Stevie Wonder Opens 50th Anniversary Tour in Birmingham

Stevie Wonder opened the tour marking the 50th anniversary of Songs in the Key of Life at Birmingham's Utilita Arena on 14 October, performing his most celebrated album in full and, according to the Guardian's review, leaving jaws on the floor.

Seated amid a bank of keyboards, Wonder told the audience that playing the album in full had been a longstanding ambition. The problem, he said, was that it needed so many people to bring it to fruition.

He had already fulfilled that ambition once. Wonder performed the album in its entirety across North American arenas in 2014 and 2015, and the current 50th anniversary shows take their cue from those gigs, complete with Superstition added as an encore. Still, the reviewer notes, his point about the scale of personnel stands.

How many musicians does it take?

There really are a lot of musicians on stage in Birmingham:

• Three percussionists
• A string section
• Five brass players
• Six backing vocalists
• Two guitarists
• Three keyboard players, including Wonder himself

Wonder variously plays a bank of synthesisers both vintage and modern, a grand piano, an upright tack piano and, on Ngiculela/Es Una Historia/I Am Singing, a bizarre stringed instrument called a harpejji. That instrument did not exist when Wonder last released an album, let alone when Songs in the Key of Life was made.

Even that sprawling lineup counts as scaling things down dramatically compared with the album's original sessions. Made by a man who could pretty much do everything himself, the record nevertheless involved 108 musicians. Eight people are credited for handclaps alone.

What does this change for the audience?

For the Birmingham crowd, the answer lies in the material itself. The Guardian's review credits the sumptuous tracks with carrying still-urgent messages, five decades after the album's release, and describes a performance that left the audience knocked sideways on the opening night of the run.

Whether the anniversary format travels beyond these shores, the Birmingham opening has set the standard: a full-album performance, a massed ensemble and an encore of Superstition, delivered by a musician still scaling his own ambition.