If you’re going to launch a career as a country-folk musician, one who sings ballads about lonesome nights and rain on the train tracks, it helps if your backstory includes a hard-luck childhood in Oklahoma or Tennessee and a string of adult heartbreaks and misfortunes—maybe even a jail sentence or two. When instead you happen to be an Oxford-educated British lord, the heir to a 14th-century estate in the Highlands and a godson of Queen Elizabeth II, things get a bit trickier.
But at a recent Paris concert, where David Ogilvy opened for country star Lucinda Williams, nobody in the audience seemed to know about Ogilvy’s pedigree, let alone hold it against him. Dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, with an acoustic guitar at his hip, Ogilvy, 49, strummed through a few songs from his three albums, made some self-deprecating jokes in goofy French, then slipped quietly offstage.
Questions of street cred are a bit less daunting for Ogilvy’s wife, Tarka, a painter who works under the name Tarka Kings, because there’s a long tradition of upper-class artists in England. Still, Tarka goes to considerable lengths to avoid being pigeonholed as Lady Ogilvy. Yes, she’s accepted commissions from the Duke of Devonshire and has spent several weekends painting on the grounds of his estate, Chatsworth, but she usually toils in a shed next to a cement works in West London, where the loud clang of dump trucks rattles the corrugated metal walls. David’s recording studio, cluttered with guitars and sound equipment, is around the corner, in an alley next to a metalworking shop. Together, the Ogilvys are one of London’s most genuinely bohemian aristo couples, though they often must make an effort to wear their titles lightly.
Tarka’s Red Sky at Night, 2006–2007
“It’s extremely inconvenient,” says David with a laugh when asked about the predicament of being a lord and a folk musician simultaneously. “The two do not marry at all, and they never will. So I just think, F--- it! And I try not to let it bother me.”
David grew up primarily at Cortachy Castle, the family’s 30,000-acre Scottish estate, where his father, the 13th Earl of Airlie, still lives. As a teenager he served as the Queen’s page of honor during royal ceremonies. “It was irritating because you had to have your hair very short, and this was in the Seventies,” remembers David, who today keeps his gray mane in a thick but well-combed shag. “There was this royal barber who wore these bizarre clothes—silk stockings and a red braided frock—and he’d sort of attack you with his shears.” After Eton and Oxford, David spent a couple of years in Manhattan, working at Sotheby’s by day, bartending at society hangout Mortimer’s by night and haunting the club Xenon afterward. Back in London during the Eighties and Nineties, he worked for art dealer Richard Feigen and started an organic farming and Angus beef business at Airlie, the second castle on the family estate, where he and Tarka now spend summers with their three sons.
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