Having previously fronted narcotic, obsessive rockers Kinky Machine and the cinematic, Spector-ish popsters Rialto, LOUIS ELIOT is a man who was revelling in the sleazy delights of the capital's nightlife when most of the current crop of London-centric urchins were still at junior school.
Consequently, his debut solo album "The Long Way Round" comes with baggage attached. However, as the cover image of our hero relaxing in a dingy pub suggests, the music contained within is rather more low-key and riven with experience. It's still a pop album, but live and close-miked with a predominantly semi-acoustic sound and tasteful embellishments like trumpet and pedal steel to accompany a set of songs written entirely from the heart.
And it's quietly revelatory for the most part. Songs like the strident opener "Warmth Of The Sun" and the regretful "Party Games" are tuneful and thoughtful and find Louis making no bones about the mistakes he's made in the past. The former's first lyrical salvo is Louis singing "here comes the day falling in through your curtains and all it says is the future's uncertain", while "Party Games" is very much an older and wiser Louis coming to terms with the recent past and recounting days when he was "calling a cab from a stranger's address/ hoping the world was still in bed."
Elsewhere, Louis is caught between accepting the past and making the most of the present. Songs like the mildly funky "Falling" and the catchy, Louis-accepts-previous-defeats-with-dignity "Heart-Shaped Bruise" are warm and memorable set pieces that reveal Eliot to be a commendable, slightly quirky singer/ songwriter in the Grant McLennan/ Bill Pritchard mode. "Heaven's In Your Eyes", meanwhile, finds him in upbeat, anthemic mood and "Tonight" demonstrates he can handle a gentle, tearjerking and (really!) unpretentious ballad with affecting aplomb.
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Funnily enough, despite the album's polished, back-to-basics approach, the one song ("Country Life") where Louis literally espouses taking his love to live in the country is the one place he succumbs to mawkishness. Besides, for all his rejection of the metropolis, I can't really see Louis in green wellies on a smallholding either.
However, even if you can take the boy out of the city, you can't so easily take the city out of the boy, and so it proves on perhaps the album's standout "Everybody Loves You When You're Dead". It's a tragically melancholic vignette about the rich kid who had it all and died young from an overdose. Performed in near waltz-time, I don't know how close it is to Louis's own story, but one only hopes it doesn't become a hymn in remembrance to one of the current London's Burning brigade who are as famed for their over-indulgence as they are their music. Whatever, it's one of several instances (the others being "Tonight" and "Party Games") where Louis Eliot shows just how under-rated a talent he is.
Simpler and more direct than ever before, this is the album this writer always hoped Louis Eliot could make. Speaking from the heart rather than from the heart of a scene, it benefits no end from the personal touch and by the time it's over you're more than glad Louis has opted to take "The Long Way Round". Despite the bumps, bends and potholes, it's clearly a road that's been worth taking.
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