Table Manners with Jessie & Lennie Ware, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, April 28
OLGA in the audience has a question for Sophie Ellis-Bextor. “Sophie,” she asks, “how often do you have sex with your husband?”
That Ellis-Bextor, after catching her breath, even considers how to answer that probably says something about the casual intimacy engendered by Table Manners, the podcast started by singer Jessie Ware and her mum Lennie.
Over the last five years the Table Manners podcast has been a vehicle for the Wares to talk to the great and the good, from Paul McCartney and Kylie to Claudia Roden and Ed Miliband (who got quite squiffy, Ware admits to the Queen’s Hall audience). Family and food are central to the Table Manners vibe. Cooking for people, Ellis-Bextor, this evening’s special guest, suggested, was “the best way to extend love”.
Read More: Jessie Ware on Table Manners, pregnancy and disco
Read More: Sophie Ellis-Bextor: The Herald Magazine interview
Last night’s live incarnation of the podcast shows why it has been such a success as a download. It offers a deceptively casual conversation about food and life which is often intimate because the guests don’t fear being stitched up and the booze is flowing. It also helps that both Ware senior and Ware junior are both quick-witted and very nosey.
The live version amps everything up a little with Jessie involving the audience – a raucous mixture of mums and daughters (plus the odd dad) and gay couples – as much as possible. And it does rather suggest she could have a career in broadcasting if she ever wants to give up the day job. (For fans of Ware the singer she is returning to Scotland in June with her disco hat on for her What’s Your Pleasure tour.)
Did it all work? Not quite. There was a Table Manners quiz at the end that Jessie wrapped up quickly because you could tell she didn’t think it was really hitting the mark. But, generally, this live show was just a rowdier version of the podcast, full of gleeful audience participation.
What did we learn? That Lennie spent the previous evening in Glasgow’s Crabshakk and loved it, while Jessie went to the Outsider in Edinburgh. That Ellis-Bextor, the evening’s guest, came late to her love of disco, wants fish and chips as her last meal (no salt, Ellis-Bextor revealed, to the horror of the audience, but extra gherkins) and a little more about how she juggles five kids and lockdown kitchen disco broadcasts.
And as for Olga’s question? The answer when it came was simple. “Enough.”
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