Joe Stilgoe plays Alexandra Palace Theatre with Fiona Monbet and the BBC Concert Orchestra on Friday 25 September 2026. It is an edition of Friday Night is Music Night.
Joe Stilgoe was born in Sevenoaks in 1979 to the lyricist Richard Stilgoe and the opera singer Annabel Hunt, read music at Southampton, and has spent his career in the space between a jazz piano trio and a variety bill. He sings, plays and writes, works regularly with the big-band leader Guy Barker, and has a long relationship with the orchestras that programme this kind of evening. The style is swing with the songwriting of somebody who grew up around lyricists and knows what a rhyme costs.
Friday Night is Music Night has been broadcast in front of a live audience since 1953. A Jazz Club Symphony is Stilgoe’s edition of it, built for orchestra rather than trio. He has written three songs into Guy Barker’s big-band suite Inferno 67, which premiered at Ronnie Scott’s, and he works regularly with the Hallé, the Royal Philharmonic and the John Wilson Orchestra.
He plays Alexandra Palace Theatre on Friday 25 September 2026 with his new trio, the violinist and conductor Fiona Monbet, and the BBC Concert Orchestra. The material comes mainly from his latest record, Welcome to the Club — ‘The Man In The Moon’, ‘Nobody’, ‘Mr Peanuts’ — and he last worked with the same orchestra on the live show for Theatre in 2022. The theatre is the small room at Alexandra Palace, reopened in 2018 after more than eighty years dark, and it is a considerably better place to hear a piano than the Great Hall next door.