Jack Savoretti

From poems to a guitar

Jack Savoretti was born Giovanni Edgar Charles Galletto-Savoretti in Westminster, London, on 10 October 1983, to an Italian father and a mother of Polish-Jewish and German descent. The family moved from London to Lugano in Switzerland, where he attended the American School. As a teenager he wrote poetry rather than songs; it was his mother who suggested he set the words to music, and he picked up a guitar at 16. He has said he learned quickly that people listen more closely when you sing to them than when you read them a poem.

His debut, Between the Minds, arrived in 2007 on the small De-Angelis label and reached number five on the UK independent chart. Harder Than Easy followed in 2009 and Before the Storm in 2012. Those early years were spent among the musicians he met around Portobello Road in west London, and it is that same circle of players, twenty years on, that he took into the studio for his most recent album.

The slow climb to number one

A move to BMG Chrysalis in 2014 changed his commercial fortunes. Written in Scars, released in 2015, was his first record to reach the UK Top 10, peaking at number seven, and Sleep No More followed in 2016. A duet with Kylie Minogue, Music's Too Sad Without You, appeared in 2018. Then Singing to Strangers, released in 2019, went to number one, and Europiana repeated the feat in 2021.

Between those peaks he made an unexpected detour. Miss Italia, released in 2024, was sung in Italian and featured Zucchero on a reworking of Senza una Donna and Natalie Imbruglia on Ultime Parole. It stalled at number 43 in the UK, an outlier in a career that The Upcoming, reviewing him in April 2026, characterised as an under-the-radar success built on quietly and assuredly picking up Top 10 albums.

Away from the stage he is married to the actress Jemma Powell, with whom he has three children, and the family is based in Great Tew in Oxfordshire.

A record made in eight days

We Will Always Be The Way We Were was announced on 8 January 2026 alongside its title track, and released on 10 April. It is his ninth studio album and his first since parting with EMI. It came out on his own Lanza Music with distribution from The Orchard, and was produced by Tommaso Colliva, whose credits include Muse's Drones. Savoretti described it to Music Week as a record that really sounds like a band, and told Official Charts it was a jeans-and-t-shirt album: he wanted to sit down, write and see what came out, the way he did as a boy. The songs were written and captured live over eight days with his long-time touring band.

The 13 tracks include Do It For Love, co-written with Miles Kane, Tempting Fate with KT Tunstall, and Only Gonna Cry For You with Steph Fraser. Savoretti has framed the album as being about self-acceptance, telling Official Charts that he is still the boy he used to be and that he hoped it would be a support to listeners going through the same reckoning. Onstage he has been open about where some of it comes from, including the death of his father in 2021.

He was candid with Music Week about the reason for going independent with a distribution partner: the band did not lack heart and soul, he said, but what they sometimes lacked was infrastructure. The market seemed to agree. The album led the midweek race for number one in the week of 15 April, then entered the Official Albums Chart at number two on 17 April behind Olivia Dean's The Art of Loving. It was his fifth Top 10 album and it topped the Official Record Store Chart, the ranking of sales through independent shops.

Two nights at the Royal Albert Hall

The year's live campaign opened quietly. On 26 February 2026 he shared a Brits Week bill with Katherine Jenkins at the Emerald Theatre under Waterloo Bridge, a War Child benefit where he played Candlelight, What More Can I Do?, Soldier's Eyes and Knock Knock with piano and guitar before the pair closed with What the World Needs Now Is Love.

The main event was the Royal Albert Hall on 23 April, a date that sold out in under an hour when it went on sale in January. The Upcoming's Antonia Georgiou saw him open with Do It For Love to riotous applause and found him a commanding, though not overpowering, presence, offering what she called a soothing concert experience that does not require much rumination. The setlist logged that night ran to 17 songs and mixed the new record's Can Hurt Sometimes, Tick Tock, The Making Of You and Time Will Tell with older material including Soldier's Eyes, Catapult, Candlelight, Home, Dr Frankenstein and When We Were Lovers.

He returned to the same hall on 27 May. Northern Exposure's Kevin O'Sullivan gave that night five stars and described a show of roughly two and a half hours including a 30-minute interval, with Audrey McGraw and Steph Fraser joining him as guest vocalists, a War Child segment played out under a sea of raised phone lights, and a candlelit encore. Between songs Savoretti talked about grief and family, his view that AI-generated music is unauthentic, and his son learning where the backstage vending machines were. The line the reviewer took home was that it is never too late to start again and find the best version of yourself. The review reported standing ovations and a room singing along throughout.

The autumn run and the castles beyond it

The touring schedule for the rest of 2026 is the most extensive he has undertaken. It begins with an outdoor date at City Park in Stirling on 12 September, then moves to the Lycabettus Theatre in Athens on 25 September and on through mainland Europe: Kablys Club in Vilnius on 5 October, Paradiso in Amsterdam on 10 October, TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht the following night and Fabrique in Milan on 15 October. The UK leg listed so far takes in Sage One at the Glasshouse in Gateshead on 25 October, the O2 Apollo in Manchester on 28 October, Oxford's New Theatre on 10 November and Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall on 11 November.

Beyond that, outdoor shows are already booked for summer 2027 at Lincoln Castle on 13 June, Cardiff Castle on 24 June and Dreamland in Margate on 11 July. Savoretti's own view of the cycle, as he put it to Music Week in April, is that every album is like a restaurant: if it works, he gets to open another one. On the evidence of a number two album and two sold-out Royal Albert Hall nights, this one is working.