Sharleen Spiteri and Texas are taking White on Blonde back on the road. The Glasgow band’s official site lists 19 arena dates across the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe for October and November 2027, built around a 30th anniversary edition of the 1997 album that turned a struggling Scottish group into one of Britain’s biggest-selling acts.
Fellow Scots Del Amitri will open the UK and Irish shows. The run starts at Aberdeen’s P&J Arena on October 15, 2027, plays two nights at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow, stops at The O2 in London on October 27 and ends at Madrid’s Palacio Vistalegre on November 11.
A new song and an old favorite
The anniversary edition, offered on the band’s site as a double vinyl, a single LP and an expanded two-CD set, is due on February 5, 2027, almost exactly 30 years after the original came out. It also carries a new single, “Another Way to Cry,” with a video starring Scottish actor Robert Carlyle and filmed in the Highlands.
Spiteri has described the original record as a low-budget, home-made affair: “We were in Glasgow, we made the album in my house and I did all the vocals in the coat cupboard.”
Why White on Blonde still matters
For readers outside the UK who mainly know the band’s name from a confusing first glance at a playlist, some context. Texas formed in Glasgow in 1986, and their 1989 debut, Southside, got off to a strong start with the single “I Don’t Want a Lover.” Then came two albums that sold far less, and by the mid-1990s the band looked finished.
The turnaround started with a TV push in 1997. “Say What You Want” reached No. 3 on the UK singles chart in January, and White on Blonde followed in February. The record:
- entered the UK albums chart at No. 1, then went back to the top six months later
- stayed in the UK top 75 for 91 weeks
- produced five singles, all UK top 10 hits, including “Halo” and “Black Eyed Boy”
- was certified six times platinum in the UK, for more than 1.8 million copies
It also led to one of the odder pairings of the decade: a new version of “Say What You Want” with the Wu-Tang Clan, performed with RZA and Method Man at the 1998 Brit Awards. The two acts teamed up again on the 2020 single “Hi,” 22 years later.
On Badiyaa’s math, those 91 weeks in the top 75 add up to about a year and three quarters on the chart. The follow-up, The Hush, also went to No. 1 in 1999, and a Greatest Hits album in 2000 matched White on Blonde’s six-times-platinum figure.
The band in 2026
Texas went on hiatus in 2005, while Spiteri released two solo albums, and came back in 2013. Their 2021 album Hi debuted at No. 3 in the UK, their best placing there since The Hush, and they played the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in 2023. As of 2017, the band’s worldwide record sales stood at 40 million. The current lineup is Spiteri, Johnny McElhone, Eddie Campbell, Tony McGovern and Cat Myers.
Big anniversary runs are crowding the 2027 calendar across Britain and Ireland. Garth Brooks has already sold more than 300,000 Irish tickets, as we reported in our story on Garth Brooks’s 2027 Irish tour and his Croke Park history, and England’s biggest rock weekend has its headliner, covered in our report on Blink-182 topping Download Festival 2027.
Texas play Dublin’s 3Arena on October 19, 2027, and the Accor Arena in Paris on November 6.
Further reading
Image: XIIIfromTOKYO, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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