Fresh from their highly acclaimed, sold-out Woman To Woman tour with fellow artistes Julia Fordham and Rumer, trailblazing British singer-songwriters Beverley Craven & Judie Tzuke will again team up to play a new 14-date UK tour this autumn, with Beverley confirming that these are to be her final farewell live shows. Buy tickets here.

Performing with the Gabriella Swallow String Quartet, this intimate new Strings Attached acoustic show (proudly presented by RLN Music) will feature songs and stories spanning their entire groundbreaking careers.

Judie Tzuke first came to prominence in 1979, signing to Elton John’s Rocket Record Company and scored a worldwide Top 20 smash hit with her timeless classic “Stay With Me Till Dawn” and her critically acclaimed album ‘Welcome To The Cruise’.

She has released a new album, ‘Jude The Unsinkable,’ this month (October 2023 – with copies on-sale at these autumn shows). The forthcoming album’s lead track ‘Keeper Of The Sun’ boasts a string arrangement written by Beverley and will be performed live during these Strings Attached shows.

We caught up with Judie to discuss the tour with Beverley Craven, previous Woman to Woman tours, her friends in Nashville, her singer/songwriter daughter, the new album and much more!

Judie was an absolute joy to talk with and really down to earth. Half an hour’s conversation flew by and it was a shame to end it! An interesting woman with such an amazing career, it’s impossible to cover it all in one go but of course, the main subject was about the tour! Judie is definitely someone that I would take the time to chat with again.

It’s so so easy to see why Judie and Beverley are friends and why these tours together have worked so well. The two of them make each show feel like you were personally invited as they are just so humble and fun on stage!

I can’t wait for the Strings Attached Tour! (Tickets here) This will be the last opportunity to see Judie and Beverley together as Beverley has announced this will be her last tour. This really will be a special event, so if you are on the fence about going, then I highly recommend you go if you can!

I hope you enjoy our chat!

Hi Judie – How are you?

I am good thank you! I was just about to look up your website and see what it is all about!

Oh thank you! Yeah, well it used to be all about country music but there are so many sub genres now and singer/songwriters that all fit in with what we are about so we cover a lot now! Nashville is music city after all and varies in genre.

When I was there (in America) I realised that and I went to the UK Americana awards a few years ago and I thought “I want to be in this band haha” it is so varied and so accepting. I went to Nashville as well and I met a lot of people in Nashville and it feels like a lovely genre of people.

It’s a lovely community and very supportive! I love Nashville.

I loved it! I’ve got some very good friends that live there. I haven’t been as much as I should’ve considering I could go but it is always such a big thing flying that far. I’m not a great flyer but once I get there I feel quite at home!

How has your weekend been?

My weekend was lovely because the weather was lovely! I do love the sun! I just got back from Texas actually, talking about travelling. I went to Texas on a writing retreat which was fantastic and it’s so lovely when you’re not allowed to do the dishes or worry about all the things that are going on day to day. You are somewhere just to make music and I do love that! I think there were 25 of us there all writing with different people every day that we have never met before. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s very emotional because you have to be open to everyone and trust that everyone is lovely and will think you’re lovely ha. I took my daughter too and she absolutely loved it! We wrote some really nice songs I think.

Good! That sounds amazing!!!

It’s what I love doing most. My daughter seems to be following in the same way which is nice to see.

Sounds lovely and I hope we get to hear some of these songs in the future.

Well I wrote one of them actually (already released song) at one of those retreats which was the lead song for Woman to Woman which was ‘Safe’. I wrote that with Beth Nielsen Chapman at the end of one of those song retreats.

I like her too and that’s an amazing song!

She is amazing!

Are you all prepared for the tour? It’s come around so quickly!

I know! At the moment I am looking forward to it because Bev and I make a really good team! We are very opposite and the gigs are very intimate and we talk to each other on stage and we talk to the audience and they talk to us. I think that Beverley is so funny as well as being an amazing singer/songwriter, piano player, string arranger, all those things. She is very funny and I am a bit of an old hippie and I think we work quite well together really.

Well I came to the last Woman to Woman tour so I know exactly what you mean about Beverley being funny. I did laugh when she said “many people come up to me and say that Promise Me is their song, but it isn’t is it? It’s mine”.

Yeah haha. I love it when she says things like “Oh I know you like to all sing along and that would be lovely but I’d really rather you didn’t”. I watch the faces when she is talking and saying these things and it’s a lovely thing because no-one is hurt by that, everyone just thinks she’s hilarious which is great and it makes me laugh every time she says them.

It is funny and I am not one who enjoys singing along anyway, I mime haha. I am also bad at remembering lyrics no matter how many times I have listened to a song!

Hahaha. I don’t know if you realise, you probably do because I don’t hide it but I take my lyric book on stage with me because when I was younger I often used to forget bits of the lyrics. When I do forget bits of the lyrics, I forget the whole English language. It’s not like I can recover at all. After many years of being more scared of doing that than actually singing, my daughter said “just get a book mum. Just put the book there and then you’ve got all the lyrics so at least you can recover” which is what I have on stage because it made my life so my easier, even though I can’t read that well stage now because my eyesight is going a bit. I wore glasses the other night at a gig – first time ever, just magnifying glasses for that reason. It’s just a prompt in case I forget things – I can at least sing the line after whereas when I was younger, I’d forget that line and then forget the rest of the song and get in a right panic. I still have some very amazing….I hate calling them fans because they are more friends really than anything, that come to a lot of my gigs. When I used to forget a line, they would come the next night with a big piece of paper with the next line on. Your brain gets into a habit, so it would get me out of that terror basically.

Well I loved it when you had your book on stage at The Woman to Woman tour – It made the show more real and relaxed. It did feel like a room full of friends.

It is supportive. Our audiences on that tour and the one before were incredible. Having the four of us on the last tour, we all wanted each other to do brilliantly. I think there is such a comradery on stage that it was quite an amazing experience.

I loved that tour and am coming to this one too and am looking forward to the Gabriella Swallows String Quartet too! I will be at the Bristol show!

Oh yeah, well it’s a very different kind of gig although I think it’s more intimate because we are closer to the audiences. We are playing in a church in Bristol I think? I wanted the whole tour to be in churches. We did a couple of these last year Bev and I, we were invited to do them and it’s such an extra magic of being in a beautiful place that’s full of history and angels. I just feel like in those places that we are with the atmosphere of some wonderful history – The buildings and the paintings and the windows. The whole atmosphere of the way people feel in the church if that makes sense?

Yes and the acoustics always seem to be beautiful!

Well the acoustics are sometimes quite echoey for us on stage but I think it will be lovely! I did two in Ireland a few weeks ago, just myself and my guitarist and my daughter came and opened up for me which was really nice. She sings with me as well.

That’s lovely. So your daughter has her own music out too?

Yes she does, she had her own stuff as Bailey Tzuke but she now has a project called T.I.G.Y. My little sister was killed in a car accident when she was very young. She used to keep a diary and she named her diary Tigy which stands for ‘thoughts I give you’. I gave one of the diaries to my daughter a few years ago because she wanted to keep it and she decided that would be a wonderful thing to keep her with us, to call her project Tigy!

That’s beautiful!

Her project is very much about her thoughts and feelings. It’s a really good project, it’s quite sad and melancholy in some ways but I think that’s a good thing to be able to express. Lots of people have those feelings.

How do you personally prepare for a tour?

I have got a very basic in ear system that I am bringing to plug me into the music stand with my lyrics so I can hear myself properly. So if it is all reverby in the church or in the gigs, I can still hear myself . I don’t do much preparation other than just lay awake at night and be terrified. I am not as terrified with this (tour) I don’t know why but I feel this is going to be easy…I hope….an easy tour. Bev and I get on really well! I’ve got my guitarist – who is fantastic with me and the girls on strings are amazing. It’s so nice to do something that’s a slightly different way of doing things. The strings move me probably as much as it moves the audience hopefully!

It’s nice that you are doing this together and that you did before.

It’s also nice that with the two of us, we share the time as well because sometimes….I just did these two gigs in Ireland and they were an hour and a half each and that’s quite a long time for me to be singing all of it. I quite like that between us, we share that load because a voice is like an instrument but it’s not one that is as reliable as a proper instrument because I might get a cold, I might get covid, anything could happen! My voice might get tired out. Sometimes when they put all that smoke in theatres, that completely destroys my voice for the next few days. There are all sorts of things that are scary about singing for a long time consistently. It’s nice that we can share that responsibility and enjoy it!

I was just reading that you don’t get much time to eat and a lot of time it’s service station sandwiches.

Well yes! Actually, if I’m honest, the one thing about the last tour was eating was very difficult. In January I got diagnosed with type 2 diabetes which shocked the hell out of me, so I’ve lost a lot of weight since then. I don’t know whether I am in remission or what I am in now. I don’t think I ate as well as I could have anyway but being on tour it’s very difficult so, we have actually made a point of saying this tour we are going to eat properly. I don’t want to be diabetic if I can eat healthy enough to control it! It’s given me a good sharp lesson and hopefully I am in remission. I don’t really know that much about type 2 diabetes and whether or not you can completely reverse it!

I don’t know either but I hope you can!

It’s a difficult thing to understand.

I can imagine!

Still on the topic of health, how do you look after your voice?

I had a bit of problem for the last few years which I haven’t really understood and I did go to have vocal coaching to try and help it but I am not really sure how much difference it made and it does seem to be a bit better now. Maybe it was just being unhealthy. I am not very good at practicing. I try and sing every day just a bit so I can keep my voice and the muscles in my throat working. I talk quite a lot haha, so that probably helps as well. I don’t really have a proper history of preparing properly. I probably should have but I was lucky before that I never had to. Now I think I probably should do some more so I am trying to do more!

I wish I could help with recommendations, Honey and Lemon, there you go haha!

I did do some vocal coaching with this lady and she’s amazing but some of the things she made me do, I thought “does she just want to see me make funny faces?” Haha. That isn’t what she was doing at all haha. You just have to use different parts of your throat and there are easy ways to come up with different words and sounds that work for that but they also sound very silly, I felt very silly doing them haha!

You are definitely not alone there haha!

During the tour, you would have released your 23rd Studio album – Jude – The Unsinkable…

Is that how many? I never know how many I have done! Yes I’ve got a new album coming out and I feel that it’s a very important album for me! It started off in lockdown and I was living on my own at that point and I think allowed my feelings to absolutely sort of overwhelm me and a lot of it is in the songs. For me, it’s an important album of expression and I have my family and my best friends all involved in it. It feels like a very special album for me. I hope that everyone else loves it too ha! Most importantly for me, I have been able to make positives out of negatives.

Will you be performing some of those songs on the tour?

I am performing one of them!

Keeper of the sun?

Yes it is that one because Beverley has done an amazing string arrangement on it. The rest of the album is quite edgy at times, it’s quite rocky like some of my early stuff. To work with the strings, Keeper of the Sun felt like the natural one to do from the new album. I will have my album with me so if anyone wants to buy it, they will be able to at all gigs.

Good! I am looking forward to hearing it!

I play it for everybody because that’s the only way really now that somebody like me gets to be able to reach people, through word of mouth.

I am also a big Lucie Silvas fan and I wanted to know what it was like working with her?

Oh, she is actually one of my friends in Nashville. Her and Beth (Nielsen Chapman) and quite a few other people but it was Lucie that I first went to stay with when she was first out there. She is like family really.

Aww, so you will know Brothers Osborne then as well?

I do, I do and TJ is the best hugger in the world. They are lovely people and they have had their twins now (Lucie and John had twins) I haven’t yet met them, I have only seen photos but when I went to Texas last week, I was toying with the idea of flying out to Nashville but I will go next year. After this tour with Bev, I’ve pretty much got a year to do other things so I very much plan to stay in Nashville and see Lucie and her babies. We have written an awful lot together!

Yes! I have down Breathe In!

Yes! I did most of that album with Lucie.

Please do share on socials when you are back out there

Oh I will do

Well I am very much looking forward to Bristol! Thank you so so much for chatting today!

Thank you Hannah, I hope you come and say “Hello” in Bristol!