Stevie Wonder plays Songs in the Key of Life in full at The O2 arena on Tuesday 3 November 2026, fifty years after he made it.
Stevie Wonder signed to Motown at eleven and had an American number one at twelve, with Fingertips Part 2, cut live on harmonica before his voice had broken. He has taken 49 singles into the top forty since, 32 of them to number one, and sold more than 100 million records. Twenty-five Grammy Awards have followed, three of them for Album of the Year, and the third was for the record he brings to Greenwich.
Songs in the Key of Life was his eighteenth album and the end of the run that began with Music of My Mind in 1972. He had nearly stopped altogether the year before it, planning a farewell concert and a move to Ghana to work with disabled children, before signing a seven-year contract with Motown that handed him full artistic control and the ownership of his own publishing. It was the largest recording deal anyone had been given, and what he made with it entered the American chart at number one, the first album by an American artist ever to do that.
The 50th anniversary tour performs the whole of it, two discs and the bonus EP, from Love’s in Need of Love Today through I Wish, Sir Duke, As and Isn’t She Lovely. I Wish and Sir Duke both went to number one on their own. Fifty years on, the record sits in the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry, kept as a recording of cultural significance to the United States.