Bell Biv Devoe

A side project that outgrew its excuse

Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins and Ronnie DeVoe were three-fifths of New Edition long before they were a trio. That group came out of Boston as children, and one of the locations used for the "Candy Girl" video was the Hatch Shell on the Charles — a detail DeVoe has since returned to when talking about playing the same patch of grass four decades later.

Bell Biv DeVoe was formed in 1989, during a New Edition hiatus, and signed to MCA Records. The push came from outside: producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis suggested the three of them work as a unit. The split of labour was obvious from the start and has never really changed — Bell sings, Bivins and DeVoe rap — and it gave the trio something the parent group did not have, which was a way to sit inside hip-hop production without pretending to be a rap act.

The record that did the damage

Poison arrived in 1990 and reached number five on the Billboard 200 and number one on the R&B albums chart, eventually certified four times platinum. Two singles, the title track and "Do Me!", both peaked at number three on the Hot 100. The commercial scale matters less than the fact that the album became a template: hard drum programming under sung hooks, with rapped verses doing the connective work.

Awards followed the sales. The group took a Soul Train Music Award in 1991 and the American Music Award for favourite soul/R&B band, duo or group in 1992. A guest appearance on "The Best Things in Life Are Free", the Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson single, reached number ten in the United States and number two in the United Kingdom. Bivins, meanwhile, ran his own imprint, Biv 10.

Nothing since has come close to that peak, and the discography is honest about it. WBBD-Bootcity!: The Remix Album (1991) went gold. Hootie Mack (1993) went gold and stopped at number nineteen. BBD (2001) managed only number sixty-two on the R&B chart. The long gap after that was broken by Three Stripes in 2017, which reached number eighteen on the Billboard 200 and number ten R&B — a respectable return rather than a revival.

Boston, the anthem and a documentary

The work of the last few years has been less about records than about occasions, most of them at home. In 2023 the trio sang the national anthem with the Boston Pops at the NHL Winter Classic; Bivins later described the setting as what made it land. "Act Like You Know", a single featuring Rev Run, appeared in late 2023 and was promoted through the following spring. In May 2024 Paramount+ released an episode of Behind the Music on the group.

The clearest marker came on 4 July 2025, when Bell Biv DeVoe performed at the Boston Pops Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular at the Hatch Shell with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, a booking announced that May. Speaking the day before the show, Bivins pointed out that he and the others had spent recent years watching the event from the grass off Storrow Drive as spectators. Bell framed it plainly: the group represents Boston wherever it plays, and performing in front of family and the city they grew up in adds something a normal date does not.

There has been no new album since 2017, and no announcement of one.

The 2026 diary

What exists instead is a scattered, well-chosen touring schedule, almost all of it shared. The R&B Forever Tour, announced in August 2024, put TGT — Tyrese, Ginuwine and Tank — at the top of the bill with Bell Biv DeVoe co-headlining and Silk also on the package. The Miami date at the Kaseya Center was originally set for 18 October 2024 and postponed; it now sits on sale for Wednesday 7 October 2026, an eight o'clock start at the same arena.

A month later the trio plays the Events Center at the Muckleshoot Casino Resort in Auburn, Washington, on 8 November 2026 — a room they also played in December 2024, which suggests it works for them.

The most significant booking of the year was announced on 9 July 2026, when Frontier Touring, MG Live and Arena Touring confirmed a Boyz II Men tour of Australia and New Zealand with Salt-N-Pepa and Bell Biv DeVoe as special guests. It runs across six shows: RAC Arena in Perth on 26 November, Mount Duneed Estate at Geelong on 28 November, Spark Arena in Auckland on 1 December, the TikTok Entertainment Centre in Sydney on 4 December, Bimbadgen in the Hunter Valley on 5 December and Sirromet Wines at Mount Cotton in Queensland on 6 December. Three of those are a day on the green winery dates. Tickets went on general sale on 17 July 2026 after presales on the 13th and 15th. The announcement noted it as the group's first time in Australia — thirty-six years after Poison.

Beyond that, 16 January 2027 has them at The Venue at Thunder Valley Casino Resort in Lincoln, California, billed with New Edition, which is where this all started.

Three men, three jobs

The live proposition has been stable for years and is built around the division of labour. Documented setlists from 2024 are short and front-loaded with recognition: at Wolf Trap in Virginia on 18 August 2024 the running order was "Act Like You Know", "B.B.D. (I Thought It Was Me)?", "Run", "Do Me!", "Mr. Telephone Man", "Cool It Now" and "Poison". The New Edition material is not a bonus, it is structural — roughly a third of that set.

"Poison" closes, and it is by a wide margin the most frequently logged song in the group's live history. On the shortest slots — the Macy's Fourth of July broadcast in New York in 2024, for instance — it is the only song they get to play.

Reviews of the trio's own headline shows have been consistent about where the strength lies. A notice from the Poison 30th Anniversary run, covering the MGM National Harbor theatre outside Washington in January 2020, credited pristine choreography and crisp vocals, singled out Bell's reading of "When Will I See You Smile Again?" as the high point, and judged that the raps of DeVoe and Bivins still sound energetic decades on. The same review marked the group a B-plus while complaining about lesser-known uptempo songs that lost the room — a criticism the current, much tighter shared-bill sets appear to have absorbed.