You’ve no doubt heard the catchy chords and choruses written by South Yorkshire’s Eliot Kennedy.

From inside the engine room of his Steelworks Studio, the unforgettable lyrics and melodies of a generation have been produced.

His iconic songs have been sung by global superstars. Aretha Franklin. Celine Dion. Lulu.

Without him, we might never have seen the birth of the Spice Girls phenomena of the 1990s, the girl band renaissance twenty years later with Little Mix, or the reformation of Take That.

Song writing has taken him everywhere from Malibu to Mustique. He’s written film scores and Broadway musicals, winning a Grammy and an Ivor Novello. And he’s become best friends and writing partners with Gary Barlow and Bryan Adams.

For all his achievements over the last thirty years, there’s nothing ostentatious about him. He still lives in his hometown of Sheffield with his wife Becky, their blended family of four grown-up children, and crazy golden retriever Django.

With his colossal stature and infectious personality, Eliot isn’t one to blend into the background. But you could easily pass him in the street and not realise he wrote the soundtrack to your childhood or your wedding playlist.

“Bryan Adams once said to me that the further I go from Sheffield, the more Sheffield I become. I’ve always kept hold of it. I can’t live here and be someone I’m not. I like going to the chip shop and people not knowing who I am.

“I never wanted to be famous. I didn’t see success in the conventional sense. It’s always been about the music and respecting what I am able to do as a songwriter,” he says.

The music world is full of unsung heroes like Eliot, those people behind the scenes who spark ideas, pen lyrics and construct melodies of the music that fills our ears and remain in our minds long after the song has ended.

Music as medicine

The calculated science of song writing began at a young age for Eliot as music became the medicine for his family’s discords.

Born in South Yorkshire in 1969, Eliot’s family emigrated to Australia when he was three. He, his parents and two older siblings, Russ and Donna, spent six weeks on a ship for the long voyage down under.

“We were literally Ten Pound Poms. I remember thinking my parents had moved us onto a cruise liner. They kept saying this word Australia but, at that age, they might as well have been telling me we were going to the moon.”

The family settled south of Sydney and Eliot says he and his siblings had an incredible childhood, mostly spent shoeless outdoors. But there was also a melancholic B-side.

“Dad was an alcoholic, violent at times. My mum suffered with mental health problems as a result. Her mum came out to Australia for the last year we were there. My nan was tough and formidable, and one of the only people my dad feared. She kept my mum alive; they were inseparable.”

But his grandmother wanted to come home to be with her other family, so the Kennedys left Australia when Eliot was 12. She died two weeks later.

“After her death, my mum imploded. It was the worst time of my life. She was sectioned for a year at Rotherham Hospital, which is a long time when you’re 12. I’d go see this woman who didn’t even know I was her child. But gradually, the doctors worked out how to rebalance the chemicals in her brain with medication.

“I’ve made peace with it now, but I learned very early on that I couldn’t rely on these people; I had to do it all on my own.”

Eliot says that music became his saviour during that tumultuous year. Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love gave him strength to get through it, its emotive lyrics speaking to him in ways other prepubescent lads wouldn’t understand.

Music also became a form of connection between Eliot and his father.

“He was a cabaret singer at working men’s clubs. I grew up listening to him sing these classic hits and was fascinated by the structure of them and why they worked so well. From there I taught myself to play keyboard.

“Then I got into listening to electronic music like Depeche Mode and Human League. Sheffield was at the front and centre of music at that time. Human League made me feel like I could do it too, be part of culture but with a daft accent.”

Daily dose of music at Dinnington Comp

At school, Dinnington High, music took precedence over his actual lessons.

“I was very much the odd one out at school. Most people will remember me as ‘piano boy’ as I was always on it. But I didn’t want to go home.”

He formed a band at school, did a gig to raise money to improve the music equipment, and rebuffed careers advice to choose between Dinnington or Maltby pit. But it was the school’s headteacher at the time, Mr Forster, who gave him the push to pursue a career in music.

“On the last day of my first year of sixth form, I was in the studio mixing my album when he came in and had a listen. He asked what I was doing the following year, and I told him I was coming back. He just looked at me and said ‘Why? You’re not doing any work. You know exactly what you want to do in life, so what are you waiting for?’

“I never went back in September, but I did go back about ten years ago to do a charity gig. I tracked Mr Forster down and gave him this plaque with my six best-selling albums on it as thanks for giving me that advice. He said he couldn’t believe he told me to quit school, but if I hadn’t then those albums would never have been made.”

Everything changed in the early 1990s

After leaving school, Eliot slogged away for years trying to make it in the music industry. He learned the ropes as an apprentice audio engineer, making death metal albums in the early days, before buying his own equipment and going freelance.

Then his first big break came in 1993 when he was asked to produce Lulu’s comeback song, Independence, her first since 1982.

The stars aligned that year and led to Eliot being asked to work on the second album for Take That. Their manager, Nigel Martin-Smith, was a big Lulu fan.

Eliot had to choose between two songs to demo: Pray or Wasting My Time. He chose the latter and his idea was to include a live band in the arrangement – and they loved it.

“The next day, Gary rang to ask if I could have a look at rearranging another song. They were doing a cover of the ‘70s disco track Relight My Fire but the key didn’t suit Robbie, so it was given to Gaz to sing.

“Then because Gaz was doing that, they needed another song for Robbie, so could I write something for him.”

That song was Everything Changes. And everything really did change for Eliot.

“The irony is that I had this ambition to get a number one by the time I was 25. That would be the story I’d tell my future kids that I’d made it in life. It went straight to number one on my 25^th birthday, the day after it was released in March 1994.”

The birth of the girl band phenomena starts at North Anston

His first global smash hit came the following year with a little-known girl group called Spice Girls. Together, they wrote their second single, Say You’ll Be There, at his home studio in North Anston.

With the help of his record label, Sony, he’d bought his parent’s house on the Lakeland estate and put in a studio so he could fine tune his craft. 

“I wasn’t confident going into the studio and was completely bluffing, so I took a year out. Then the Spice Girls turned up one day. They’d split from their manager who wouldn’t give them my number, so they tracked me down.”

“They crashed at my house for a week which was just chaos. They all had the bedrooms, and I was demoted to the sofa. It breaks down barriers between an artist and producer when you share a bathroom and kitchen.

“I had to feed them and put petrol in their car. There was no money in it, but I believed in them. I didn’t know they’d go off and change the world. It’s an amazing thing to be part of when an artist becomes a sensation like the Spice Girls did.

“When they got their first bit of cash, they wanted to take me out for dinner, so we went to the Cantonese in Dinnington and each of them wrote a cheque for a fifth of the bill.”

Imagine what those cheques would be worth now if the owner had kept them.

A shopping trip phone call proves lucrative

The rest of the ‘90s was a blur for Eliot, scoring numerous top ten hits with the likes of S Club 7, 911, Billie Piper and Kavana. He also scooped his first gong, an Ivor Novello with Boyzone for their song Picture of You from the Bean movie.

Then another life-changing phone call came. It was a random day in 1997, and Eliot was in the supermarket shopping for the studio when his phone rang.

“I had this big Motorola brick phone, and the person on the end of the phone said, ‘Hey man, it’s Bryan Adams.’ I thought it was my manager winding me up – why would Bryan Adams be calling me? I’d just seen him perform at Sheffield Arena the night before. So, I told him to jog on. Then he said he liked my song I did with the Spice Girls, so I knew it was a joke.

“But it really was him. He invited me to Manchester for a cup of tea. I abandoned the trolley and drove straight there.”

That meeting would become a million-dollar one, with the pair writing a song for the queen of ballads, Celine Dion.

Sony had asked Eliot to write English lyrics for a song called Puisque Tu Pars, written by Celine’s French songwriter.

“Celine was the golden goose for songwriters, so I thought it was never going to happen. But I had this stream of consciousness and wrote five verses. I was singing the melody as I was reading the lyrics and it just fit perfectly. They said it was like poetry, but where was the chorus?”

He called up his buddy Bad, as he calls him, to help finish the song, but he said no, aware of what people would say about two Canadians working together.

“Bryan was going to Princess Diana’s funeral the following day so said he wouldn’t have time unless we wrote it that very same day. I was also awaiting the birth of my first child any day, but I drove straight down to his house in Chelsea. It was surreal; Paul Burrel was there ready for the funeral.”

They wrote the rest of Let’s Talk About Love and sent it off to Celine’s people that evening. The following day, Bryan went to the funeral and Eliot’s daughter Livi was born.

Soon after, Eliot was in an airport hotel waiting to fly to New York when his phone rang at 4am. It was Bryan, telling him that not only was Celine using the song, but she’d chosen it as the album title.

The album had the Titanic song on it and became one of the best-selling albums in history, going diamond-certified with 33 million copies sold.

They worked together again on Bryan’s album, On a Day Like Today. After writing a few tracks together, Bryan said he wanted an up-tempo song, so Eliot wrote the chorus to When You’re Gone.

“He wanted someone to sing it with. Sheryl Crow was his first pick, but she was on tour. Then he said what about someone British, could I get him a Spice Girl? Mel C was the only one I knew could do it, and she loved Bryan Adams so of course she agreed.”

That was the song that launched Sporty Spice’s solo career, peaking at number three in the top 40 and staying in the charts for 15 weeks.

Where words fail, music speaks

Eliot and Bryan continued their songwriting partnership, branching into writing scores for films like Racing Stripes and Princess Diaries. In 2002, together with Hans Zimmer, they wrote the soundtrack to the DreamWorks animated horse film, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

“It was a big gig and a lot of pressure. We wrote this southern rocker called Get Off My Back after busking along together for 15 minutes. A year after the film was released, I got this letter from a woman in Thailand whose eight-year-old son had leukaemia and had been transfixed by the film while in hospital having radiotherapy.

“He watched it daily but she said he loved this one particular scene which was like a rodeo. He loved the song that much she bought the album. She wanted to thank me for giving them another year with their son; he had likened the song to his illness and told her that some spirits can never be broken.

“I measure success by one person breathing easier because of something I did, but that letter was unquantifiable. It wasn’t about me. I’m part of something much bigger than me, a passenger on this journey, and I’m okay with that. I’m just lucky to be holding a pencil when the universe wants to write a song.”

Another career highlight came in 2006 when Eliot won a Grammy for best gospel song for Never Gonna Break My Faith. Again, he and Bryan worked on the soundtrack to Bobby, Emilio Estevez’s biopic about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

It was sung by Aretha Franklin and Mary J Blige, but Eliot says he wrote it for those who lost the most after the presidential candidate’s death – African Americans.

“He was their last hope for civil rights. It needed to be a gospel song, but I’d never written one before. I was in Mustique and was dragged to church by this woman from the hotel kitchen called Gloria. One day I asked her what happens when hope is snuffed out and she said, ‘Mr Eliot, nothing can break my faith.”

The song was also nominated for a Golden Globe for best original soundtrack. In 2020, fourteen years after the film’s release, a solo version by Aretha became the official song for the Black Lives Matter movement.

“This keeps happening. There’s a quote by Rabindranath Tagore that goes ‘For years I’ve been stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I sing remains unsung.’ I thought I’d got it with Aretha Franklin. But while ever I’m still here it feels wrong not to be writing.”

And he sure has been busy.  He’s currently working on another three films with Bryan, on a musical about the birth of disco with Nile Rogers, producing a musical about the immigrants who built New York, and, the one he’s most excited about, a musical about the women of steel with John Parr and John Reilly.

“It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s going to be a celebration of women and what they did. After working with girl bands, I know the power that a group of women have when they walk into a room – they turn everyone’s heads. The story is about four women who come together, told through song.”

El and Gaz – the songwriting duo you didn’t know you needed

His career took a turn towards musical theatre thanks to Finding Neverland, the Broadway hit he wrote with Gary Barlow.

Eliot and Gary have been writing together for over twenty years, having hit it off from early days of Everything Changes.

The trajectory of their lives was quite parallel; both were talented songwriters with a strong work ethic inherited from their northern working-class backgrounds. They’d meet up if they were in New York or LA at the same time, and Americans were always asking if they were related.

But Eliot could be pitched as the one who brought Gary back from the brink. When Take That split up and Gary’s solo career dwindled, he became a recluse and spiralled into depression, but Eliot offered him a lifeline.

“He started answering the phone in this funny voice. I remember I called to check on him after a newspaper went in heavy on him with a headline they wrote. He told me of all the people he’d worked with, I was the only person to call.

“But I had a project I thought would be good for him. Artist development had become my thing and I was working with Virgin to launch the career of Blue.”

Eliot and his family moved to Cheshire and he and Gary set up True North Productions together. Over the next five years, they wrote three albums for Blue, solo material for Mark Owen, worked with Atomic Kitten and Donny Osmond, and discovered Delta Goodrem.

Gary felt reinvigorated to get the band back together and Eliot moved back to Sheffield. But the pair went on to work together again in the 2010s when Gary became a judge on X Factor. He enlisted Eliot as a development producer.

Eliot’s time on X Factor saw him be instrumental in putting Little Mix together. A band had never won the show, and he thought he knew why.

“It got to boot camp and there were these four girls who hadn’t got through as solo acts. I asked them to hang about but it got to 1am and the hotel was complaining about the noise from all the singing, so we had to call it a day. The girls came up to me and said, ‘you’ve not forgotten about us, have you?’ So we went into the gym and I heard them sing together. It all happened so serendipitously.

“I gave them advice I had learned from working with the Spice Girls. They’d be on stage for two minutes and before that there’d be a two-minute VT of what happened during the week. The cameras would always be on, so the four of them had to be who they were. They had to be Perrie or Leigh-Ann 24-7. Whatever their image was, they couldn’t drop it. They had to be themselves to build a fan base.

“The Spice Girls were so successful because they appealed to five different girls. Little Mix were prepared to do the work and it paid off.”

Over the years, Eliot and Gary have collaborated on various projects, from writing the official song for the Queen’s diamond jubilee with the Military Wives, to the teen TV show Britannia High, and an upcoming musical based on Around the World in 80 Days.

And you might recently have caught the pair together on TV doing a wine tour of South Africa.

“Every day was fantastic. It was unscripted, very much us, with lots they couldn’t include! We did a couples massage and had to get in a bubble bath together which was an experience.”

Making his own kind of music

Over the years, Eliot has given back generously to the communities who support him, helping people to achieve their own dreams through digital technology, creativity, song production and charitable gigs.

From his Derbyshire-based studio Steelworks, he continues to champion new artists alongside working on studio albums with The Overtones and Alfie Boe. 

He’s also developed an app called Myxa to combat the crippling effect streaming has had on songwriters.

“There are a few songwriters doing well but a gulf of people earns nothing. Platforms won’t pay out for less than a thousand streams, so it’s become tough for developing artists. My app is a new way of listening to artists that’s never been done before as it uses stems to remix your favourite songs. And it’s all based on sales rather than streams.”

After years of writing for other people, Eliot released his own Yacht music album, A Yacht Named Sue, a few years ago, having written it during the pandemic. He’s also recently found time to pen his own story, making a hefty start on his autobiography that he plans to call ‘What the F*ck Am I Doing Here?’

“With the album, I enjoyed it and it got played on the radio but it didn’t make me want to do it again. People have been telling me for years I need to write a book about my life. I’m about ten chapters in and really enjoying writing it. It’s been very cathartic.”

Away from songwriting, Eliot has also been creating audio therapy music for the TriggerHub mental health app. He worked with doctors and specialists to create instrumental songs that benefit specific conditions like OCD, anxiety and PTSD. Eliot has created songs for different purposes, from sleep and relaxation to focus and exercise.

“I think because of what my mum went through I’ve become so interested in the neuroscience behind music. But as a writer, you want to know how music helps the brain and what happens when somebody listens to one of your songs.” 

So what’s next for Eliot? This June, he’ll be at WentFest at Hooton Lodge and, while he can’t announce any star guests yet, he’ll be performing some of his new music with his full band.

Son Jack will also be performing with his own band, TJ & the System. While analytics graduate daughter Livi is currently on a sabbatical in Sri Lanka

“I’ve got a fantastic relationship with my kids and I’m so proud of being their dad. I think I’ve tried harder as a parent after my own experience growing up.”

Their family home in Sheffield is a hive of love and activity, and Eliot plans to open it up to the public – virtually – with a new YouTube series combining his love of cooking with the piano, which has become an extension of his soul.

“People don’t know I love to cook, but there’s nothing better than being in the kitchen – especially Sunday dinner or a good breakfast. I’ve got this idea called El’s Kitchen where I’ll cook for artists and then we’ll have a little singsong by the piano – maybe a glass of wine to pair with it.”

“Amazing things happen when you’re not looking. I don’t know what’s next and I’m excited about it. But If I pop my clogs tomorrow then I know this is what I was put on earth to do.”