Miller Campbell Live in London

Miller Campbell played Pizza Express Live in Holborn on 5 August 2026 with support from Natalie Shay.

This was Miller Campbell’s first ever headline show in London. It was great to have seen her play solo at Bush Hall back in October and to be there to watch this huge milestone. She started off quietly with an almost unaccompanied intro to Out of My Head and then followed up with 3AM, always a loud song that contrasted nicely.

I’ve always loved Little Things for its Tom Petty-style intro and MC said that she enjoyed the experience of writing that song. They had only three months to write the debut album in Los Angeles. She told us that Bad is one of her favourites and that it is seriously popular in Germany. The northern Europeans have always been mad keen on American pop-rock music. If you want to know where to start your Miller Campbell journey, Bad is a good place. It showcases MC’s range and control, the way the song simmers along before boiling over in the chorus. There is something so clear in her voice, even at its loudest.

I want the night, I want the tide and sea
To pull you in closer and cover me
No river deep, or burning heat
Nothing’s gonna stall your way to me

All Night was one of the first songs written for her self-titled debut album and helped MC to set a course away from more traditional country. Certainly Miller’s early singles such as Your Turn to Cry around five years back were traditional country, and they’re great to listen to, but her first full-length album is much more towards pop-rock.

Miller has a good number of songs I have described as sad-angry love songs. Sometimes she starts off sad and wistful and gets progressively angry as the song unfolds. Sometimes it’s the other way around. But there is a complexity there that will keep you playing the songs over and over.

The song I learned the most about was Self Medicated. It was used on the soundtrack of a 2024 movie called Afraid, alongside some big names including Goldfrapp. MC described it as an AI robot movie. You can catch it on Netflix if you want to see what happens when a household AI assistant goes rogue. Whether or not that helps you decide to watch it, it is certainly topical.

There were two covers in the set. Miller’s sound is partly inspired by the Bangles and she has released Hero Takes A Fall as a single before but I had not seen her play it live. I didn’t detect any flickers of recognition in the audience... were there no Bangles fans there?

Contrast that to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, which fired everyone into spontaneous action. A group to my right cheered as soon as it began and the group to my left sang large sections of the song. As I’ve been putting the finishing touches to my own book about the band, it was a timely reminder of the Mac’s appeal across the generations and across the decades, exactly fifty years since the song was first recorded. And by the way, Miller did a brilliant version and seemed to really enjoy channelling Stevie Nicks.

One of the confusing things for an artist is that the songs don’t always get released when they are written. Her new single, For You, has only been out a couple of weeks and I enjoyed it live here for the fist time, though it was actually written right at the start of the work on the last album. She also played Side of You and Problem from the upcoming second album, which should be with you in the autumn.

For You is really strong live. Every so often I reflect on the live experience, even the hi-fi experience as contrasted to the streamed AirPod music experience. There’s no point trying to figure out if one era was better or worse than another. Things just are, or they’re not. But listening to Miller’s vinyl on the turntable with the walls of the house vibrating, followed by the live show that evening, is surely music at its best. For You was also a solo Miller on guitar for the first half of the song. That voice again. There’s nowhere to hide in a small venue with only an acoustic guitar and it is clear that both Natalie Shay and Miller Campbell have enormous careers ahead of them.

If music is best live then that is partly because it becomes a communal experience, like watching a movie at a cinema. The audience ranged broadly in ages and tastes. We were all drawn together for a couple of hours for a collective experience. I’ve grown to love these smaller venues in the year I’ve been writing this Substack. They are so different from the arenas. You get to really hear the artist as well as hear from them about their writing process or where and when a song emerged.

This was Miller’s final show of the tour that has taken her from Ireland to England, Sweden and back to England. The pro musician’s life involves a lot of travel and a lot of late nights and I wrongly assumed a week back in the log cabin in Montana was in order. Instead, Miller somehow managed to write a song yesterday and was out of bed early to record a demo of it at Rak Studios near Regent’s Park in London before catching a late flight to Seattle for a west coast tour!

You can catch Miller Campbell on August 11 at Madrona Playfield in Seattle and a lunchtime show the very same day at the Symetra Center. She regularly plays in and around Bigfork, Montana where she has been based for the last several years. She posts regularly on both Instagram and TikTok. Her own website is here.

The new Gibson guitar acquired at Under the Big Sky festival, Montana

Natalie Shay

I had spent the morning spinning a few Natalie Shay tracks from her latest EP, ATMOSPHERE. I knew she attended the BRIT school and had been pursuing a music career since her early teens. As I took my seat I was completely unaware that I was next to three members of her fan club. Only later did I see they were all wearing bright yellow branded T-shirts. It was a heartwarming sight. A first for Natalie as well: it was her first time performing in the Pizza Express basement. She exuded bouncy energy and asked a lot of her guitar.

She introduced Like You Boy as her most-streamed song, expressing surprise at its appeal. Something all writers find difficult is to predict which words will resonate the most, which songs or which stories. You just don’t know, but she was surprised that a quieter acoustic song had done so well. Hate To Say It also stood out. Natalie wrote Taking It Out On You aged 14 and she said it was the nearest thing in her discography to a country song.

Natalie Shay is a wonderfully engaging live performer, full of humour and energy and it would be great to see one of her own headline shows. She certainly found a few new fans in this audience!

You can learn more about Natalie Shay on her website, Instagram and TikTok.

Pizza Express Live

This was also my first time at Pizza Express Live and I want to take a moment to recommend it. It’s a great way to experience live music if that’s not something you normally do. A year ago I certainly found it daunting to watch live music on my own for the first time in years. The Pizza Express venues give you a familiar environment, you don’t have to order food if you don’t want to, and you get very (very, very) close to the music. It was the most chilled of all the venues I have been to and helps you plot a course through the smaller venues like Moth Club, the Water Rats or the 100 Club, and up towards Oslo or Bush Hall. Sometimes watching a movie or listening to music on your own lets you focus more on the experience in front of you.