Don McLean, the writer of “American Pie” and “Vincent” and one of the last working links to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s, will play his final UK and Ireland concerts in May 2027. Billed as The Farewell Tour, the eight-date run opens at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Tuesday 11 May and closes at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Saturday 22 May. McLean has said these will be his last performances here.
That he has chosen to say goodbye here says something about where his career has been happiest. The London date closes the circle exactly. McLean first played the Royal Albert Hall in 1972, on a three-concert British tour that also took in Fairfield Hall in Croydon and the Manchester Odeon, in the months after “American Pie” reached number one and the album of the same name spent seven weeks at the top of the UK chart. He returns to the same venue 55 years later to make his farewell.
Few American artists of his generation have kept a British and Irish audience for as long, or worked as hard at it. McLean played the Great Western Express Festival at Bardney in Lincolnshire in May 1972 alongside The Beach Boys, Joe Cocker, Genesis and Slade. He toured Britain again in the autumn of 1973, and the tapes from those nights in Manchester, Bristol, London and Oxford became Solo, the double live album released in 1976. Its track listing shows how far into the local repertoire he had already gone: “American Pie” and “Castles in the Air” sitting alongside his own arrangements of “Geordie’s Lost His Penker”, the traditional Tyneside marbles song, and the Scottish “Mactavish Is Dead”.
In 1975 he drew a reported 100,000 people to Hyde Park, an audience beaten only by The Rolling Stones at that point in the park’s history. “Crying”, recorded in Nashville with Elvis Presley’s musicians and The Jordanaires, gave him a UK number one at the start of the 1980s, following “Vincent” at the start of the previous decade. He played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 2011 and was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards the following February.
The traffic has continued in both directions. Shirley Bassey recorded “And I Love You So”, which was performed at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding reception in 2018. Ellie Goulding recorded a stripped-back “Vincent” the same year, and Ed Sheeran sang the song as a duet with McLean at a Teen Cancer America benefit that August. In 2022 Tyson Fury joined him to remake “American Pie” for the opening of the Fury and Whyte fight, and in May 2025 McLean gave a keynote address to the Oxford Union.
His songs have travelled as far as he has. Lori Lieberman went to see him perform “Empty Chairs” at the Los Angeles Troubadour in November 1971 and wrote notes that fed into “Killing Me Softly With His Song”, a hit for Roberta Flack and again, in 1996, for The Fugees. Madonna’s version of “American Pie” entered the UK singles chart at number one in 2000, and George Michael recorded “The Grave”
MAY 2027
TUE 11 GLASGOW Royal Concert Hall,
THU 13 BELFAST Waterfront Hall,
FRI 14 DUBLIN 3Arena,
SUN 16 BIRMINGHAM Symphony Hall,
MON 17 BRISTOL Beacon,
WED 19 MANCHESTER Bridgewater Hall,
THU 20 GATESHEAD The Glasshouse ICM,
SAT 22 LONDON Royal Albert Hall,
Tickets on sale Friday, 18 September 10am for all dates, except London.
Tickets on sale Friday, 2 October 10am for London Royal Albert Hall.
Available via the venues and ticketmaster.
Comments are closed.