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. The Dublin date will be at 3Arena on 14 May 2027. 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" from the same album as a protest against the Iraq war in 2003. When Taylor Swift broke his fifty-year record for the longest 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 for an American literary manuscript.
He will be 81 when the 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 twenty-second studio album, American Boys, released in May 2024.
Don McLean said: "I love these audiences. They have kept me going for 55 years and given me a career I could not have had anywhere else. 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 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, the first time Elvis Presley's backing group had performed outside the United States. 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.
ABOUT DON McLEAN
Don McLean was born on 2 October 1945. Among his awards and achievements, he is a Grammy award honouree, a Songwriters Hall of Fame member and a BBC Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. "American Pie" resides in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry and was named one of the top five songs of the twentieth century by the Recording Industry Association of America.
