Alison Moyet Returns with the ‘Key’ to Celebrating 40th Year as a Solo Artist in New York City

“I’m a musician. This is not what I did. This is what I do,” Alison Moyet told the sold-out crowd at Webster Hall on May 2, 2025. New York City was just one stop on Moyet’s ongoing tour, stretching through July with stops in New Zealand and Australia and summer festivals, all commemorating her four decades as a solo artist.

After taking a brief hiatus from her solo career following the release of her ninth album Other in 2017, Moyet enrolled in the Fine Art Printmaking at the University of Brighton in England, graduating in 2023. A year later, she commemorated the 40th anniversary of her debut, Alf, her blossoming as a solo artist following her split as one half of the synthpop duo Yazoo (Yaz) with Vince Clarke (Depeche Mode, Erasure) in 1983 with a collection of newer interpretations of songs from her past on 10th album, Key.

Supported by musician and Key producer Sean McGhee and Brendan Cox, the 21-song set honored Moyet’s chart-topping Alf and hit “All Cried Out,” which also went to No. 8 in the UK, and more songs from her past featured on Key, including the opening “Fire” and “Can’t Say It Like I Mean It,” originally released on her 2007 album The Turn, and “All Signs of Life” from The Minutes in 2013.

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For Key, Moyet said she wanted an album with some “significant songs that had been hits, some deeper cuts that had gone completely unnoticed,” that could work together as a cohesive set, “almost ss if they had been written together in one year,” she said, “and not end up in some nasty karaoke.” She also used her printmaking skills to design the cover Key art along with its corresponding lyric videos.

Before adding one of two new songs on Key, “Such Small Ale,” which she co-wrote and produced with McGhee and Suede guitarist Richard Oakes, Moyet said, “It’s really important to include the older voice in music. As we grow older and we gain wisdom, we become observers, we expand our vocabulary, and we broaden the narrative.”

Whether it was 1982 or 2025 didn’t make a difference with Moyet’s unfaded vocals, from rewindng to Yazoo’s only two albums Upstairs at Eric’s (1982) and You and Me Both (1983) with “Nobody’s Diary,” a song she said she wrote when she was 16, and “Only You,” through her second newer offering, also co-written with McGhee, “Impervious Me.”

“I think that we spend so much of our lives feeling like we’ve got something wrong or something we’ve got to change something about ourselves … to make ourselves acceptable,” said Moyet. “It’s not until we learn to be impervious that we shut out those voices. To be impervious is something I always wished for.”

Toward the end of her 90-minute set, Moyet shared an acoustic-folk rendering of “It Won’t Be Long” from her 1991 release Hoodoo, and kept it stripped down for the next, a deeper cut from her Essex (1994) with “Dorothy,” then shared a humorous story of the origin of her 2013 song “All Signs of Life”: long-distance biking.

“People who do that fill me with admiration,” said Moyet, who added that her nickname when she was a kid was “stamina” because she would never stop moving. “I have such huge admiration for people who can go into high endurance sports. … What conversation must they have in their heads that can push them through that pain, mile after mile on their own?”

Moyet closed the set with another Essex track, her cover of Jules Shear’s “Whispering Your Name” and didn’t keep the crowd waiting longer than a minute before returning for a three-song encore of Yazoo’s 1982 hits “Situation” and “Don’t Go” and revisting Alf with “Love Resurrection.”

Setlit: Alison Moyet, Webster Hall, May 2, 2025

1. Fire
2. More
3. Such Small Ale
4. Nobody’s Diary
5. The Impervious Me
6. So Am I
7. Can’t Say It Like I Mean It
8. This House
9. Changeling
10. Beautiful Gun
11. Only You
12. It Won’t Be Long
13. Dorothy
14. Is This Love?
15. All Signs of Life
16. Footsteps
17. All Cried Out
18. Whispering Your Name
    
    Encore
19. Situation
20. Love Resurrection
21. Don’t Go

Photos: Tina Benitez-Eves