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Eliot Kennedy is a British singer-songwriter and producer.

Photo courtesy Eliot Kennedy

Songwriter, producer enjoys international success

By Jim Gordon and Leeta Liepins

Published 2:36 PST, Fri February 17, 2023

Last Updated: 2:38 PST, Fri February 17, 2023

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Eliot Kennedy makes his home in Sheffield, in the north of England—but his success is international.

Kennedy has won a Grammy Award and a Juno Award, and has received critical acclaim on Broadway. He has also been nominated for a Golden Globe Award and a Critics Choice Award. The Our City Tonight team sat down recently with Kennedy to talk about the people he has worked with—including a then-unknown group of artists who became the Spice Girls—and his new Broadway play.

Our City Tonight (OCT): You are in New York preparing your play?

Eliot Kennedy (EK): Yes, this is my second play set to go to Broadway—the first was a musical called Finding Neverland. It’s something I’ve been working on for two years called Empire State Dreams, which is a musical based on that iconic photograph of the construction workers eating their lunch (sitting on a steel beam) high above New York. It’s about the immigrants who built New York and is a celebration of diversity. We have an excellent director and producer and we’re having a great time.

OCT: You first came to our attention back in the mid-‘90s when you were the guy responsible for the follow up-single to “Wannabe” for The Spice Girls—you wrote “Say You’ll be There.” You were also there at the beginning when these five young women showed up at your place in Sheffield and all of a sudden you had five new adopted sisters.

EK: It was literally like that. We had set a date to work together and what I didn’t realize was in the interim they had decided to fire their manager. He wouldn’t give them my phone number so they just drove to Sheffield, descended on my doorstep, and said they wanted to work with me but they didn’t have a place to stay. So I adopted five sisters, and they were incredible. Their energy was amazing. It was like having five hurricanes move into your house, but it was also so inspiring, we got so much done, and we had a ball. I still have amazing memories from that time.

OCT: It is a great tribute to the work you’ve done when you look at the diversity of artists you’ve worked with: the Spice Girls, Celine Dion, Lulu, Shirley Bassey, and you won a Juno Award working with Bryan Adams. That must be a real joy for you to work with such a diverse group of artists.

EK: When I started my career, it was my intention to not repeat myself, not pigeonhole myself. I always saw myself as a songwriter who would get into the mind of the artist who was going to be singing the song. My job was not to sound like me but to sound like them. It’s a challenge as you must remove any ego, any sense of how you think you want it to go, and really try to get into their vocabulary and make it feel like what they’re saying is from their heart. The thing I’m most happy about, looking back on my career, is that all of those artists are diverse and do not sound like each other. It really comes from this lifelong love affair with music. I fell in love with as many styles of music as possible, and that helped me be able to do that.

For the full video interview, visit richmondsentinel.ca/videos

Jim Gordon and Leeta Liepins are contributing writers to the Richmond Sentinel.