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DON McLEAN ANNOUNCES THE UK & IRELAND FAREWELL TOUR

McLean’s last UK and Ireland concerts, closing at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2027, 55 years after his debut on the same stage

Tickets on sale Friday, September 18 at 10am for all dates, except London.Tickets on sale Friday, October 2 at10am for London Royal Albert Hall.

LONDON, UK – 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 UK & Ireland 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’ topped the American charts and ‘Vincent’ went to number one in Britain.” “Vincent” topped the UK Singles Chart for two weeks in 1972. 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 over 85,000 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 also performed at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding 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” from the same album as a protest against the Iraq war in 2003. When Taylor Swift broke his nearly fifty-year record for the longest US number one single in 2021, she sent him flowers and a handwritten note. His original working manuscript for “American Pie” sold at Christie’s in New York in 2015 for $1,205,000, the third highest price ever paid at auction at that time for an American literary manuscript.

He will be 81 when The UK & Ireland Farewell Tour opens in Glasgow. The shows will draw on the full span of the catalogue, from “Castles in the Air” and “And I Love You So” through to material from his latest studio album, American Boys, released in 2024.

“I love these audiences. They have kept me going for 55 years and given me a career I could not have had anywhere else,” shares McLean. “A troubadour has to make his farewells somewhere, and I would rather choose the place myself. The Albert Hall was the first room that ever felt like it belonged to me, and it seems right that it should be the last.”

Read in order, the route looks like a man retracing his own steps. It opens in Glasgow because Scotland is where the name comes from, McLean’s father and grandfather both having been Donald McLean and both of Scottish descent, in a city he has known since he headlined the Apollo in 1973. Ireland took him in early to Belfast during the Troubles on the argument that music could bring a divided city together, while Dublin holds the finest surviving film of his early years, RTÉ’s recording of his National Stadium concert in December 1975 with the whole hall singing “By the Waters of Babylon” back at him.

Birmingham gave him his first British television special, recorded at Pebble Mill with Elkie Brooks and The Jordanaires. Bristol Beacon, once Colston Hall, was among the venues taped for Solo in 1973. Manchester gave him the Free Trade Hall in 1991, a night filmed, mislaid for twenty years and released at last as Live in Manchester. Tyneside runs both ways: he had taken “Geordie’s Lost His Penker” into his set by 1971, and his support act on the 1980 British tour was Prelude, the Gateshead trio behind “After the Goldrush”. It ends where it began, at the Royal Albert Hall, a short walk from the Hyde Park crowd he drew three years after his first night there.

UK & IRELAND TOUR DATES

MAY 11-22, 2027

Tickets on sale Friday, September 18 at 10am for all dates, except London.

Tickets on sale Friday, October 2 at 10am for London Royal Albert Hall.

Available via the venues.

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ABOUT DON McLEAN:

Don McLean is one of the world’s most revered and enduring singer-songwriters, best known as the creator of “American Pie,” one of the most recognizable songs in popular music history. Born in New Rochelle, New York, McLean emerged from the 1960s folk scene before achieving international stardom with the landmark 1971 album American Pie. Its title song reached No. 1, entered the GRAMMY Hall of Fame and the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, and was named one of the five greatest Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2026, “American Pie” surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.

A Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee, GRAMMY Award honoree, and recipient of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards Lifetime Achievement Award, McLean is also the writer and voice behind “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night),” “And I Love You So,” “Castles in the Air,” “Empty Chairs,” and “The Grave.” His recording of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” became an international hit, while his songs have been recorded or celebrated by artists including Perry Como, Madonna, George Michael, Garth Brooks, Josh Groban, Drake, and “Weird Al” Yankovic. In 2018, “And I Love You So” was played during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

A landmark chapter in McLean’s recent career was the Paramount+ original documentary The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie. Premiering in the United States and internationally in 2022, alongside special theatrical screenings, the film gave McLean the opportunity to reveal the story and meaning behind his signature song while exploring its cultural history and continuing influence on generations of artists and listeners. The acclaimed, Telly Award-winning production was nominated for Best Music Documentary at the 2023 MTV Movie & TV Awards and was subsequently released on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital platforms.

McLean has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and has been inducted into both the Musicians Hall of Fame and the Music City Walk of Fame. In 2024, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut and released American Boys, a 13-track collection of original material. That year, “Vincent” received RIAA Gold and Platinum certifications and inspired the award-winning illustrated children’s book Vincent: Starry Starry Night.

More than six decades into his career, McLean remains an active recording artist and international concert performer whose songs continue to connect with audiences around the world.

For more information, visit donmclean.com.

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