Rialto

Spin the clock forward twenty-seven years from ‘Monday Morning 5.19’ and it’s Friday morning, 3.10am. The weekend is just beginning, the night stretching out to dawn, still full of possibility. And Rialto are back on the streets; back from the brink and hungry for life, love, lust, experience.

Theirs is a reunion spurred on not so much by a longing for the past as an urgency to grab the best of life while they can. Six years ago, while holidaying in Spain, singer and song-writer Louis Eliot was rushed to hospital for extreme emergency surgery, mere hours from death. His full recovery was an epiphany. “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.”

Part of Eliot’s rebirth involved leaving behind a long-term relationship to immerse himself once more in London’s late-night party scene. Part of it was the romance and anguish he found there. And part of it was realising that the songs that were emerging from this period – songs of love and loss, hedonism and regret, set in wistful witching hours – were a call from the past. 

“There wasn't a single point of realisation,” he says. “It just kept dawning on me. I’d play it to people privately, and they’d be like ‘this is Rialto’.”

Rialto, for the uninitiated, were the band too sophisticated for Britpop. Emerging from the wreckage of Kinky Machine (1991-5) into a decade of primary colour ladrock and cartoonish alt-pop culture, this cultured five-piece (Eliot and his ex-Kinky guitarist cohort Jonny Bull, plus bassist Julian Taylor, keyboardist Toby Hounsham and drummers Pete Cuthbert and Anthony Christmas) were stylish interlopers. Tracks such as ‘Summer’s Over, ‘Monday Morning 5.19’ and ‘Untouchable’, from their self-titled 1998 debut album, echoed the bright synthetic melody of the era but imbued with the suave drama of classic cinema, French chanson, ‘60s pop classicism and a frisson of seedy romance.

For accessibility enquiries & carer tickets, please read the accessibility document on the Hare & Hounds website.

Age restriction: 14+ / U16s accompanied by an adult