GRASSMONSTER SAYS:

The Rise of the Ryan Twins
Teen Dream to Chart Phenomenon

It takes approximately three minutes and forty-six seconds for pop history to collapse under its own sentimental weight. That, coincidentally, is the runtime of “Eloise” – the song that vaulted the Ryan Twins from charming anonymity to gold-plated notoriety and then, without warning or mercy, to absolute silence. No fanfare. No farewell. Just a sharp cut to black, as if the spotlight itself blinked in disbelief.

Twins in the entertainment world often arrive with a built-in novelty – something for teenage magazines to drool over and talent agents to exploit. But David and Daniel Ryan, born in 1952 to a quietly ambitious showbiz mother in Middlesex, were more than a gimmick. They could sing in uncanny synchronicity, write their own material (at least initially), and project a sort of wounded glamour that made teenage girls weep and teenage boys scowl.

Their break came not, as folklore insists, in a smoky Soho club, but at a ghastly television showcase called Saturday Scene, hosted by the ever-smirking Sally James. The boys, dressed in matching velvet blazers like miniature Liberaces, sang “Eloise” live to a backing tape that promptly malfunctioned. They didn’t flinch. Instead, they harmonised harder, as if defying fate, and won not just the crowd but the attention of Tony Meehan, former Shadows drummer turned producer-hyena. Meehan smelled money – the scent always lingered stronger than talent in those days – and signed them the next week.

To say “Eloise” took off would be to underplay the cultural trauma it inflicted. A ballad soaked in teenage heartbreak and the vibrato of overexposure, it charted top ten in the UK and made minor tremors in Europe, especially in Germany where sentimentality is a growth industry. It was bold, overwrought, and (critics muttered) vaguely creepy. Which made it perfect.

The Ryan Twins were 17, suddenly wealthy, suddenly stalked, and not remotely prepared. They had, until then, shared a bedroom, a school bus, and a pet hamster. Now they were grinning across Top of the Pops sets while middle-aged cameramen muttered about their bone structure.

Every interview ended the same way: “What’s it like being twins in love with the same girl?” It was always Eloise. Except Eloise didn’t exist. Not really. She was a composite fiction stitched together from unrequited sixth-form affections, the odd fever dream, and an unfinished poem their mother had once scribbled during her own half-forgotten flirtation with cinema.

But we’ll get to her soon enough. She’s the real ghost in this story.

For now, what mattered was that the Ryan Twins had arrived – precisely as the culture was beginning to shift beneath them. They were gentle, melodic, and decorous. The world wanted rough, loud, and scandalised. They were two years too late and one generation too early. Still, for a few shimmering months, they were unavoidable.

Then came the postcard from Portugal. And the silence that followed was louder than any encore.

“Eloise” – The Anthem That Made and Broke Them

In the annals of British pop, few songs have clutched the public by the throat and whispered both ecstasy and doom quite like “Eloise”. When the Ryan Twins performed it in late 1969, barely out of school uniform and not yet fluent in the predatory dialect of the music business, the song sounded less like a hit and more like a warning. A ballad written with adolescent desperation and produced with a kind of orchestral violence, it was the anti-bubblegum – a maudlin epic hiding behind teenage faces.

Contrary to myth, it was not a cover of Barry Ryan’s earlier song of the same name. That was a grotesque, overblown monolith in its own right. No, the Twins’ “Eloise” was an original, named not in homage but in defiance – a pointed reclaiming of a name their mother had once performed under in silent films. A name laced with ghostliness, repetition, and maternal regret. The song wasn’t about love. It was about longing in a house where no one ever came back.

From the opening chords – an aching, minor-key swell of strings and a harpsichord that no one asked for – it demanded attention. Daniel’s voice, higher and more delicate, took the lead. David’s, darker and rounder, hummed underneath like a premonition. The chorus arrived like a funeral with fireworks:
“Eloise… won’t you come home / There’s no more sun in the garden / Just the echo of your name / and the dust on the telephone…”

It was preposterous. And brilliant. And utterly out of step with the Beatles-driven optimism of the era’s closing act. Which is why it worked. It went to #7 in the UK, hit the Irish and Dutch charts with baffling force, and earned a bizarre cult following in Finland, of all places. But like many meteor-struck careers, the chart success only deepened the shadow that followed.

The tabloids, sniffing drama beneath the velvet, asked questions the boys could barely answer: “Is Eloise a real person?” “Why do you sing about her like she’s dead?” “Is your mother really her?”

Their manager, Tony Meehan, deflected with oily charm, offering lines like: “The boys are poetic, not literal. Eloise is every woman and no woman.” But Meehan knew full well. The name Eloise Delane had once belonged to a second-tier Rank Organisation starlet with a jawline sharper than her résumé and a tendency to vanish during shooting days. She’d been in one noir, two kitchen sink dramas, and half a bottle of gin most afternoons.

She was also their mother.

Critics, those sanctimonious midwives of failure, began to sniff. “One-hit wonders,” they said. “Pretty boys with sad eyes and one decent song.” What they didn’t know was that the second single had already been written – and buried.

“Eloise” was not a hit. It was a confession. And some confessions aren’t meant to have follow-ups.

The recording sessions had been tense, allegedly marred by fights over orchestration, rewrites, and a furious row when Daniel insisted on including a lyric cribbed from their mother’s old diary. “She’ll sue,” Meehan had hissed. “Let her,” Daniel replied. That lyric stayed. So did the lawsuit. A sealed family court record, gagging order, and a brief psychiatric evaluation of Daniel would follow months later. None of it made the papers. Yet.

They performed “Eloise” live only three times. Each one visibly drained them. On Top of the Pops, they looked like they were saying goodbye. On Blue Peter, Daniel had a nosebleed mid-performance and finished the song with blood on his cuff. On Disco 2, they sang it a cappella in front of a chalkboard scribbled with the word “Eloise” 100 times. No one asked them to explain. No one wanted to know.

And then, silence. No second single. No album. No tour. Just a void.

The kind of void that makes you wonder if someone pulled the plug on purpose.

The Disappearing Act: Why the Ryan Twins Walked Away

Pop careers do not, as a rule, conclude with silence. They collapse in scandal, overstay into parody, or drown in the gurgle of synth-heavy comeback albums. But the Ryan Twins performed their vanishing act like magicians who’d rehearsed the trick in private for years. There was no drugs bust, no seedy nightclub stabbing, no solo career that flopped so hard it warranted coverage. They simply – vanished.

By spring of 1971, the press assumed they were abroad. By autumn, it was assumed they were dead. Neither was true. What was true – and spectacularly unmarketable – was that they’d had enough. Enough of being the same. Enough of being the brand. Enough of living inside a single song they no longer believed in.

The music industry is not a kind place for those who ask questions. And the Ryan Twins, it seems, had started asking all the wrong ones. Not about contracts – those had been laughably unfair from day one. Not about money – most of it had already gone. But about meaning. Why sing? For whom? And at what cost?

Daniel had grown quiet, more so than usual. Friends from their short-lived Camden flatshare recall him reading Kafka aloud in a sing-song tone while burning letters from fans. He kept a ledger of all interviews they declined and insisted on attending therapy – a scandalous act for a male pop star in 1971. David, meanwhile, was drinking heavily and dating a hairdresser who sold their unused lyric notebooks to Disc magazine for £15 and a free perm.

At the heart of it was their mother, Eloise Delane. Or rather, the memory of her. Still alive, yes, but more ghost than matron. She had reportedly issued a handwritten letter to their management warning against “further artistic exploitation of my name, my past, and my maternal contributions.” It arrived scented with jasmine and rumour.

Insiders say the letter was a bluff – her past was already a patchwork of scandal and vanishing acts. She had walked off a film set in 1958 after a co-star allegedly called her “the bottle-blonde Billie Whitelaw” and never returned. She turned up two years later in a village in northern France running a crêperie with a Hungarian pianist. Then she disappeared again.

So when the twins disappeared in late 1971, it wasn’t so much unexpected as… familial. They followed her blueprint. A friend close to Daniel once described their departure as “less a decision and more a family curse being honoured.”

What’s certain is that by November, the flat was empty. Their manager received a postcard from Portugal that read simply:
“No more gardens. No more phones. Don’t come looking. – D+D”

No forwarding address. No press release. Not even a goodbye to the fan club, which continued operating for another six months out of sheer delusion and leftover stamps.

Rumours filled the void like flies to a carcass. They’d joined a cult. They were living in a monastery. They’d died in a car crash. They were women now. They were married to the same woman. They were writing music under pseudonyms. They were running a hotel in Naples. The truth was more mundane – and more tragic.

They were tired. And they were traumatised.

“You have to understand,” said one BBC producer anonymously in 1999, “they weren’t built for it. They were sensitive boys with velvet voices and mother issues. What they needed was a countryside and a dog. What they got was Tony Meehan and the Melody Maker.”

To this day, neither has appeared in public again. Not officially. A man resembling Daniel was allegedly spotted at a Leonard Cohen concert in Lyon in 1983. David may have attended a cousin’s funeral in Surrey in 1997. But no confirmed sightings exist.

Just the silence. And the record.

Mother of the Show: The Forgotten Actress Behind the Legend

Long before she became a shadow in her sons’ lives and a metaphor in their only hit song, Eloise Delane had already disappeared several times. Once from the screen. Once from the public. And, arguably, once from herself. To understand the Ryan Twins’ peculiar fame and permanent withdrawal, one must first study the performance of their mother – an actress who never quite became famous, but who never quite stopped acting either.

Born Eileen Delaney in 1929 in the east end of London, she renamed herself Eloise Delane at age 17, believing – not without reason – that syllables were everything. She claimed Irish heritage when needed, French descent when desired, and spoke with an accent so slippery it could pass for royal or Romani depending on who she was seducing. Her early career was in theatre, but she landed a studio contract with the Rank Organisation in 1953 after catching the eye of a senior casting director who called her “a glass of wine poured by candlelight.”

She starred in The Crooked Staircase (1955), Night of the Ink (1956), and The Tea Room Confession (1957) – none of which aged well, and all of which were later used as trivia questions by bored film students and BBC Four interns. Her performances were described as “opaque,” “ethereal,” and in one memorable review, “like a ghost trying to remember a shopping list.”

But off-screen, she had presence. Too much of it. She drank, argued, wrote poems in lipstick on mirrors, and was known to slap co-stars if they sneezed during her takes. Rumours swirled that she had an affair with a married newsreader, fled a production in Spain after punching the wardrobe mistress, and once faked appendicitis to escape a BBC radio play about hedgehogs.

By the time she gave birth to David and Daniel in 1952 – yes, the timeline is suspicious – she was already living two lives: struggling starlet by day, absentee mother by night. The twins were raised largely by a sequence of nannies, a volatile Welsh aunt, and, for one six-month stretch, a landlady who believed children should read The Times aloud at breakfast to build diction.

Her influence, however, was omnipresent. She told them bedtime stories from scripts she never got cast in. She gave them matching velvet bowties at age five. She insisted their early demo tapes include “a sense of foreboding.” When “Eloise” the song was being written, she reportedly stood over Daniel’s shoulder and whispered, “Make her mournful, not tragic. Mourning lasts longer.”

In her later years, Eloise Delane became more myth than woman. She turned up at a poet’s retreat in Whitby claiming to be researching a role, then left three weeks later with someone else’s dog. She wrote an unpublished memoir, “Silk, Bruise, Repeat”, which included a chapter titled: “Why I Never Called Them Mine.” It remains locked in legal limbo after one of the twins allegedly bought up the rights and refused all release offers.

She died – perhaps fittingly – in silence. A short obituary appeared in The Stage in 1999, listing her as “occasional actress, great beauty, devoted to privacy.” No mention of the boys. No photograph. Just a name. Just “Eloise.”

But her fingerprints are on everything. The theatricality of the twins’ performance. The opacity of their lyrics. The silent retreat from fame. Even the idea of vanishing as legacy – that was hers first. She didn’t just raise them. She directed them. And like any great director, she knew exactly when to call cut.

Managers, Money, and Missteps: Industry Wolves at the Door

If Eloise Delane was the architect of her sons’ emotional foundation, then the music industry was the demolition crew. With contracts made of smoke and advances made of air, David and Daniel Ryan were not just mismanaged – they were devoured.

Enter Tony Meehan, former Shadows drummer turned producer and managerial opportunist. A man with teeth as white as his contracts were grey, Meehan had a knack for recognising fragility as marketable. He liked his artists young, soft-spoken, and legally illiterate. The Ryan Twins were, in his words, “a velvet investment”.

Their first contract – signed under the fluorescent hum of an office above a gentlemen’s outfitters in Holborn – gave Meehan exclusive rights to their recordings, performances, merchandising, and songwriting for seven years. In return, the twins received £250, a used Morris Minor, and the solemn assurance that their “talent would be protected.”

It wasn’t. What was protected was Meehan’s control.

The royalty structure was comical. From each record sold (retail price: 89p), the twins earned less than 1p, after deductions for studio time, producer fees, promotional costs (including a disastrous billboard in Croydon that read “THEY’RE WATCHING YOU – THE RYAN TWINS”), and Meehan’s management cut – a lush 25% on everything, including things he had nothing to do with. He billed them for sandwiches consumed by studio engineers. He deducted postage for fan mail replies. He charged them £60 for a haircut he insisted David get to “look more broken-hearted.”

There were whispers that Meehan deliberately sabotaged their second single. Titled “Love’s Ledger”, it was reportedly a stronger, darker follow-up to “Eloise” with lyrics referencing debt, abandonment, and a woman named Mother. A master recording exists, but it was never released. Instead, Meehan shelved it, allegedly claiming, “We don’t want the boys getting ideas above their agony.”

When Daniel began keeping his own books – a meticulous account of studio time, label communications, and cash flow – Meehan dismissed him as “a neurotic ledger-boy.” When they asked to renegotiate their publishing rights, Meehan responded by replacing their booking agent with his brother-in-law, who once double-booked them for a gig in Hull and a radio interview in Brighton on the same day.

The final straw came in early 1971. According to a leaked letter from their solicitor, the twins discovered that Meehan had licenced “Eloise” to a toilet paper commercial in West Germany without their knowledge. The chorus – “Eloise… won’t you come home…” – was reinterpreted over footage of a forlorn man in a bathroom stall reaching for an empty roll. The twins were livid. Daniel allegedly smashed a tape recorder against a wall. David wept.

The result was swift and final. They severed contact. Not just with Meehan, but with everyone. Their publisher. Their label. Their fan club president. Their hairdresser. A scorched-earth exit. They sent Meehan one last note:

“Tony, you’ll find the twins have left the building. The song is not yours. The silence is. – D+D”

Meehan, ever the professional, immediately sued. But the lawsuit never reached court. It was quietly withdrawn under terms that remain sealed to this day. Rumours persist that the twins offered a trade – silence for silence. Meehan died in 2005, his final interview refusing to mention the Ryan Twins by name. He called them simply, “a beautiful tax write-off.”

And so, as with so many stories in the British music industry, the headline should have read: “Talented boys. Ruined by a suit.

Where Are They Now? The Life Beyond the Limelight

In an industry that lives on overexposure, the Ryan Twins pulled off the most daring move of all – they left. Entirely. And stayed gone. Not for a break. Not for rehab. But, seemingly, for life.

By 1972, no one knew where they lived. By 1982, no one knew if they lived. By 2002, the only people still asking were podcast interns and grey-haired women with shrines of yellowing Look-In magazines. Fame had become an afterthought. Disappearance had become the narrative.

So where did they go? Theories abound, stacked like vinyl in a charity shop.

Portugal was the first lead – a postcard sent to their former manager, postmarked Lagos, signed “D+D.” But the trail there grew cold. A local British expat swore she served “a young man who looked like he’d just stepped out of a David Cassidy calendar” at her guesthouse in 1973. That was it.

In the mid-1980s, rumours swirled that David had resurfaced under the name Mark Langdon, running a small bookshop in Oxfordshire specialising in out-of-print poetry and political theory. When a journalist tracked the shop down, “Langdon” was gone – and the lease was transferred to a woman named Delane.

In 1991, a BBC Four researcher found what he believed to be Daniel Ryan’s voice on an anonymous vinyl test pressing of spoken-word poetry, recorded under the name “The Thistle Ghost”. The subject? Abandonment, gardens, and a recurring female figure called “E.” The track never aired due to copyright murkiness, but the acetate exists. Held by an archivist in Leeds, who simply says, “It’s them. Or it’s someone who wants to be them.”

And then there’s the French theory. A retired music critic claimed, in a footnote to a memoir no one bought, that both brothers had been living in Provence since the mid-1990s under assumed names. “They raise goats,” he wrote. “And never speak English unless quoting Leonard Cohen.” A rumour too beautiful to disprove.

No one ever claimed the PRS rights to “Eloise.” No one sued the German toilet paper company. No one published a memoir. No one did Strictly Come Dancing. By 2000s standards, this is the equivalent of saintly martyrdom.

But why the absolute silence? Why no reunion, no reissue, no redemption tour playing second-fiddle to nostalgia?

Because for the Ryan Twins, silence wasn’t just absence. It was a rebellion. Against Meehan. Against tabloids. Against the mother who viewed life as a series of exits. Against a world that wanted them in matching suits, singing matching harmonies, feeling matching pain.

One anonymous friend of the family, speaking in a Guardian back-page obituary for Eloise Delane in 1999, offered the closest thing to closure:

“They loved music. But not attention. They loved each other. But not the brand of ‘The Twins.’ So they did the unthinkable – they chose life. Somewhere, I hope they’re still singing. Just not for us.”

So maybe they’re dead. Or maybe they’re at peace. Or maybe that’s the same thing, depending on what fame did to you. But wherever they are – if they are – they owe us nothing. Not even a second verse.

What We Never Knew: The Final Notes in a Vanishing Melody

Every generation breeds a mystery it refuses to solve. For the 1970s, that mystery was the Ryan Twins. Their rise was improbable. Their retreat, absolute. Their legacy? A single song, an abandoned contract, and enough silence to rattle a nation’s memory. But among the unanswered questions and veiled family histories lies something harder to dismiss – the haunting suspicion that they did it all deliberately.

Their vanishing was not a fluke. It was crafted. Just like “Eloise,” which upon re-listen reads not as a love song but as a rehearsal for exit. The references to absence. The mourning. The longing for someone never truly real. It wasn’t about a girl. It wasn’t even about their mother. It was about them.

And while tabloids weep over the prospect of one more broken star and fans clutch laminated vinyl in tribute, the twins are out there – or were – writing a different kind of song. One without choruses. Without bridges. A life composed in silence and chosen anonymity. And that, arguably, is the bravest encore of all.

In the final estate filings of Eloise Delane, filed discreetly in 1999, there were no royalties. No assets. Just a box marked “Stage Memorabilia – Private.” Inside were two letters. One addressed to “D.” One to “D.” Neither was opened by the solicitor. Both were buried with her at her request.

There is no closure. No comeback. Just the truth – or something near enough to it – that some songs end not with applause, but with refusal.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the most poetic thing they ever did.

Author – @grassmonster

References

Keywords: Ryan Twins final story, Eloise truth, what happened to the Ryan Twins, vanished musicians UK, British pop mystery, Eloise Delane legacy

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