En Vogue, TLC and Salt-N-Pepa Are Playing One Set Between Them

En Vogue — Terry Ellis, Rhona Bennett and Cindy Herron — photographed in 2017.

There is no support act on the It’s Iconic tour. There is also no headline slot. TLC, Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue simply walk on and off across one continuous set for the whole evening.

Cheryl “Salt” James described the format in the announcement video. “We’re doing the whole mixtape vibe, coming in and out.”

Nobody Opens, Nobody Closes

Rolling Stone spells out what that means in practice: a running order that might go from “Shoop” to “Waterfalls” to “My Lovin’ (You’re Never Gonna Get It)” at speed, with members of three groups moving on and off stage.

It is the same structure New Edition, Toni Braxton and Boyz II Men used on their arena run earlier this year — no intermission, no billing hierarchy, the sets interleaved. Two major touring packages adopting it in one year suggests promoters have found something that works.

What it solves is the problem of the legacy package tour, where the audience arrives late for the first act and the second act plays to a room already checking the time. Removing the running order removes the incentive to arrive late.

Salt’s own framing of it is less technical. “I feel like we’re going to feel the queens is in the building. We’ve earned this seat.”

Thirty-Two Dates, Amphitheatres Mostly

Live Nation describes it as a landmark co-headlining run and the first time the three groups have toured together at all.

It opened at the FirstBank Amphitheater in Franklin, Tennessee on 15 August and closes in Concord, California on 11 October, taking in Toronto, Chicago, Jones Beach, Virginia Beach, Tampa and the Minnesota State Fairgrounds along the way.

The advertised hits are “No Scrubs”, “Waterfalls”, “Push It”, “Shoop”, “Free Your Mind” and “Don’t Let Go (Love)”. All three groups appeared on one stage for the first time ever at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on 26 March, the week the tour went on sale.

The claim of a first is precise rather than promotional. En Vogue and Salt-N-Pepa have shared a bill before — they were both on the Mixtape Tour alongside New Kids on the Block in 2022 — so what is new here is TLC completing the set, and the three of them carrying a run on their own rather than as part of a larger nineties package.

It is also a bill made entirely of groups, which is rarer than it sounds. Almost every heritage tour of this scale is built around solo headliners; putting three multi-vocalist acts on one stage means an evening of arrangements rather than an evening of frontpeople, and the mixtape format only works because every one of these records was written for more than one voice.

Who Is Actually on Stage

The line-ups are the part worth reading carefully, because all three have gaps.

En Vogue field three of their four classic-era members — Terry Ellis, Cindy Herron and Maxine Jones. They have not worked with Dawn Robinson since 2011.

TLC tour as a duo. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes died in a car crash in 2002 and has never been replaced; T-Boz and Chilli play videos of her during her moments, including the “Waterfalls” rap.

Salt-N-Pepa arrive reconciled. After a period of estrangement that followed a legal dispute, they have made peace with Spinderella, who is on the tour.

Terry Ellis put the arrangement generously: “These ladies represent resilience and empowerment. To be a part of that is everything. They’re legends.”

Three incomplete line-ups on one bill could read as diminished. In practice it is the opposite: a death, a fallout since resolved, and a member who stopped working with the group fifteen years ago are the ordinary attrition of any act that has lasted this long, and all three have kept performing through it rather than folding or replacing people. The TLC video screen is the clearest statement of that — an absence acknowledged on stage every night instead of quietly filled.

Funky Divas, and Why the Category Fits

En Vogue’s position here is worth stating plainly. They arrived in the early nineties, at the point when new jack swing had rebuilt R&B around drum programming, and their contribution was four-part harmony placed on top of it.

Their defining album is called Funky Divas, and the title is not decoration. ABC Audio catalogued its thirtieth-anniversary reissue: an expanded 21-track edition with eight remixes making their digital debut, and the videos for “Free Your Mind”, “My Lovin'” and “Giving Him Something He Can Feel” upgraded to 4K.

Those three singles cover most of the group’s range on their own — a rock-guitar protest song, a swing-beat dancefloor record and a soul ballad, all from the same album by the same four voices.

Reissuing it as twenty-one tracks with eight previously undigitised remixes is also a reminder of how these records were actually consumed at the time. A single arrived as a physical object carrying four or five versions, and the remix a listener knew was often not the one on the album. Restoring those to a streaming catalogue puts back a layer of the era that had quietly gone missing.

The funk underneath is structural rather than stylistic. Their records lean on hard, physical grooves borrowed from an older tradition, with the vocal arrangement doing the melodic work above it. That is a direct inheritance, and it is why the group has never sounded dated in the way purely programmed records of the era can.

Eight-Year-Olds Singing the Words

Salt-N-Pepa’s biggest records predate the others by several years, but Rolling Stone notes that the set will be drawn overwhelmingly from the nineties rather than the eighties.

Chilli explained the preference in terms of writing. “The music from the Nineties, it’s just… the lyrical content is great. You can put on a song no matter how you’re feeling. Once you hit the 2000s, the lyrical content just changes. The beats are crazy, but it’s just different.”

Then she supplied the commercial argument without meaning to: “It’s crazy to see eight-year-olds sitting in the audience singing all of the songs.”

That is the actual engine of every tour like this. An audience that inherited the records rather than bought them is a second generation of ticket buyers, and it is the difference between a nostalgia circuit and a working one — the same effect keeping Boyz II Men in arenas and a Las Vegas residency three decades on.

Rehearsals All of July

The preparation was not casual. “Rehearsals are going to be all of July,” Chilli said. “We’re going to eat clean. We’re going to exercise and work out. We’re going to release eight hours a day, five days a week.”

A month of full-time rehearsal for a summer amphitheatre run is more than most current acts commit, and the format demands it. A show with no fixed running order and three groups rotating through it has far more cues to hit than three separate sets would.

Salt’s prediction for the result was brief. “I feel like this is going to be the most fun touring experience I’ve ever had.”

Whether or not that holds, the structural point stands: three groups who spent the nineties competing for the same audience have concluded that the only sensible way to play to it now is together, in one continuous hour and a half, with nobody made to go on first.

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Will Lisil

Founder of MW3.biz, building technology that empowers creators and democratising access to digital tools.

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