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About one-quarter of the way into Alison Moyet’s performance at the Crystal Ballroom last week on Wednesday, May 14, the music went dead, and the 63-year-old singer-songwriter shared a confused look onstage with one of her accompanists. “I’ve sung the wrong bit,” Moyet said. After a brief exchange with the two gents handling all the music, it was decided: skip it and move on. It was one of those good-humored, unapologetic moments that I rarely see at concerts of this size or with an artist of Moyet’s stature.
An iconic artist in her native U.K., she’s primarily known here in the States for her brief tenure in Yaz, a synth-pop duo led by future Erasure member Vince Clarke. That was clear enough when a few hundred smartphones popped into view once the opening notes of songs like “Only You” and “Situation” burst out of the PA. Fucking up a song, especially one that most of the crowd at the Crystal likely didn’t recognize, could have been disastrous. Moyet sloughed it off with a laugh and plowed ahead.
The rest of the night went off without a hitch as Moyet walked the crowd through a pocket history of her long career. She concentrated the set list on Key, her recent LP of rearrangements and overhauls of songs from her nine previous studio albums. It was, truly, the ideal way to catch up to what Moyet has been up to in the 40 years since Yaz split up, all rendered in a dark, silvery sheen of synths and almost industrial rhythms. While fans were clearly thrilled to hear the songs they danced to in their college years, my hope is that, like me, the concert sent them scrambling into Moyet’s back catalog to see what they’ve missed.