“There are certain sounds from the mid-‘80s that were very much of their time and were a part of the mood that doesn’t sit well for me, but when you’re living with that all the time, they become wearisome and feeling a bit bombastic,” says Alison Moyet, reflecting on her 1984 solo debut Alf, and everything that came after, following the demise of her synth-pop duo Yazoo (Yaz) with Depeche Mode’s Vince Clarke a year earlier.
It took some time for Moyet to find her way as a solo artist, even after shooting to No. 1 with Alf and her hit song “All Cried Out,” which went to No. 8 in the UK, along with charting singles “Love Resurrection,” “For You Only” and “Invisible.”
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of her solo career and debut album, Moyet revisited 16 songs spanning her extensive catalog on her latest album, Key. Produced by Sean McGhee, Moyet scans everything from her debut album through her eighth release, The Minutes (2013), as a semi-chronicle of her career with refreshed and rerecorded versions of songs, along with two new tracks.
“It was about finding the sound that could pull all of that really diverse material into one frame,” Moyet says of returning to previous songs for Key. “The language changes so much between the ages of 20 and 63, and the reason why it was such a significant thing for me to do is because my work circles mainly around wanting to play live. So when you’re looking at 40 years of work, it’s about finding a way into all the songs to bring them together as a body for a set.
“I needed to step away and to reappraise them. It’s only when you’ve really played live that you understand what the meat and the bones are of the song, what part stays with you, where you can still engage, and what is superfluous.”
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Along with more spacious renditions of “All Cried Out,” “Where Hides Sleep,” and “Love Resurrection,” Moyet also transformed “Is This Love?” and “This House” from her second album, Raindancing, into a more cinematic scene. She also included newer interpretations of “Fire,” “Can’t Say It Like I Mean It,” “World Without End,” and “This House” from her 2007 album The Turn and deeper cuts.
McGhee also reworked the arrangements from Moyet’s 2013 album The Minutes with a noir revival of “Filigree” and the synth-happy “All Signs of Life.” Though no tracks were pulled from Other in 2017, Moyet did take another turn with “My Best Day,” which she co-wrote with the Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie for the band’s 1994 album Jollification.
Along with reexamining her past, Moyet also looks forward on Key. She penned two new songs, “Such a Good Ale” and “The Impervious Me,” while working on a first-class degree in fine art printmaking at the University of Brighton during the pandemic. She earned her degree in 2023 and utilized those skills to design the cover of Key along with its corresponding lyric videos.
We should step out / From under this cloud / Take chance to meet daylight / Abandon the crowd sings Moyet on the slow-burning “Such Small Ale,” co-written with McGhee and Suede guitarist Richard Oakes. With a penchant for reconfiguring pieces of language from the Middle Ages and other periods, the song references a Tudor-era saying, “Small Ale,” meaning a thing of little importance.
“‘Such Small Ale’ deals with sweating the small stuff, the subjects that you’re faced with when you’re my age, and you have spent so much time fighting over bollocks, just rubbish, that even when you win a point, nothing is won,” shares Moyet. “You’re running out of time, and the song is saying, ‘Look, we can either spend the rest of the time with this ridiculous, pointless battle, or we can just get out from under all of this grief that we pile on ourselves, feel the sun on our bodies, and forgive one another and be accepting of one other.”
“The Impervious Me” directly reflects where Moyet has arrived in her career. “You deal with coming to the fore and then dropping out, coming to people’s notice, being completely irrelevant, being a part of the zeitgeist, and being discarded,” says Moyet. “But as an artist, none of those things should affect your engagement with what you do.”
That’s part of the downside of having luck with music, which Moyet had from her earlier successes with Alf, Raindancing, and Other in 2017. “You have to get to this place where you trust your own voice,” she says. “I know that my best songs are not the ones that got the biggest platform or have sold the most copies. They are often buried.”
This new era of life is liberating for Moyet and the new songs indicate that it’s still in progression. “It’s still a journey that’s moving forward,” says Moyet. “There’s hope, that each of those songs become a key into the album from which you source them. The aesthetic fits the musician that I am now, which was always going to change in time.”
Alison Moyet 2025 Tour Dates:
Apr 29 Washington, DC The Fillmore Silver Spring
Apr 30 Philadelphia, PA Keswick Theatre
May 2 New York, NY Webster Hall
May 3 Boston, MA Big Nite Live
May 5 Toronto, ON The Danforth Music Hall
May 6 Detroit, MI Saint Andrew’s Hall
May 7 Chicago, IL The Vic Theatre
May 9 Minneapolis, MN Fine Line
May 11 Seattle, WA The Showbox
May 12 Vancouver, BC Vogue Theatre
May 14 Portland, OR Crystal Ballroom
May 16 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
May 17 Pasadena, CA Cruel World
Photos by Naomi Davison
The story also appears on Americansongwriter.com.
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