Camille O’Sullivan spoke to David Hennessy about her 20th year in Edinburgh, bouncing back after the pandemic and paying tribute to Shane MacGowan, Sinead O’Connor and Christy Dignam in her performances.
Camille O’Sullivan is well known as musician, singer and an actress.
It has not always been easy for Camille to take to the stage.
Initially studying architecture, Camille was involved in a near fatal car crash that involved serious rehabilitation. It was this lucky escape that convinced her she had to follow her dreams while she still had the chance.
The pandemic was also something that put her off her stride. When everything stopped, she wasn’t sure how she would pick up where she left off.
Camille tours the UK next month and The Irish World catches up with her from Edinburgh where she is there for her 20th Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Known as the “Queen of the Edinburgh Festival” (BBC) and the original star of Olivier Award-winning LaClique, Camille O’Sullivan enjoys a formidable reputation for her intensely dramatic interpretations of the songs of Brel, Cave, Waits, Bowie, Edith Piaf and more.
O’Sullivan has also been paying tribute to Shane MacGowan, the late frontman of the Pogues and her friend as well as other greats of Irish music like Sinead O’Connor and Christy Dignam.
Are you enjoying being back in Edinburgh?
“I am. It’s my 20th year.
“I’m really doing it for Ireland at the moment.
“We finish close to midnight.
“The piano player’s laughing. He says, ‘You’re like a young pony again, you’re coming in at 3am in the morning’.
“We did go until six one morning where we had these young lads going, ‘Come and look at the sunrise’, and I’m like, ‘I’m 108. I did that before’.
“So we’re having a great time.”
Edinburgh has been huge for you and your journey, hasn’t it? It launched you..
“Yeah, for sure.
“And especially when you come from Ireland and you’re not like a singer, a songwriter.
“I’m kind of really realizing what I am all after these years is someone who is a performer, but I kind of take songs and make them happen.
“And I was lucky enough at the time in Dublin that there was a moment that there was those kind of clubs and places that allowed it, but I was too scared to go abroad because I thought, ‘Oh, I’m just good enough for home’.
“And then somebody said, ‘Go to Edinburgh’.
“I looked at the blooming magazine, and I went, ‘You need several thousand pounds’.
“It wasn’t like any other festival where you join and you get paid. This is where you usually lose a bit of money, you’re going to be critiqued within an inch of your life but then it’s like a shop window.
“What I realised this year and every year is it’s really important as a person and a performer to take the risk, to put yourself out there.
“I didn’t realise it was a risk at the time because when you’re young you just say, ‘I’ll go for it’.
“I lost a lot of money. I ended up being doing my show and then I got spotted by Ewen Bremner from Trainspotting for Steven Frears’ Mrs. Henderson Presents, ended up being in a film with Judy Dench and Bob Hoskins on the back of that.
“I went, ‘Okay, so you can lose a lot of money but something can happen’.
“So then from there, I’ve just been coming every year.
“I was saying to Feargal (Murray, long time musical collaborator), ‘Just how lucky we are that we’re still doing it?’
“Phil Coulter said, ‘If you’re still doing music, that’s enough. If you’re still in it’.”
The last time we spoke you had been rocked by the pandemic, it was hard to see yourself getting up there, wasn’t it?
“Absolutely
“Covid for everybody was awful.
“I thought it was really awful for what people were going through, but I was kind of happy to not be on the hamster wheel.
“I really loved not having to worry.
“I thought, ‘Nobody else is doing it so this is brilliant. I have time off’.
“I was starting to try exercise and then it went south, started eating and drinking whatever.
“But I think performers have different reasons for getting on stage.
“Some performers are like, ‘I really want to be seen and I think I’m great’.
“And fortunately I don’t come from that thing.
“I love singing but I’m quite scared of an audience.
“I actually probably have a bad social anxiety because I can’t even open messages.
“People are laughing going, ‘Why are you up there?’
“And I’m like, ‘I still don’t know why but something calls me’.
“So I was nervous and also, you know, a lot of us were tired before it happened. The whole band were like, ‘We need a bit of a break’.
“So it probably came at a good time.
“But it was like we were surfing a wave where we played the first gigs back in Dublin.
“I remember it was only my posters around town.
“So I thought, ‘You know what? I’m going to embrace that it’s not just normal gig. Because people have gone through something, I’m going to be open in that way and I’m going to be vulnerable. If I hid before that I was slightly scared or if I hid my eccentricities, I’m going to show it’.
“So I’m in a very funny, kind of weird, no man’s land because the songs are dark and they’re beautiful and they’re uplifting and funny too because it’s all about being different things.
“People were going, ‘I really loved your show and you’re enigmatic but since you’re bonkers now, it’s fantastic’.
“But it’s getting mad, there’s hoola hooping during one of the songs.
“Recently we did it in front of the President and he was laughing.
“I couldn’t tell if he was totally embarrassed but his head was going.
“I thought, ‘I hope I’m not going to give him a seizure now’.
“Somebody was like, ‘You’re like a little mouse backstage, and then you come on like a lion’.
“Definitely for someone who is scared of going in front of people, there’s far more joy.
“Especially when you lose people like Christy and people who were such a voice to us.
“When Bowie and Cohen died, I didn’t really feel like singing because it just was so upsetting.
“But when Sinead and Shane died, it was like a full blanket of us on Facebook, we were really reaching out to each other.
“I went, ‘Wow, they gave us a voice’, and especially Shane, really gave us one that had all that passion in it, the longing for home.
“I definitely think their passing was a big thing for all of us, with Christy.
“I don’t know if we’ll ever have their like again.
“I mean, Shane was a gent and he was shy.
“I mean, you’d never cross him because he’d tell you to f off, but I kind of enjoyed his madness.
“And I mean, he was so learned.
“You’d say something and he’d correct you and you’re going, ‘I thought he was sleeping in the corner but he was listening to what I was saying’.
“But Victoria and himself were just actually quite spiritual people and the same with Sinead, just really genuine, authentic.
“I don’t think those two could have been cancelled today, but they would have given it a good try.
“But when I met him I was just like an architect student up at a Christmas party eating pies, and next minute I get the call, ‘Do you want to come down and sing with Shane in the Olympia in 40 minutes?’
“And I’m like, ‘What?’
“It must have been like 25 years ago or something.
“Of course, I knew the chorus of Fairytale, but I never knew the verses, so I wrote it down.
“I was on my bicycle just reading it as I went down and met him on stage.
“He’d be- not brutal, but if he didn’t like you, didn’t like the way you sang, you wouldn’t be on again.
“So you were just happy that he invited you back.
“Anytime I sang a song of his, I used to run away in case he didn’t like it.
“But Victoria said, ‘He did, Camille’, and we did end up recording. We’ve recorded a song together: The last duet he’s ever done and that hopefully will come out at some stage.
“But those last few years hanging with them, and just even the last few days, he was in great form, still joking.
“He always just had a good little joke but he’d say it in a way you just weren’t sure.”
Of course you got to sing at his incredible funeral, did that feel special? Did you feel his presence even?
“Yeah, absolutely and still do.
“I’m not necessarily religious but I am spiritual, many Irish people have that thing in them.
“Singing his songs, I suppose that’s my way of keeping hold of him.
“You sing for yourself, you sing for people you love, you sing for your child, you sing for people you lost.
“And when you sing for somebody you were such a fan of, it’s very different how you sing it.
“You always sing it back to them like some prayer and some gift.
“It’s a way of holding on to them.
“When we were at his funeral, I got there early and I remember going down in the car with Feargal and I said, ‘I’m scared because I don’t want to mess it up’.
“You don’t think about cameras, it’s because it’s this momentous thing for this amazing person.
“And he said, ‘Just say goodbye to your friend. Just say goodbye’.
“And it was the loveliest thing because my shows are like therapy for me.
“Somebody said to me, ‘Only step up on stage if there’s a good reason to go’.
“The funeral was a catalyst because I went, ‘I never want to forget how beautiful that was. I never want to forget how much love was felt’.
“Being asked was a real honour.
“When I went out Finbar (Furey) said, ‘I know you’re scared’.
“He said, ‘Camille, heart, it’s all heart from here’.
“And I was like, ‘Finbar, I know, I know’, so to get people who you’re so in awe of and see that’s where their hearts come from.
“I think we were so lucky to have him (Shane).
“It was a voice that we needed, and what a voice.
“I didn’t realise how complicated the relationship with Ireland was because I think people thought at the start, ‘Oh, you’re drunks and you’re bastardising trad music’.
“But at his eulogy, his sister was saying that he cried when he got the award from the President. It was like the biggest thing.
“I remember we were all around him.
“He was really nervous to go on stage and it was actually Sinead who was the one putting her arms around him in the end, going, ‘Are you okay?’
“And it was the last time I saw her perform and the same night Dolores O’Riordan had passed away. It all happened on that night.
“Shane could sing any song, and when people were asked to sing his songs, it was a nightmare because you either sound like you’re copying him or faking it.
“I realized then, ‘That guy owned every song he ever did’.
“He said something actually in hospital.
“He said, ‘Look, I loved to singing with you but I must say, I felt like a traitor to a Kirsty McColl, any person I sang Fairytale with.
“And I said, ‘Don’t worry. I absolutely agree with you’.
“Because we were the generation that heard that song for the first time and it always was her.
“It was a really weird song to sing with him onstage because Kirsty always owned that song, so you sang it as well as you could.
“I thought that was a really beautiful thing to say.
“He said, ‘I loved her and I always missed that it wasn’t her’.
“And he was always sweet.
“He’d look at you, sometimes you’d be singing and then he would look at you and give you a cuddle so you knew you were doing well.
“He was kind about it.
“It was alchemy on stage.
“I remember crying.
“I was looking at him in Brixton Academy.
“He would always stand quite still in a show.
“Everybody else were the ones rotating around him, like planets around the earth and he’d stand still and he just sing it.
“And just the power emanating just from him, even if he’d had a drink or not had a drink.
“Sometimes he’d have no drink and he’d go on the stage and put a pint on his head.
“He knew that people went, ‘Oh, he likes his drink’.
“So even when he wasn’t drinking he’d be trying to whip the frenzy.
“I remember looking at their audience going, ‘I have never seen such a loving, fierce animal of an audience who are crying their eyes out and shouting back’.
“I’ve never seen that. I’ve not seen that at U2 concerts.
“But Shane McGowan, absolutely. It was a meaning of life and death, and you just looked out and went, ‘This is the most incredible audience to sing to’, because it really mattered and it was wild.
“I’ve never told this to somebody before: I was pregnant and I must have been about four, five months.
“I got the call and they said, ‘Look, we’re doing the London O2. Would you do it? My (Jem Finer’s) daughter can’t do because she’s pregnant’.
“I went, ‘Absolutely’.
“And I went, ‘I’m not going to tell them I’m bloody pregnant’.
“So he’s swinging me around and there’s snow.
“The other one that happened was I was asked that Christmas by David Letterman to do his show and I was advised by someone not to do it and to this day, I still wake up sometimes going, ‘You big eejit, you should have done it’.
“I can also tell Lila, ‘You danced on stage with Shane. You didn’t know it’.
“But it was quite amazing to have laughed, dance and sang with him, and to have been held by him.
“Also, everything is so woke now.
“That’s what’s so great about those two.
“Recently I had to sing it somewhere and somebody was saying, ‘Are you going to change the words?’
“And I went, ‘Absolutely not’, because are we going to go back to James Joyce and change his words?
“I’m probably going to get cancelled now, maybe I’m wrong.”
Is it poignant to pay tribute to Shane in your shows?
“It is special.
“I do have a cry because I did love him. I do love him. I love Victoria, I love his sister, I love the boys.
“I wouldn’t have come back if it hadn’t been for him. I didn’t really know if I wanted to, but it does give great comfort.”
Camille O’Sullivan tours the UK in September.
She plays Colchester Arts Centre on 3 September, Milton Keynes, The Stables on 4 September, Cambridge, Junction on 5 September, Norwich, Playhouse on 6 September, Hebden Bridge, The Trades Club on 7 September, Manchester, Band on The Wall on 8 September, Leeds, City Varieties on 10 September, Winchester, Theatre Royal on 11 September and Bath, Komedia on 12 September.
For more information, click here.