Most people look back with mild embarrassment over what they did as teenagers, but Eliot Sumner, 25, would like to scratch the early parts of her music career from the record altogether.
“I know it’s out there, but I don’t really want anyone to know about the old stuff I did,” she tells The Post. At just 17, the daughter of British rocker Sting — né Gordon Sumner — and his wife Trudie Styler signed a record deal that resulted in the 2010 album “The Constant,” released under the name I Blame Coco (Coco being her nickname). The glossy pop album tanked and, as Sumner herself puts it, she went “into hiding for about two years.”
Now she’s back, performing under her given name and recording noticeably more confident-sounding music that has darker touches in the style of Joy Division and Depeche Mode.
It’s a new sound that will be performed Wednesday at Pianos on the Lower East Side and on Thursday at Baby’s All Right in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “I was very young when I did I Blame Coco, and I never really recognized that sound as me,” she says.
But not everything has changed. As she has continually stressed since the days of I Blame Coco, Sumner is making her own way. There’s no danger of Mom and Dad stage-managing her music. “I talk to them all the time, but they don’t dictate my career,” she says. “They’re happy for me. I think they knew that I wasn’t entirely comfortable doing pop music the first time around.” (Eliot is the third of Sting and Styler’s four children; Sting also has two older offspring.)
When not touring, Eliot lives mostly in England. Naturally, she grew up with music all around her. “I picked up the guitar when I was 4, and from then, I could never be bored,” she remembers. In later years, she also dabbled in modeling, appearing in a Burberry campaign during 2008 alongside Agyness Deyn, but these days, the 25-year-old says she is largely dialed out of the fashion world.
“I pretty much wear all-black onstage and offstage,” she admits. “I wear black KTZ trousers every night because they’re comfortable, but wearing all-black [also] means I don’t have to think about it too much.”
Modeling may never have been a threat to her music career, but a freak accident in a Los Angeles restaurant in 2009 definitely was. After falling hard, suffering a fractured skull and landing in intensive care, Sumner was left without any sense of smell.
“I wouldn’t be able to sense a gas leak,” she says, but it’s a condition that has plus points. “My taste buds are also affected, so I can eat as much really spicy food as I like!”