As any ‘cheese-ophile’ can tell you, camembert cheese especially pleases when it ripens over time and gets creamier. As any lover of cabaret will divulge, cabaret is best enjoyed in a shadowy club at night while huddled around a table, une bouteille d’ Barossa Shiraz in hand, with the prospect of dubiously mounted tassels somewhere in the room.

The shirt of Monsieur Camembert’s consummate flautist, saxophonist and clarinettist, Edouard Bronson, may have had a hint of tassel, but at half past seven, the new Council Chambers room was markedly free of tassels, tables and??well, essential seedy atmosphere. This well-loved, triple ARIA award winning Australian cabaret band, known for their riotous musical spirit, was being watched by an audience sitting politely in rows of seats. Was this really the way to go?

It was hard for the audience to be uninhibited, do freewheeling whirly jigs, sing, and clap each other on the back in an absinthe-sipping state of delirious abandonment. Although to give them their due, Monsieur Camembert tried hard to encourage this. They are a band to accompany naughtiness and late night inebriation. But they were inhibited by a society of sobriety.

They performed as a five-piece, playing an audacious range of gypsy, klezmer, Leonard Cohen, Django Reinhardt, and kitschy Italian (Think Renato Carosone’s ‘You Want to Play the American’.). The wedding party just failed to show up.