The medieval music group Mediaeval Baebes play Stoke Minster with their 30th anniversary tour, opening with a torchlit procession.
Mediaeval Baebes bring their 30th Anniversary Tour to Stoke Minster on Saturday 19 December, one of their few dates in the city this winter. They've been around since 1996, when musical director, composer and producer Katharine Blake first put the group together, and they've spent the last three decades carving out a sound that's hard to pin to any one era.
That sound comes from setting mediaeval and romantic texts to original scores, sung in a range of ancient languages and accompanied by early and folk instruments. The subject matter is often gloriously dark, and the whole thing opens the same way every time: a torchlit procession and a fanfare of mediaeval instruments and drums. It's a vivid way to start, and it sets the tone for what follows.
They've released twelve studio albums over those thirty years and picked up a fair bit of recognition along the way. There's an Ivor Novello Award for their performance on the BBC's The Virgin Queen, two Emmy nominations and a Royal Television Society award for the theme to ITV's Victoria, and they've topped the classical charts. This tour marks the big anniversary, and the set will draw on that long run of recordings.
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Part of that will be The Spinning Wheel, the album they released in February 2026 to mark the thirty years. It collects twelve songs, each inspired by one of the months of the year, so it's a record that follows the calendar through. Hearing those songs live, alongside the older material, is what the anniversary tour is built around. The concert is on Saturday 19 December at Stoke Minster in Stoke-on-Trent.
