If you passed Eliot Kennedy on a south-west Sheffield street, or saw him cheering on the Steelers at the Arena, you probably wouldn’t recognise him. And that’s just the way he likes it. But if you do pass him unknowingly, be aware that you’re seeing pop royalty. Eliot was one of the most prolific songwriters and producers of the 1990s and 2000s, working with the likes of Take That, Spice Girls, Bryan Adams, Boyzone, Celine Dion and Blue – and many more besides. 

“One of my favourite things is going through Meadowhall and hearing your song in a shop and no-one has any idea I wrote it,” he laughs as we chat in his back garden on a gorgeous summer’s morning. 

There’s lots of clues to Eliot’s occupation as you enter his home, not least its name – Novello – which is a nod to the Ivor Novello songwriting award he won in 1997 for Boyzone’s ‘Picture of You’. Then there’s the huge grand piano in his living room and a few guitars dotted around but don’t expect any gratuitous pictures of everyone he has worked with. He’s humble to a tee.

As we sit at a table outside, I notice a few lingering specks of rice, which Eliot is apologetic for and puts it down to “Gaz popping round for a curry” the previous evening. The ‘Gaz’ in question is Gary Barlow, whom Eliot struck up a friendship with when he worked with the band Take That in the early 1990s, achieving his first number one with ‘Everything Changes’. It’s a friendship that has stood the test of time and the pair remain very close working on multiple projects, more recently in musical theatre, which the pair have now embraced. 

Their first Broadway musical was Finding Neverland, which comes to the UK next year, and they’ve also worked on Calendar Girls and a further one based around Around the World in 80 Days. 

“Finding Neverland came along at exactly the right time and it felt like everything I knew about songwriting was thrown out of the window,” Eliot recalls. “It was a challenge like I’d never have before and was exactly what I needed.”

Eliot has also written a musical called Empire State of Dreams, which is based on the iconic photo of the workers eating lunch on the girder above New York, and has worked with John Parr and John Reilly on a Sheffield-set musical called Women of Steel.

Eliot is revelling in working in musical theatre and feels like he is learning all the time but is still able to draw on his previous experiences.

“What I learned is that the reason why there’s music in theatre, the songs are the thoughts and actions the actor can’t say,” he explains. “It’s all expression.

“Out of all the genres of music, the closest one would be country, in a sense that country music is all about the story and taking the listener from bar one to the end. In that instance, musical theatre is the same, it has to do all the heavy lifting of the story.”

Eliot has also branched out into film and has written every song and the score for a new project called Hot Flash, which stars Gaynor Faye as a skint Yorkshire woman who goes viral after a wine-fuelled rant about her menopause app idea.

The film has also provided a great opportunity for an artist Eliot is working with called Georgie Tarbatt – two of her songs are now in the finished production. Although how Eliot came to meet her is somewhat unusual, as he explains: “Every year I volunteer a studio experience for a charity which they auction it off and last year it was Georgie’s parents who’d bought it for her.

“I’ll be honest, normally it’s some wealthy dude’s daughter who wants to come in and do a cover version and I fully expected that that was what this would be. Georgie came with her mum Nicky, and said that she wrote songs and wanted to record one of those.

“She played this song that was just her and her keyboard – she’s into Lorde and it had a bit of that going on – but I looked at my business partner Jim [Jaywardena] and said ‘this is the real deal’.”

Eliot maintains working with Georgie as well as another young female artist called Freda, from Barnsley, but continues to write songs for other artists, as he has done for many years. More recently he has been writing with Howard Donald on the new Take That album and has worked with a young Leeds band called Apollo Junction.

“They reached out to me,” Eliot says. “They were doing festivals and getting bigger and bigger stages, and the bass player said, ‘we just need better songs, we need signature songs, what we really need is songwriter’.

“For a young band to make that decision was pretty intelligent. I went and had a cup of tea with them and on the way back I wrote the first song because I was so inspired.”

Another project Eliot is working on at present is his app, Myxa, which allows people to remix tracks and connect with music in a different way. 

“It’s original music by original artists and allows people to interact with music and feel like you’re getting into the studio with them,” he explains. “It’s not  AI, which is a massive thing for me.”

Talking about the app brings us on to how younger generations now find and consume music and how this differs to when we were teens growing up. 

“The way we find music nowadays doesn’t have that emotional attachment that it used to have when we went into a record shop and bought a record,” Eliot says. “I had to have several paper rounds to buy records. I’d go into Our Price on Fargate and I’d got £10 – I could buy one album and a KFC – so it was an emotional decision not a financial one and was about what album I needed the most. I’d carry that home like a badge of honour and play it back-to-back.”

That emotional attachment to music is something that is often raised, particularly if you’ve attended a live gig and being surrounded by a sea of mobile phones. What happened to living in the moment? But touring is an essential part of any artists’ repertoire and is something Eliot actively encourages.

“What record companies do, if they’re honest, is say, ‘we’re going to make you famous enough to tour’ and that’s where you make your money,” he opines. “And that’s where musicians want to be and connect with their audiences.”

Eliot’s career stretches almost four decades and has taken him all over the world, but Sheffield will always be home. Although born in the city he moved to Australia when he was three and spent nine years there before relocating to North Anston where he attended Dinnington High School. It was around this time that he started writing songs with his brother but, after persuading his school to invest in some studio equipment, found himself enjoying the production side a lot more. Clearly bitten by the music bug, he only had one thing in mind upon leaving, although his careers teacher had other ideas.

“I remember my careers meeting was ‘which pit are you going down, Dinnington or Kiveton?’” Eliot laughs. “It was actually the headmaster who gave me the most significant advice I’ve ever had in my life. He said, ‘you know exactly what you want to do, what are you waiting for?’ I took it as a positive and got myself a job as a teaboy in a little studio and started there.”

After completing an apprenticeship as an audio engineer, Eliot branched out further into production whilst continuing to write songs. He scored his first chart entry with Lulu in 1993 before getting his first number one with Take That. And many more followed. 

Eliot is now in that happy space where he can pick and choose what he wants to do, whether that’s songwriting, musical theatre, artist or app development. He has no desire to slow down and puts his eternal enthusiasm down to approaching every project as he did all those years ago. 

“If you can keep that sense of wonderment about what you do, that everyday can be something you’ve never heard before, it can only get better,” he says. “If you can try and maintain an element of almost, a child-like faith about what you do, you’re always going to enjoy it and be surprised by it.”

As we finish our oat milk lattes, I ask Eliot what his proudest moment is. 

“The thing I’m proudest of, when I look back, is that Celine Dion doesn’t sound like the Spice Girls, and the Spice Girls don’t sound like Five, and Five don’t sound like Bryan Adams, and Bryan Adams doesn’t sound like Take That…” Eliot beams.

“But I’ve written songs for all those people. If no one can recognise the thread between them, I’ve done my job. It’s always been my aim to get into the heart and mind of the artist and make it sound like them and not me.”

Given this huge success, the fact that Eliot still slips under the radar in Sheffield doesn’t seem quite right but he’s completely comfortable being in the background. And loving every minute of everything he does.