Jo Harrop - Upstairs at Ronnie’s – March 3

Jo Harrop (vocals); Jamie McCredie (guitar); Sam Watts (piano)

There are rooms that suit an artist, and then there are rooms that feel as though they were built for them. Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s is one such space — and for Jo Harrop, it proved nothing short of perfect.

There is an immediacy to the room: low-lit, tightly framed, with the audience almost folded into the performance itself. It is a listening room in the truest sense, not a space for grandstanding but one for nuance, breath, and emotional detail. That is precisely why it worked so profoundly well for Harrop.

From the opening moments, accompanied by ger who forces a room into submission. Quite the opposite — she draws you in. Jamie McCredie on guitar and Sam Watts at the piano, the tone was set. This would be a performance of restraint, of space, and of deep musical trust. Harrop has never been a sinHer voice, soft-grained and emotionally transparent, sits just above a whisper, yet carries a quiet authority that demands attention without ever asking for it.

In a larger venue, that subtlety can sometimes be lost. Here, it was magnified. Throughout the set, the room was held in a kind of collective stillness. Apart from the occasional chink of glasses and the muted clatter of cutlery, there was a near-total silence — the kind that only happens when an audience is completely absorbed. You could feel it: people leaning forward, breathing with the phrasing, unwilling to break the spell. Harrop, to her credit, never did.

That atmosphere was established almost immediately, following a gently spoken introduction and a respectful hush that fell across the room as the trio took to the stage. Opening with I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You), Harrop set out her stall early — phrasing elongated, time stretched, melody reshaped with a kind of emotional elasticity that has become her hallmark. It was less a statement of intent than an invitation inward, one that the audience accepted without hesitation.

What followed was a set that moved seamlessly between interpretation and original material, each song delivered with that unmistakable narrative instinct that underpins Harrop. There is never any sense of performance for performance’s sake; instead, each lyric is lived, each phrase considered, each silence allowed to settle fully before the next thought emerges.

I Think You’d Better Go unfolded as one of the evening’s most intimate moments, stripped back to just McCredie on guitar. The artistic chemistry between the two was achingly beautiful — a masterclass in restraint, trust and shared storytelling. Harrop leaned into the lyric, allowing its emotional ambiguity to linger in the air, while McCredie’s accompaniment felt less like support and more like a quiet conversation.

And then, almost cinematically, Harrop drew the audience into what felt like a second act. “They didn’t go home,” she quipped, before moving seamlessly into Umbrellas in the Rain. Here, the narrative continued, but the musical palette widened. McCredie was given space to stretch out, delivering a beautifully shaped solo that retained the intimacy of the room while hinting at something more expansive. Watts followed with a piano solo of equal sensitivity and invention, his touch both lyrical and exploratory. This is the kind of jazz people picture when they think of a club like Ronnie’s — unhurried, conversational, and rooted in feel rather than flash — and Harrop, at the centre of it all, occupied the space entirely, owning it with quiet authority.

You’ll Never Be Lonely, her affectionate ode to Soho, brought a subtle shift in tone. There was warmth here, a sense of place and belonging, of streets and stories woven into the fabric of the song. A lyric referencing “the cast of characters out on parade” felt particularly apt; glancing across the room, there sat John the Hat — resplendent in his burgundy velvet jacket, neck scarf, and wide-brim fedora with a subtle western influence — a legendary Soho character and a familiar presence from the club’s earlier incarnation. Figures like him are part of what make Soho internationally famous: the living, breathing texture of the place itself. Now, seated at the bar in these newly refined surroundings, he felt like a bridge between the old and the new, the spirit of Soho still very much intact.

A particularly striking moment came with Guilty, the Randy Newman song that Harrop and McCredie have made very much their own on Weathering the Storm. Harrop has a rare gift for inhabiting other writers’ material and reshaping it in her own image, and here that instinct was fully realised. This live rendition gave us the very best of McCredie on slide guitar, his playing raw, spacious and deeply expressive, while Harrop stretched the lyric with a phrasing reminiscent of Shirley Horn — unhurried, behind the beat, and emotionally devastating. It was a performance that felt lived-in rather than performed, the kind that lingers long after the final note.

More new material came in the shape of the Northern Soul classic Love Now Pay Later, underlining the fact that Harrop is not tied to her musical roots, nor constrained by the Great American Songbook. This is an artist who moves easily across genres, absorbing and reshaping material with complete conviction. With a new album produced by Chris Seefried on the horizon, there is a strong sense that Harrop is poised to reach an even wider audience, without sacrificing any of the intimacy that defines her work.

Harrop introduced the next song as never having been performed in the UK before, only getting an airing when she showcased the new album in New York. I Wanna Love You (Like I’ve Never Been Hurt Before), written by her producer Chris Seefried, hinted at a slightly broader sonic palette, though still anchored in the emotional honesty that defines Harrop. Delivered with characteristic restraint, the performance carried a quiet vulnerability, its theme of guarded optimism unfolding with a sincerity that felt both personal and universal.

A nod to the great American songbook came with This Girl’s in Love with You, a Bacharach classic, which Harrop approached not as a vehicle for vocal display but as an exercise in storytelling. The melody was allowed to breathe, the lyric to unfold naturally, and in doing so the song felt newly intimate, stripped of anything unnecessary.

Throughout, the trio dynamic remained central. McCredie’s guitar work was all texture and suggestion, lines that seemed to hover in the air rather than resolve conventionally, while Watts’ piano playing provided both structure and colour, his touch light yet harmonically rich. Together, they created a space in which Harrop could exist exactly as she needed to — unforced, unhurried, and completely exposed.

There were moments where the three seemed to breathe as one, tempos stretching and contracting almost imperceptibly, phrases lingering just beyond expectation. It is in these moments that Harrop is at her most compelling, when the boundaries between voice and accompaniment dissolve into something closer to conversation.

The Path of a Tear provided a quietly devastating centrepiece, its alternate French title, Le chemin d’une larme, a subtle nod to its co-writer Grégory Soussan. In Harrop’s hands, the song became something almost cinematic in its intimacy; the audience could easily have been transported from Soho to a small café in Montmartre, such was the delicacy of its delivery. The performance unfolded with a kind of suspended time, each phrase placed with care, until it dissolved into complete stillness at its close — a moment held just long enough to remind you how powerful silence can be.

Harrop once again demonstrated just how deftly she can take a well-known song and recast it entirely in her own image. If Ever I Would Leave You, the Robert Goulet classic from Camelot, became something altogether more intimate in her hands — stripped of grandeur and rebuilt with emotional precision. Vocally, it was exceptional, but more than that, it was the control of space and phrasing that truly captivated. As the song unfolded, a profound stillness settled over the room — not enforced, but earned — the kind of silence that so many artists strive for, yet so few truly command. It was a moment of complete connection, held delicately until the final note faded.

Sensing that she had the audience completely in the palm of her hand, Harrop leaned further into that stillness with a beautifully stripped-back version of Everything’s Changing. Written in darker times, when Covid gripped the nation and artists were left wondering if they would ever again perform to a live audience, the song carried an added weight here, its message resonating with quiet clarity. As with If Ever I Would Leave You, this moment also shone a light on Sam Watts, who co-wrote the piece with Harrop. His playing was both understated and deeply expressive, a reminder of just how integral he is to her sound. This really felt like an evening where Harrop had surrounded herself with those responsible for some of her most compelling work, and crucially, she gave them the space to step forward — both McCredie and Watts taking their moments with playing that was as sensitive as it was assured.

 

To close the show, Harrop turned to the audience with a knowing smile and a simple question: “Do you want the whiskey, or the truth?”

On this occasion, there was no hesitation — “whiskey” came back as the resounding answer. What followed felt like the only fitting conclusion to an evening steeped in mood and atmosphere. McCredie dropped into a slow, blues-soaked riff, the kind that immediately shifts the temperature of a room, while Harrop leaned into the lyric with a smoky ease that felt both playful and knowing. It was one of those moments where the line between performance and experience blurs — you could almost feel the audience reaching for a glass of bourbon, the music conjuring its own late-night world as the set drew to a close.

What made this performance so compelling was not what was added, but what was held back. In this simple three-piece setting, Harrop excels; in larger ensembles, she can sometimes find herself competing with the band, which can detract from the delivery of the lyric. Here, she had space — and she capitalised on it completely. Harrop understands space not just musically, but emotionally. She trusts the material, trusts her band, and crucially, trusts the audience to meet her halfway.

Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s rewarded that trust completely. It amplified it. In a world where so much live music is about scale and volume, this was a reminder of the power of quiet, of listening, of shared stillness.

This was not a performance built on virtuosity or vocal acrobatics. It did not need to be. Instead, it was built on connection — between artist and audience, between voice and accompaniment, and between song and silence.

For an artist like Jo Harrop, there could scarcely be a more fitting stage than this. On this night, she didn’t just perform to the room — she held it, completely. Glenn Wright