There are jazz clubs, and then there are rooms like Green Note — spaces where the distance between performer and audience all but disappears. Tucked into Camden’s side streets, just a couple of doors up from the legendary The Dublin Castle, there is something wonderfully authentic about Green Note. No glossy VIP experience. No digital ticket wallets flashing at the door. Just your name on a list, artist posters blu-tacked to the window with dates handwritten along the bottom, and the feeling that you have stumbled into something quietly special. In an age where digital content often seems to matter more than the moments themselves, Green Note feels rooted in another time entirely. Even the name carries a kind of romance to it.
Yet places like this are woven into the foundations of live music in the UK. The Dublin Castle helped launch generations of artists from Madness to Amy Winehouse, while downstairs at Green Note, the tradition feels quieter but no less important — a room where connection still matters more than scale.
Downstairs in the basement bar, with glasses clinking softly at the back and the low Camden murmur held outside the door, Jo Harrop and Jamie McCredie returned to a stage they hadn’t shared together for three and a half summers. A long enough absence for the room to feel less like a gig and more like a reunion.
The evening carried that feeling from the outset. Harrop and McCredie chatting easily with the audience in the moments before the first notes of My Foolish Heart settled the basement into silence. Introducing the song, Harrop reflected on how it had been the very first track recorded for their first album together, Weathering the Storm, and recalled hearing it played on the radio for the first time, crackling through a little Roberts radio in the kitchen. In a venue like Green Note, that kind of story feels less like anecdote and more like shared memory — the romance of small beginnings, fragile moments and songs quietly finding their way into the world. Not the polite silence of an audience waiting for entertainment, but the kind of collective lean-in that only happens in rooms this size.
Green Note has always specialised in that rare closeness. Artists capable of filling concert halls and theatres somehow end up revealing more of themselves here than they ever could in front of five thousand people. Perhaps that intimacy — that exchange of breath, glance and story — is the reason many of them started performing in the first place.
Throughout the night, songs drifted between jazz standards, Weathering the Storm favourites, Tom Waits meditations and self-penned material from the pair’s evolving catalogue. But what became striking over two sets was Harrop’s extraordinary ability as an interpreter. She doesn’t simply sing other people’s songs; she quietly repossesses them. By the time she reaches the final verse, they no longer belong to the writer, the famous version, or even the history of the song itself. They become entirely hers.
Cole Porter’s Easy to Love arrived with warmth and conversational ease, while Burt Bacharach’s This Girl’s in Love With You felt almost painfully vulnerable in the tiny room, Harrop stretching the lyric until it sounded less like pop song writing and more like confession. Tenderly floated through the basement with the unhurried patience of late-night conversation, while Michel Legrand’s You Must Believe in Spring carried exactly the sense of fragile optimism the song has always deserved.
Even Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars (Corcovado) seemed less like bossa nova and more like a private thought spoken aloud somewhere after midnight.
But it was the Tom Waits material that formed the emotional spine of the evening.
Temptation, all smoky corners and slow-burn danger, suited the duo perfectly, McCredie drawing shadows from the guitar while Harrop delivered the lyric with knowing restraint. Rainbow Sleeves carried a bruised tenderness that felt almost suspended in the room, while Take It With Me became one of the night’s defining moments — the kind of performance where nobody moves, glasses remain untouched and even the bar staff instinctively pause.
Waits’ songs have always lived somewhere between beauty and damage, and Harrop understands exactly how much weight they can carry without ever oversinging them. She trusts space. Trusts phrasing. Trusts silence. McCredie does too.
That partnership remains the key to everything they do together. His playing never pushes for attention, despite the fact he could easily command it. Whether introducing his new guitar with self-deprecating humour, accompanying Harrop with almost orchestral subtlety on In the Wee Small Hours, or later using a red wine glass as a slide during the closing Guilty, McCredie revealed himself to be one of those rare musicians entirely devoted to serving the song. Before In The Wee Small Hours, Harrop shared the story of how songwriter David Mann’s son had discovered their version online and played it to his mother, who quietly remarked that her husband would have loved what they had done with the song. In a room already wrapped in nostalgia and late-night intimacy, it felt like another reminder of how music continues to travel quietly between generations.
There were lighter moments too. Harrop’s playful introduction to the Bessie Smith classic I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl brought laughter across the basement, while Red Mary Janes, released the same day from the forthcoming live recording captured while Harrop, with Sam Watts on piano, supported Gregory Porter on his recent 16-date UK tour, added a flash of cabaret swagger and sly humour.
The duo then moved into self-penned favourites such as The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants, I Think You Better Go and Everything’s Changing, songs written during and after lockdown that now feel woven naturally into their wider catalogue. Everything’s Changing in particular carried an understated emotional weight, its reflections on uncertainty and shifting lives still resonating long after the years that inspired it.
And yet, despite the stories, jokes, wine glasses balanced on amps and spontaneous audience requests, the evening never lost its emotional centre. Harrop spoke openly about the significance of returning to Green Note after years away, calling it “our little special place,” and you believed her. Not because it sounded rehearsed, but because the entire performance proved it.
By the encore run of I’m Confessin’ and the closing Guilty, the room felt less like an audience and more like participants in something shared. That is Green Note at its best. And it is Harrop and McCredie at theirs too — not hiding behind scale or spectacle, but standing close enough for every lyric to land exactly where it should.
In larger venues, connection can sometimes become performance. Downstairs at Green Note, connection was the performance. Glenn Wright
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