Last night was my first time attending a full concert by Camille O’Sullivan and I feel as if I’ve just had amazing sex for the first time. I don’t mean anything furtive, adolescent or pimply. I mean the full no-holes-barred celebratory experience of bare bodies and souls entangling athletically and it all coming together in one triumphantly rhythmic moment of bliss, to be repeated as often as is physically possible.
You see, I’m not talking a one-night stand here. I’m committed. This is serious.
At a packed Olympia Theatre, Camille came on, louchely announced she was exhausted, lay on the floor, and had everyone immediately eating out of the palm of her hand. She’s astonishingly commanding on stage, playful and seductive, with a ballsiness that is amazingly beguiling. Watching her take off and put on her shoes, or putting on her make-up – she transforms it into an experience akin to performance art.
She’s an incredibly versatile performer, with not just the classic Brel and Brecht to satisfy our appetites, that rich material I’ve seen her perform in La Clique before. Ne Me Quitte Pas was simply beautiful. She sings everything from Dilly Keane’s Look Mummy, No Hands to Kirsty McColl’s In These Shoes? and a wonderfully bawdy version of Nina Simone’s Sugar in my Bowl – but she is a truly peerless interpreter of Bowie. Suffragette City and Rock’n'Roll Suicide simply rocked. Her band is superb.
She does dark so well – Nick Cave’s People Ain’t No Good was mesmeric, as was Tom Waits’ Misery is a River of the World, Everybody Row; then she shifted into Bowie’s Five Years which had me weeping as if I’d never heard it before, segueing into a goose-bump-raising Dark Side of the Moon.
She’s a really brave performer – she warped Mac the Knife tonally until she bent it into submission, triumphantly. Vocally, she strips herself bare, and flies high without a safety net; at the beginning of her first encore, Jacques Brel’s Marieke, dedicated to her Irish father and (blessedly) French mother, who were present, she inhabits a scary tone-shifting vulnerable breathy place, until she digs right down to produce the passion to transform it into an astonishing cri de couer.
She is such a compelling live performer because, although I’m listening to her newly-bought albums now, she takes risks each time she performs, and I can quite see myself wanting to see her every show in Dublin from now on – if only to see how far out on a limb she’s going to throw herself each time. And there’s something really joyous about her – if there’s one performer who signifies for me a vital and sparkling difference between the Ireland I left in 1993, and modern Ireland of 2007, it’s Camille O’Sullivan.
