The World Tour Starts Here In Australia For Eloise…

Eloise is bringing My Man & Me to Australia starting this week, returning for the first time in three years for a run of solo shows and opening her global tour right here. The smoky-voiced Londoner will play Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth on her debut visits to each, alongside returns to Sydney and Melbourne. It’s her biggest Australian run to date, celebrating the release of her superb second album out now via BMG. Australian audiences will experience the record live for the first time. My Man & Me is about the messy business of loving someone, and it’s built to be played live. Made with her longtime friend and collaborator Slim Gabriel, it pairs her voice with lush jazz instrumentation on songs like You Will Remain and Resisting Your Love, giving the whole thing a timeless quality.

Eloise has been building to this for a decade. She wrote and sang alongside Damon Albarn for the soundtrack to Broken as a teenager, then dropped out of BRIT School to tour America with Bruno Major and open arenas for Sam Smith. Her 2019 debut EP This Thing Called Living has been streamed more than 125 million times, and her 2023 debut album Drunk on a Flight drew praise from NME and The Line of Best Fit. Live, she is warm, funny and completely disarming, the kind of performer who can quiet a room with a single held note. Rob Lyon talks more with Eloise about the tour.

Inside one week to your Australian tour, you’ve got to be getting a little bit excited?
I know, I’m pretty buzzing. I’m just trying to get everything locked and loaded so I can just enjoy, getting excited for it.

It’s a big coup for Australia for you to be kicking off your Australian tour here. Was it an obvious choice to start the tour here as opposed to anywhere else in the world?
I love being out there, and it’s such a rare opportunity to get to go and perform over there. I think obviously it’s incredibly far away, so any opportunity that I was going to get to go there, I was going to go, like, let’s go there soon. Also, I’ve toured there the least, I’m just, like, buzzing to be back. It’s going to be great.

Also this time around Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, it’s getting bigger. You must be really stoked that your music’s taking you even further than before?
I really am, and I think it’s a happy combination of I’m nervous because I’m taking a punt by going to the extra places and whatever, but I’m also like, yeah, as you said, like, I can’t believe that there are even people that far away who are listening to my music, that I’ve been in their houses and cars.

Five shows in seven days, that must be a bit of a tough grind. Are you already mentally prepared, physically prepared?
I am mentally prepared in that I’m not thinking about it, because if I think about it, I just believe you can talk yourself into it going wrong. So I’m not going to talk myself into going wrong, but I literally am just getting over a flu. So, A, that’s a good thing that it’s happened before, but B, I’ve got a lot of training to do to get myself back up back to scratch.

The new album is an absolute stunner. Truly fantastic. Have you been blown away personally by how fans have embraced it and the comments they’ve been leaving on social media?
I’m never surprised at how lovely all the fans are, because they’ve always been lovely people that I would be friends with, so, like, the quality of what they’re writing is not surprising, but the amount of love that I’ve been shown is absolutely mind‑blowing. I just feel like this sacred thing has been respected. It’s very scary to put an album out in the niches kind of way, but it is really daunting. and they are just always the net that appears when you make the leap. It’s just so moving. I really took a punt, going old school and doing what I used to do, and everyone has just been so loving and supportive. It’s great.

Is it true what they say about the second album, that it’s usually the hardest?
I would say the fear and the anxiety of putting a second one out and following the first and whatever, sure, I definitely felt way more anxious and whatever. I put out an EP, a second EP, an album, at this point, even though it’s a second album, it’s a fourth body of work, so I’ve gone through the fear of, like, oh wow, if people haven’t heard these songs in tomorrow, they will have.

Even when you look back at it now, how do you feel about the album? Are you even more proud now that you’ve had a chance to sit with it?
Absolutely, I think when you start putting together a show… because I’m doing Australia acoustically, and then when I come back, I’ve got my band out here, and we’re sort of mapping out how that’s going to sound. Just playing these songs live for the first time has made me fall in love with them again because especially preparing for the acoustic thing, I think what’s going to be so special about these Australia shows is because it’s just me and a guitar slash me and a piano. While I’ve been practicing them, I fall in love with them because they sound exactly as they did when I wrote them. Obviously, when you produce something, you chip away at it until it’s like a grown‑up version of it, but… you know, it’s going to be really special to sing these how I wrote them at the end of my bed. I really can’t wait. I’m even prouder than I’ve ever been, because I’m re‑listening to the intricacies of my writing and going, like, yay, that was good.

From the original concept as you had them in your head, did it really change much? Even with what you said about being able to play them on piano and acoustic guitar now, it doesn’t sound like they’ve really strayed much?
I mean, the feel is the same. I think if anyone had been in the studio, they would have heard what the natural, vague evolution of any of these songs should be, and we followed that. We did not want to stray too far. We took little detours every now and then, but the basis of most of the songs are an acoustic guitar, or whatever I wrote the song on. Why Can’t You Love Me is a piano song, and so we built the whole thing around that. So it’s basically like we’ve put clothes on what already was there. But to strip it back means that I sing it in a different way, and I can be more loose with timing, and find different pockets and avenues.

That must make it even all the more exciting to be able to go into the full band mode as well and just kind of make that even more expansive in terms of sound?
Totally. Yeah, exactly. That’s also what’s really fun, these feel like separate things. It doesn’t even feel like a global tour; it feels like its own really special tour. The setlist I’m doing for these shows in Australia will probably change within the tour, and it definitely won’t be the same setlist I do with the band. This is really the only time I’ll do it this way, and it’s going to be in Australia. Each part feels like its own little evolution into the next.

No temptation to sort of play the new album start to end?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is that temptation, of course, and I understand that people do that and why they do it. I personally am still a huge punter, I love going to shows, and I really, fully love it so much. I’ve gone to so many shows where I’ve wanted to see my favourite person I grew up listening to, and they’ve done the whole “we’re only doing the new album” thing. For me, if you’re performing to fans who’ve been there from the start, it’s about both of you, it’s not just about you and what you’re bored of playing. The moment you put your music out there, you’re sharing it. So I understand that, especially in Australia, where I’ve been the least and people haven’t heard my first EP a thousand times live. I really want to honour that and it’s special for me, I’m not bored of playing any of these songs.

How important was your friend and collaborator Slim in the context of this album?
I literally would not… we wouldn’t have anything to listen to without him, not just because he produced it, but because nothing would have been better than what he did for me as an artist and what he created to listen to. There’s something really special about working with someone who has never done that before, he’s produced, but never for anyone else. A combination of someone having something to prove, which he did, and me having something to prove, and the feeling it must have given him for me to trust him to do that, all of that makes magic. The whole energy the whole time was like, let’s try this, let’s try that, oh my god, that’s… it was so positive and inspiring and infectious. He’s one of the most, if not the most, important people in my personal life. He’s been my best friend for ten years. So getting to make an album together feels like we’ve had a child together. It’s amazing.

Seeing those songs come together as well, that must have been beyond exciting?
Every day it would be like I’d go to his place. We wouldn’t work for very long, we’d work for a few hours a day, because creatively I don’t believe in working until a burnout moment, because you just end up with bad ideas. We’d work in little pockets: I’d get there, he’d say, “Right, play me some songs,” and then he’d go, “I think we should do that one.” It was that calm. Then he’d just hold a little mic up and I’d play. It was seamless. And by the end of the day, we’d basically have done a bloody song.

Did you get to have a moment where you could listen to the album in its entirety once it was finished and just take it all in?
We didn’t really. I mean, it’s funny, basically what happened was, the beginning, when it was just he and I, we would listen to them, we’d always listen back to what we’d made. So if we were on the fifth song, and we’d finished the fifth song, we would listen to all five. So we’d sort of do it that way. But at the end, I wrote a lot of string parts, I sort of mocked up some string arrangements, and then we worked with people to make that more expansive, and we had to record the strings, and we had to record the horns. So then once we had already finished, we had to fit that back in, like, tinker away again. So by the end, we actually got to a point where we were like, I can’t listen to this anymore. Which I think is the natural thing. I think in the same way that kids grow up, and then they’re ready to leave, and the parents are ready for the kids to leave, and so on and so forth. It’s like, we raised the kid, the kid was ready to leave, and we were like, cool, I want to go on holiday, so you need to be done now. So we never listened through it, and actually, I think it would have been almost too emotional if we had sat through it. When you finish an album, you’re never finished. Like, we would have found things we wanted to keep working on.

Was it equally as hard narrowing down the final track selection?
No, actually. Every single song I wrote for the album is every single song there. There was one that we didn’t put on, but that was an old song that I was sort of trying to ram in there and didn’t fit.

So where to from here? Obviously, you’ve got the Australian tour, is 2027 just predominantly touring and see what happens?
Yes, I know that after Australia, I come back, I do Europe and then I do North America. That takes me through to Christmas and then early next year, I’m supporting Sienna Spiro on her UK Europe run.

Oh, wow.
Yeah, so that’s going to be pretty phenomenal, and that will take me through to March and then hopefully some festivals, and then I’ll write another album and record it, do it again.

I can’t believe you’re on the same bill as Sienna. She’s here doing East Coast in January in Australia. So you never know, she might bring you along for the ride.
My God, she’s amazing. I literally can’t wait to be on the same bill as her, and I also think especially if it had been my last album, it might not have worked sonically, but I feel like with this album, like My Man and Me, and doing a few songs from that, and then going into Sienna, just as someone who goes to shows, I feel like I’d go and see that, be like, this makes sense, this is a great thing. So I’m super jazzed about it.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Eloise on the following dates, tickets from Handsome Tours…