26 March 2025

In defence of cabaret-style seated gigs

There’s something about crowding round tables at a concert that conjures conversational magic.

One side effect of flying solo for a month is that – recognising that just because I could quite happily spend every evening at home watching television, that doesn’t mean that I should – I’ve taken to saying yes to any and all invitations. That’s how I found myself this week watching the singer-songwriter Ashley Campbell perform at London’s Brasserie Zedel with my friend Emma, J— and C—, a couple from South Florida, and Stanley Tucci.

Ashley is the daughter of the country-music legend Glen Campbell – you might have heard one or two of his hits: “Rhinestone Cowboy”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Gentle on My Mind”… He died with Alzheimer’s in 2017. “My dad was Glen Campbell,” Ashley told her audience, then corrected herself: is. Unlike her brothers, Ashley, an accomplished guitar and banjo player, didn’t want to be a musician at first – she trained as an actress. When she graduated, she asked Glen if she could join him on tour in Australia and New Zealand for a laugh. He told her: fine, but only if you play banjo. And so Ashley went on the road with her father, and continued to play with him until his retirement. Glen’s final tour was supposed to last two weeks – the family weren’t sure what the reaction to his Alzheimer’s diagnosis would be – but ended up lasting more than a year, so great was the demand. I was surely not the only audience member snivelling into my sleeve as Ashley played the song she wrote for her father, “Remembering”: “Bone for bone we are the same/Bones get tired and they can’t carry all the weight/We can talk until you can’t even remember my name/Daddy don’t you worry, I’ll do the remembering.”

You might have noticed that I used my friend Emma John’s actual name, rather than anonymising her as “E—”. That is because I want you all to go buy a copy of her gorgeous book Wayfaring Stranger. Emma was a classically trained fiddler (don’t!) who travelled to Appalachia to immerse herself in the culture of the American South and learn to play bluegrass. Emma and Ashley met some years earlier, in 2013, when Emma drove a Dodge Caravan full of friends, strangers and instruments – including Ashley, two other musicians, a music writer and a banjo-maker – the 1,700 miles from the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado. Emma is remarkable for both her adventurousness and her endless openness to learning new things: right now, it’s ballroom dancing.

We bonded with our Floridian friends over our celebrity sighting (“I’m glad he didn’t end up being the pope,” J— whispered – a reference, one assumes, to Tucci’s role in Conclave) and our shared love of the Station Inn, a bluegrass venue in Nashville. There, last spring, M— and I met a girl from Manchester, who, on learning what M— does for work, became set upon the idea that he simply must join in the jam. No matter that he didn’t have a guitar with him, she begged and borrowed (and probably would have stolen had it been necessary) until she secured one, and he hovered on the edge of the group of 15 or so musicians, playing along by ear, conspicuous in his Arsenal sweatshirt.

J— is from Massachusetts, C— from England, and they told us how they’d married on board the Queen Mary, right above the wreck of the Titanic (this might have been a tall tale, but I lapped it up nonetheless). They’d spent years travelling around the US in an RV, and gave me the link to their blog to assist in planning our next US road trip, scheduled for 2026. I insisted they visit Floyd, Virginia, the runaway highlight of our last.

I would once have rolled my eyes at seated gigs, but there is something about crowding around tables with strangers that encourages conversation you wouldn’t otherwise get in London. Where else could two writers from England and a couple from Florida meet and within five minutes be sharing memories of a music venue on the other side of the world?

As for Stanley Tucci, I briefly debated with myself whether he would be flattered or offended to learn that my in-laws have a fat ginger cat named “The Tucc”. But he didn’t stick around long enough for me to find out.