Mari Wilson

Mari Wilson plays the Music Room at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Saturday 7 November. She's billed as the 'Neasden Queen of Soul', and the name does a fair bit of the heavy lifting for where she started. She first made a name for herself in the early eighties with a beehive hairdo and a fully choreographed twelve-piece band, The Wilsations. She charted with 'Beat the Beat', 'Baby It's True' and 'Just What I've Always Wanted', and her version of 'Cry Me A River' became a hit.

Since then, she's worked across a few different worlds. She wrote theme tunes, including 'Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps' for the BBC sitcom Coupling and 'Dance With A Stranger' for the film of the same name. She played Dusty Springfield in Dusty the Musical and released the album Pop Deluxe in 2016. In 2017, her song 'Moon and Back', written for the US show The Young and the Restless, was nominated for an Emmy.

She's built a reputation as one of the UK's best live soul performers, and 2026 marks 45 years of her recording and touring. She's followed that milestone with Girl About Town, a collection of self-penned songs that run through soul, pop and jazz. The set will draw on that new material alongside the older records, so you'll hear the newer songs and the early ones in the same night.

It's a Saturday night in the Music Room at Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, and the date is 7 November. If you've followed her since the beehive days, it's a good chance to catch her live; if you're coming in through the newer stuff, it's a decent place to start.