Jessie Ware – and her mum – on their award-winning Table Manners podcast

“People feel like they are sitting around the table with us”

Jessie Ware

Jessie Ware and her mother, Lennie, love to bicker. They don’t call it arguing, in their house, though. “We call it ‘speaking loudly,’” says Jessie. Their successful podcast, Table Manners, has a lot of “loud speaking” woven into its cosy premise: a home-cooked meal prepared for a visiting celebrity guest who joins them around the bustling Ware kitchen table to talk about life, food, their careers and families.

The loud speaking reached an all-time high in the fraught days running up to the recording of episode one of the fourth series of Table Manners last year, when Nigella Lawson popped round to Jessie’s east London home for lamb and ice cream.

Cooking for Nigella

“She’s a goddess,” says Lennie. “I was so nervous to cook for her, I had to get my son to do it. He did the dessert and he prepared the crust for the rack of lamb. It was all fine in the end. Nigella was just astonishing, beautiful – I just couldn’t stop looking at her.”

“It was the first time we ever wore make-up to record the podcast,” says Jessie. “Nigella was a guest we had been trying to get since the start.”

Both Ware women admit that they are naturally “nosy”, which is where the idea for the podcast began. Lennie is a social worker in south London, where Jessie was raised with her sister, Hannah, an actress, and brother Alex, a doctor (Lennie divorced Jessie’s father, John Ware, a reporter for BBC’s Panorama, when Jessie was 10).

Not trained, but enthusiastic

While neither Jessie nor Lennie is a trained cook, food is a big part of their lives and always has been: they both love big Friday night dinners – sometimes up to 20 people would all be eating Lennie’s famous chicken and matzo ball soup and the conversation would always, always be funny with her mum around. So, says Lennie, the podcast was born: “Jessie suggested it and I agreed. I thought I’d just be the dogsbody doing all the cooking.” But Jessie, 34, says: “Now she’s the star of the show.”

Since it launched in 2017, the Wares’ podcast has become phenomenally successful. Table Manners was nominated for two prestigious Aria awards last year, won the New Voice award at the UK’s Audio Production Awards and just celebrated its five millionth download. This is perhaps most surprising to Lennie, who admits she didn’t even know what a podcast was before they made the first episode.

Big names round the kitchen table

“It served her right because she was telling me what to do and thought she knew best”

Jessie Ware

Nigella has not been the only big name they’ve booked – Jessie says she has now “exhausted her phone book” calling in favours. The Wares have now interviewed guests including Ed Sheeran, Yotam Ottolenghi, Jay Rayner, Sam Smith, Sadiq Khan (who revealed on the show that he would be seeking re-election as the Mayor of London in 2020), Cheryl, Mel B and, for the launch of the fifth series this week, Kiefer Sutherland (“Having Jack Bauer in my kitchen eating brunch was quite surreal,” says Jessie).

It’s their simple premise which Jessie and her mother think has caused so many listeners to join them. It is strangely comforting to listen to the family chatter, even Jessie and Lennie’s frequent rows (recently, Jessie says these have been based around Jessie “getting her boobs out” to breastfeed her two-month-old son in front of their guests).

“People say it reminds them of their relationship with their mother or father – people enjoy the fighting,” says Jessie. “We don’t edit it. People feel like they are sitting around the table with us.”

Constant moaning

Not many mothers and daughters could commit to working together so closely; Jessie admits they can often make three episodes in one week. “There is constant moaning when she says she’s got too much to do! No, that’s mean. But it’s a huge commitment now, and we do stress about making the dinners. Because we want to make it nice, we can’t just give them a packet of crisps, even though I’ve been tempted to do that.”

Jessie’s highlight of the entire experience involves Lennie setting fire to herself while making crème brûlée for the first time recently. “It served her right because she was telling me what to do and thought she knew best. I was heavily pregnant at that point and my pelvic floor couldn’t handle it.”

Before Table Manners, Jessie, who has two children with her husband, Sam, was known primarily as a singer – she has been nominated for the British Female Solo Artist award twice since her debut in 2012. But she said she wanted to do something aside from her music career, which she had “fallen out of love with”.

Making podcasts vs making music

“Now I’ve made more series of this podcast than I have albums,” Jessie says. “Though I recorded half of my new album before my son was born and the rest will follow. We’re doing a Table Manners book first.

“People come up to me now and say ‘Are you Jessie Ware?’ and I say ‘Yes’, then they say ‘I love your mum’, or ‘I love your podcast’. Music has become last on their list. I don’t know how I feel about that.”

Lennie gets recognised, too, now: “A lady on the Tube recognised my voice when I was moaning about the Northern Line being horrendous.”

Though they joke that they are sick of each other, Jessie admits that this is a lovely thing for them both. “I think there is something really special in the fact I have these audible memories with my mum, meeting these people together,” she says. “And she really makes me laugh. Though we are now fighting harder than we’ve ever fought in our lives.”

‘Table Manners’ series 5, episode one, with Kiefer Sutherland, is available for download now