Six years ago, while holidaying in Spain, erstwhile Rialto singer and song-writer Louis Eliot was rushed to hospital for extreme emergency surgery, mere hours from death. His full recovery was an epiphany. “When something like that happens, you really get the ‘this isn’t a rehearsal’ feeling, and you just think ‘wow, I’ve got to do what I’m interested in doing’ and change lanes.”
Eliot is telling me about how this near death experience was the spark for Rialto’s come back with a rejigged line up. “What you might think is if you have a very close to death experience you want to start looking after yourself,” he says. “I just went chasing full speed after my youth. I was just like, fuck it, I might not be here next week, I’m just going to dive in.”
Rialto release their first album in twenty four years, Neon & Ghost Signs today, and it taps into themes around the different sides of love, the cost of hedonism and the fleeting nature of life. It’s also an evolution in sound for the group: “I didn’t want to just come back and do old songs, and when we did throw in a couple of new songs in the set, we’ve only played a handful of shows so far, but immediately the reaction to the new songs was great, and I felt like, yeah, that I could do this.” He explains about not wanting to end up just as a 90s nostalgia act: “I’m up for doing old Rialto stuff, but it’s got to have a new element as well. I hope that the record is everything that anybody who liked Rialto before, I hope they’ll find what they liked about the band in this new album. But I’m confident they’re going to find a lot more in there as well, there had to be a progression of some sort.”
Following the breakdown of a long term relationship Eliot threw himself into the seedy underbelly of London nightlife. Neon and Ghost Signs opens with ‘No One Leaves This Discotheque Alive’, a hooky, hip-swaying, rippling disco cut juxtaposed by his frayed, narrative Jacques Brel-style growl as Eliot casts himself “the hound of London town, where the sheets are stained with gold” , out to “lose my head” and find love “in a perfect storm”. It’s a wryly drawn nocturnal party prowl that the album pursues with a passion. “There’s the narrative within the song where I, a middle aged man, is coming out of the toilets in a club, and everybody’s left. It’s having a humorous look at the desperation that you can feel, there’s also a deeper meaning too,'” he observes. “I’m just going to do this. I’m skating on thin ice here but I think I’m going to try a pirouette anyway,” he smiles.
The synth-laden and widescreen glimmer of the title track ‘Neon and Ghost Signs’ with its clicking drum machines and doleful vocals, is about the light of promises up ahead and shadows from the past. “The album has a definite mood of looking backwards and forwards at the same time, and that’s the title of the album as well. It refers to neon being like something bright up ahead. It’s the promise of of what’s up ahead. And ghost signs are, those faded hand-painted advertisements you see on the side of old buildings sometimes, the buildings have since been repurposed, but they’ve got this memory of what they were used for, or what they were selling before.” It’s also about consolation and the connection that comes from sharing high times and low times. It’s a song for the person you lean on when the dawn breaks the spell of the night; that “you and me against the world, love and friendship forever”.
For the uninitiated, Rialto were a chart-topping, double-Platinum success in SE Asia. They rose to critical acclaim and prominence with a string of singles in 1997 and 1998 including memorable cuts like ‘Untouchable’ and their trademark song ‘Monday Morning 5:19’ which appeared on their debut album, juxtaposing a big orchestrated sound with a more doleful, understated delivery. It’s a song about doomed love delivered from the bedsit.
In a tale that typified the 90’s record industry of the time, Eliot told me last year how they got dropped just as their debut album was released in 1998. “It was quite a shock. We were so shocked. We didn’t have a moment to be angry or bitter about it, we just thought, oh, we’ll find another deal, which we did. But it did take quite a long time, you know, these things, and, it, you know, obviously had some effect on our momentum,“ he remembers. “So it took another six months or so to get a new label. Then the label that we signed to China was then bought by Warners who we’d been dropped by, so we were back on the label that had dropped us. There were quite a few things that happened then. But I think our particular version of that story was even more ludicrous than some of the others. So we ended up back there and it ended up they dropped us again. So we had a good reason to get the violins out.”
Following a second album Night on Earth in 2001 the band split and Eliot spread his wings. He became a regular collaborator with Grace Jones and Supergrass’s Danny Goffey; he released a 2004 solo album and “a very rural sounding record” as Louis Eliot And The Embers in 2010, and developed the 8,000 capacity Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall.
Largely shifting away from the more string-led sounds that charcterised early Rialto records, Eliot brings his experience of years of touring and writing for others. His credits included the Ivor Novello winning ‘Leave Right Now’ for Will Young. Experimenting and broadened his palette of sounds at home, it makes for a more eclectic album, that whilst acknowledging the past, looks forward. “I just allowed myself to be a bit freer, and part of that came about because I’ve done a lot of working with other people, producers and that was the case in Rialto first time around,” he explains. “Although I was writing all the songs, and I had a sort of a kind of musical directional role in the band, I wasn’t actually twiddling knobs in the studio,” he recalls, before explaining how he has broadened the sounds on the record, utilising synths and new instrumentation. “I’m quite late to it in some ways, I’ve got a bit of a fear of technology, so in the past I used to just write on guitar or piano and pencil and paper, guitar piano and try and get a really solid song and then explain my ideas about instrumentation or sing them or whatever to whoever I was working with. This time around it was more me reaching for those sounds myself and demoing at home, and that was really, really liberating, so that allowed me to have a broader palette as well.”
Eliot has also spent many years collaborating with Grace Jones’ and in her touring band, and the influence has worked its way in, naturally. “I’ve always liked records where you can put it on and it’s the whole mood and it will last for the 45 minutes to an hour. But I also like those albums that really go to some quite different places. Prince records did that. I mean the obvious one is ‘Revolver;’ by The Beatles, the bar is high, obviously. But yes, certainly playing with Grace and obviously, her set is very varied. But also I think some of the more kind of groove-led stuff of Grace’s, probably seeped in.”
The influence of disco and soul, and the music of the 1970s and the varied sounds that make up his record collection from his youth to today are also littered throughout the album. From the nighttime prowl of the opening track, to the shimmering synths of the title track, and the nods to the trademark funky guitars of Nile Rodgers on ‘Cherry’, and the sounds of Abba on ‘Put you on Hold.’ “Like most people, my tastes are really eclectic,” Eliot notes. “In my teenage years, I was probably flipping from listening to New Order one week, then to Sly and the Family Stone and then to something completely different, like the Velvet Underground or something. We’ve all got very broad tastes, but I certainly think there was a period in probably late teens, where my taste went more into a less of an indie world, and more into a disco, funk, soul, kind of world of music, Curtis Mayfield and Barry White.”
He also cites Leonard Cohen‘s I’m Your Man album as an influence on the songs, and it certainly has echoes of that juxtaposition between electro tapestries and emotional brevity that Cohen tapped into. “Lenny at his best is wise and he’s gracious and he’s funny, and that’s definitely, something to aim for. You know, he’s the master of covering different emotional things within his songs, he’s an amazing writer,” Eliot enthuses. “I saw him once at Glastonbury, and he was just so good. He was so great it was such a lovely atmosphere he was playing all of those songs and older ones as well. And I probably won’t be able to get it, get it exactly right, but he just said something like, “It”s 18 years since I last played here. I was 60, you know just a kid with a crazy dream,” he laughs. “yeah it was a really charming, funny, and moving show.“
The third song released into the world from the new album record was ‘Remembering To Forget’, a more lavish, crooning 60’s-flecked ballad with widescreen detail that possess echoes of Rialto first time round, it captures the fleeting nature of love. “I wanted the feeling of of two people knowing something is going to end but with a kind of summery sound, if there’s a season, it’s going to be, it’s going to be spring, summer.”
“That’s the only way you sort of move on, isn’t it reminding yourself to let go of the past?” he suggests rhetorically. “So yeah, the song is slightly about not clinging on to something you know, and understanding the only way you have to keep reminding yourself, to forget your dreams that didn’t work out. They can just weigh you down otherwise.”
The album is available to stream/download on all digital platforms as well as on Limited Edition Indie Store Exclusive ‘Transparent Green Glow In The Dark’ Vinyl, ‘White’ Colour Vinyl, Limited Edition ‘Transparent Neon Pink’ Vinyl, Compact Disc and Cassette – Order Here.
Rialto will headline London’s Scala on 14th May and embark on a tour of UK record stores during album release week – full dates listed below.
Live Dates
27th April | Rough Trade, Bristol (Instore Show)
28th April | Rough Trade, Nottingham (Instore Show)
29th April | Rough Trade, Liverpool (Instore Show)
30th April | Rough Trade East, London (Instore Show)
1st May | Banquet Records, Kingston (Instore Show)
14th May | Scala, London (Headline Show)
17th May | The Albert Hall, Manchester (with Supergrass)
18th May | Cardiff University, Cardiff (with Supergrass)
20th May | O2 Academy, Leeds (with Supergrass)
21th May | Roundhouse, London (with Supergrass)
25th Sept | Tramshed, Cardiff (with Sleeper)
26th Sept | SWX, Bristol (with Sleeper)
27th Sept | Stylus, Leeds (with Sleeper)
4th Oct | Wulfrun, Wolverhampton (with Sleeper)
9th Oct | NX, Newcastle (with Sleeper)
10th Oct | QMU, Glasgow (with Sleeper)
11th Oct | The Level, Nottingham (with Sleeper)
16th Oct | Academy, Oxford (with Sleeper)
17th Oct | Albert Hall, Manchester (with Sleeper)
18th Oct | Concord 2, Brighton (with Sleeper)
Please see link to the instore tour dates poster Here and a link to all tickets Here.
https://orcd.co/neon_ghost_signs_single
