Huge tour announcements rack up for 2023

The live business is braced for another intense year of touring amid a flurry of huge announcements for 2023.

This week has seen Pink, Depeche Mode, Iron Maiden, Lizzo, The 1975 and Dead & Company all confirm major tours for next year, adding to shows already on sale by artists such as Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band, Arctic Monkeys, Harry Styles, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Muse and Elton John.

Pink will perform two nights at the 65,000-cap BST Hyde Park in London from 24-25 June to conclude her UK stadium tour, which will also stop at the University of Bolton Stadium (7-8 June), Sunderland’s Stadium of Light (10-11 June) and Birmingham Villa Park (13 June).

Depeche Mode unveiled their first tour in five years at a special event in Berlin on Tuesday (4 October) in support of their forthcoming 15th studio album, Memento Mori. The Live Nation-presented tour will begin with a series of North American arena dates starting 23 March, before heading to Europe for a summer stadium run.

Live Nation president and chief financial officer Joe Berchtold recently detailed the post-Covid rush to return to the road.

“Next year’s shaping up to be another very big stadium year”

“Artists are like everybody else – they went without the majority of their income for a couple of years – they’re making 80-90% of their money from touring,” he told Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference. “So if you’re going to lose that percentage of your income for a few years, you obviously are going to be pretty motivated to get out and start making money again.

“What we saw was a very strong return on the supply side with artists wanting to get out. Next year’s shaping up to be another very big stadium year. We’re seeing that ’23 is looking like another great year for us.”

Meanwhile, Iron Maiden will visit arenas for their The Future Past Tour, which launches in Europe next June. The dates will showcase previously unperformed songs from the band’s most recent studio album, Senjutsu along with a focus on 1986’s Somewhere In Time.

“This combination of the two albums we feel is very exciting,” says the band’s manager Rod Smallwood of Phantom Management. “We know fans want to hear those epic cuts on Senjutsu for the first time live and we think that by combining it with an iconic album like Somewhere In Time it will make for another really special tour for fans old and new. Of course, for a new album tour in Europe and the UK we will go back largely to the relative intimacy of arenas and we know fans will be very happy about that too.”

Elsewhere, Lizzo will play 15 shows across European arenas next February/March and The 1975 have revealed Australia and New Zealand dates for April 2023, while Dead & Company have said their US 2023 summer tour, produced by Live Nation, will be their final tour since forming in 2015.

The announcements come despite warnings from European festival heads that there is “trouble ahead”, with the impact of spiralling costs, while AEG Presents UK head Steve Homer advised “the watchword is caution” for 2023.

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