Lauryn Hill has announced she will do a one-off performance in London on September 20th at the O2 Brixton Academy.
This will be the first time in five years the singer songwriter has done a show in the UK and tickets will go on sale at 9am on Friday, May 2nd. They will be priced from £42.50 to £85.00, plus booking fee.
So why is this SO exciting? Forget The Fugees, forget the controversy that has followed the star in recent years. Lauryn Hill is and always will be a total genius thanks to the incredible work that was The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Here was an album that took on love, motherhood, achievement, relationships being good, relationships being awful and somehow said everything every woman was thinking then and is still thinking now.
If you listen to it today, it's still as relevant as it was when released in 1998. I vividly remember the first time I heard it. My friend Louise had a cool aunt who lived in New York and she sent across a copy to our small town in Scotland before it came out in the UK. We didn't have the internet yet. This. Was. HUGE.
It was such a good album, Louise summoned me to her house to listen to the whole thing start to finish. It was moving. It was cool. It was the best thing since Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill. After one listening, we felt like we understood everything a little better and like there was a woman out there who understood us.
And do you know what? When I listen to it now, 16 years on, I still feel exactly the same. Honest, timeless and impossible to replicate, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was everything us girls in the Nineties needed and nothing has come close to it since.