Camille O’Sullivan told David Hennessy about her show that pays tribute to lost greats such as her friend Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor.
Camille O’Sullivan is at Soho Theatre with her Loveletter show London for its London premiere.
The intimate celebration of some of Camille’s musical heroes, including her dear friend Shane MacGowan, Sinéad O’Connor, David Bowie, Radiohead, Brel, Nick Cave and more, was a runaway sell out hit at the Edinburgh Fringe 2024 and she has since taken the show across Australia and Europe.
Previously an award-winning architect and painter, Camille was born in London to a French mother and Irish/English father, she grew up in Passagewest, Cork.
When she was involved in a near fatal car crash it was one thing that made her realise she had to pursue her love of singing.
How are you looking forward to coming to London with the show?
“Really excited.
“London was a big dream for me all those years ago.
“Soho is one of my most favourite places in London.
“It’s the perfect place to be playing this kind of music which is my most personal show because a lot of the artists, like Shane and Kirsty MacColl and Bowie, all had a relationship with Soho.
“I always love playing in churches and stuff.
“This feels like a spiritual church for these gigs.
“I’m always nervous with the London audiences too because it’s like all the capital cities.
“But I think at this stage of my life, after we were locked away (during COVID), I’m nicely falling apart.
“A lot of people went, ‘We loved it when you were enigmatic which you still are but now that you’re losing the plot, we really love it’.
“The show has a few things going on.
“It’s my love of these artists but it’s also me unravelling and enjoying that.”
What do you mean ‘unravelling’?
“Coming out of COVID, my girlfriends were all saying, ‘Listen, Camille, you should really share the jokes and stuff that you do in our life because you’re good craic’.
“So I decided to let the wheels come off.
“Because I’d been eating chocolate and drinking my head off during thing, I couldn’t fit into my outfit.
“I showed that was the case by turning around showing the zip can’t go up.
“My shoes, I’ve worn them for the past four years. They’ve got gaffer tape.
“The tights have like 100 holes in them.
“So the idea is instead of pretending to be something else, you show yourself and the fact that the wheels are coming off here and to laugh at life and to enjoy it because of what we’ve all gone through.
“One guy said recently, ‘It’s really dark but I didn’t know sometimes if I was in a comedy show because I laughed so much at the sh*t you were going through’.
“It’s kind of a joyful madness and I think that’s something that we’re very attuned to at home when we’re going through sadness.
“I’m singing about people I miss like Sinead and Shane who I truly miss and love.
“I do go to the place where it’s a very heartfelt thing.
“I don’t even look like the poster anymore.
“I’m hanging by a thread.
“I drink through the gig.
“I just want to embrace that so people don’t feel they’re seeing something on television, that they’re seeing a real thing.
“And this is the real thing.
“You can see the audience go, ‘I can’t keep up with this sh*t’.
“I’m a different person to the person I am on stage.
“I found it quite hard to climb back up on stage after I was locked up for the two years with the cat so I just thought, ‘Be authentic and be real because people have been going through sh*t’.
“What’s interesting is people have enjoyed the madness.
“I find it kind of embarrassing.
“I wake up with shame at 4am going, ‘What did I say to these people?’
“There is happiness in the show but I think it goes between the sublime and the ridiculous.”
As you you you’re very different in real life to your onstage persona..
“A lot of people don’t believe you when you say it.
“Sometimes you see other artists and they’re totally confident, I’m looking for the exit and I’m drinking a few glasses of wine going, ‘Jesus Christ, why did I switch my career from architecture? What am I doing here?’
“It’s like there’s Sasha Fierce and Beyonce.
“It’s not like you’re pretending to be somebody else. It’s you but it’s like a child, uninhibited. It’s magnified.
“You’re so bloody present everything is magnified by 100 which means that you are more you than you could ever be.
“And you come off stage and somebody goes, ‘I can’t believe you danced. I can’t believe you sat on me’.
“And you’re like, ‘What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean I did that?’
“I adore singing and I adore people but I have a social anxiety.
“I realise I have some social anxiety but when I go on stage where there’s a light on me, it’s like you can really connect.
“It’s a very strange thing.
“A guy saw me in Kinsale doing a gig outside and he was like, ‘Jesus Christ, we were terrified. You were like a mouse backstage. We didn’t know if you would go on and then you came out like a big, bloody tiger. I couldn’t recognise the girl’.
“And it’s true.
“I would be very critical of myself if I stand up on stage and I don’t feel like I’m nailing those songs and I’m connecting.
“Jesus Christ, I wish I’d known I was good looking in my 20s because I look back at the posters.
“I was hard on myself then and I was going, ‘F**king hell, I rocked then’.
“Now I’m grateful that I am performing, that I am lucky to return to London.
“(After Bowie passed away) I thought, ‘I’m going to embrace being a singer’.
“Because sometimes you forget that even when you’re doing something which is your dream, you can hide like a little mouse and not enjoy those moments.
“I am a different person.
“I still have the shame but I’m pushing through it because life is too short.
“What was lovely about Shane and Sinead is they were authentic.
“That was something I really loved about the two of them.
“They were very forthright,
“I always kept under Shane’s radar.
“I adored him but he would tell you to f off if he didn’t like what you did so I wasn’t sticking around for that.
“And Sinead was the same but with a loving hand.
“They were very open and loving.
“I think we were very lucky in Ireland to have them.
“He gave us a voice.
“I think he changed who we were and she gave me a voice as a girl.
“I saw him in two days before he passed and we had a lovely, gentle conversation: Victoria, myself and Aidan (Gillen, Camille’s partner) and him, and had a laugh.
“And he was saying, ‘Oh, I loved singing with you but I felt a traitor to Kirsty because Kirsty was my soul mate, my angel, my friend’.
“And I said, ‘Shane, I felt the same. Singing Fairytale (of New York) is the hardest thing in the world because you can never top what they did but you can support him. But it was lovely that he was still thinking of her in that way.
“And I remember when he passed, I couldn’t listen to their music.
“I played Sinead’s songs for my daughter.
“I was like, ‘Look, Taylor Swift is grand but this is real’.
“But with Shane, I sat with the words because I couldn’t listen.
“He went on about Brendan Behan. He is Brendan Behan, he is Patrick Kavanagh.
“I was talking to him going, ‘You were bloody romantic, you were sentimental’.
“We sang at his funeral and I was really anxious about singing that day.
“And Feargal says, ‘You’re singing for your friend. That’s all you’re doing’.
“There was such love in the air.
“I didn’t feel like going off and singing a tribute to Shane because I didn’t want to kind of bastardise that relationship but it became stronger as the months went on.
“I thought, ‘I need to send the love back to stay close to them’.
“Lyric has always been a thing for me with Brel and Bowie and Cave and I never knew that part of Shane.
“And after sitting with the words I said, ‘Feargal, let’s just go and do what we do with Cave. Let’s just do this, you and I’.
“So it started as that and then I thought, ‘Well, what is this thing?’
“This thing is like a love letter.
“It was really like a prayer and it was like a continuation of the day in that church.
“So it is singing back to him.
“It’s kind of me as a youngster connecting back to someone I remember growing up with, who happened to crazily get a phone call one time as an architecture student to come down to sing in the Olympia.
“That’s where I met him.
“I walked up on stage, that’s how I met him and from there on in I cried and laughed and danced with that guy and I owe him so much as a person, never mind as a singer.
“I was born in London and I had a very strange, uprooted childhood.
“I wasn’t accepted in England, I wasn’t accepted in Ireland but I like being this little mix of a mongrel doggie.
“But I don’t know if he would have been that writer if he hadn’t been born there (London) and yearned for home.
“I think there was a real defiance in their writing and it’s an English/ Irish thing.
“They (The Pogues) were all about to kill each other and there was anarchy (onstage).
“It looked like a pack of Vikings out in the audience.
“I was like, ‘We’re gonna die tonight’.
“I think there’s a repression in us as people and that’s what maybe is in me as a performer.
“I feel like a feral, bloody wild animal when I’m on stage.
“The band laugh and say, ‘Camille, you tell us like you’re a wild animal going through a forest’.
“Now they were like, ‘What the hell does that mean?’
“And they say, ‘But when we get on stage with you, we know what that bloody means. That’s the only thing we know’.
“I remember seeing the band and going, ‘I want that anarchy. I want that craziness’.
“The poster is well photographed and the makeup looks great and you lure the audience in, and then all hell breaks loose.
“The idea is, be real.
“The worse my relationships were, the better of a singer became.
“The more I was having a breakdown over the years, the better a singer became.
“When my life was going well, I’m a worse singer so I’ve got to keep a certain edge to myself that’s always falling apart.
“I’m not a songwriter, I was ashamed about that.
“I probably still am ashamed about it but I am someone who loves music, inhabiting songs and becoming the character.
“It’s not pretending.
“It’s actually you.
“It’s finding something in you that you empathise with, that makes you want to dance, wants to laugh and sing.
“But you’re not trying to force people to go, ‘Oh, this is what I must feel’.
“You just go, ‘I’m inhabiting that. I feel tough in it. I feel angry in it. I feel vulnerable in it’.
“I don’t want anybody to get upset but you get people who go, ‘I’ve not felt emotion like that in a while’.
“Or, ‘I had a cry’, or ‘had a laugh’, or ‘I felt like a child’.
“I don’t go out of my way trying to have a plan.
“I sing with spirit, sing with truth.
“When we first did it in Edinburgh, that was really a grieving thing for us because it felt like a tiny version of the church we had said farewell to Shane in.
“So it’s a lovely landing now in London.”
Is it very emotional in that case?
“Yeah, I would say 70% of it is emotion.
“I would cry probably three or four times.
“I remember when I first stepped up on stage as an architect and I remember crying my eyes out singing Jacques Brel.
“I was a student and I thought, ‘Oh sh*t, I’m going to end up leaving architecture. I don’t know when that’s going to happen’.
“But I had never felt that kind of passion or that existing in a song.
“I realised that was where my heart lay, was in emotional singing, in songs that you bury your soul in.
“I used to be highly embarrassed crying on stage and joking and stuff but I’m not so ashamed about it now.
“And when I gave up my family were like, ‘What do you mean you want to become a singer? You wanted to be a painter’.
“My sister said, ‘You’re never going to make a career out of it. You’re going to end up in cafes for the rest of your life’.
“And I said, ‘So be it’.
“After years of architecture my thing wasn’t about fame.
“I saw this woman, Agnes Bernelle: Amazing career and I came across her and saw her on stage in her 70s singing really tough songs.
“And I remember later on talking to her downstairs.
“She was smoking a cigarette and having a whiskey.
“And I said, ‘I want to be a singer but I’m too scared. I’ve never been trained’.
“She said, ‘Oh, you don’t need to be trained’.
“She says, ‘Live your life. Just live it real. You’d be a better actress’.
“That was a few years before I gave everything up but I never forgot it.
“And she said, ‘I’ll help you’.
“I think that was the person that made me go. ‘I want to continue that journey’.
“I was lucky to have met her.
“Life is mad, isn’t it?
“I might have gone and stayed in that career (architecture), not ever done this but she would be a massive inspiration.
“Everything is about emotion.
“I cry very easily.
“I don’t know why I do.
“My dad says, ‘You’re highly sensitive’.
“He said, ‘We were all very scared of you being on stage because you’ve always been so sensitive as a child’.
“It’s like taking people on a rollercoaster of emotions so it’s absolutely emotional.
“My dad said, ‘If you sorted your head out, your vulnerability and sensitivity, you wouldn’t be the singer you are because that’s what you bring’.
“There’s got to be a certain part of you that’s falling apart but there’s got to be a massive strength too.
“I think people are really respectful of that because I think people love music and people feel they need to express themselves.
“Some people are shy and even people are mad but they don’t get the outlet.
“I sometimes go to the audience, put my arms around them but I’m doing it not just for them, I’m doing it for me because I’m scared of them but they don’t know that.
“I can’t explain it.
“I don’t know how the hell I ended up there.
“Doing Mercy Seat, you’re doing a really tough, horrible song.
“Sometimes people wouldn’t clap because they wouldn’t know.
“I used to go, ‘Is that awful?’
“They said, ‘No, it was great but it was shocking that you did it’.
“It’s brutal but sometimes you need the brutality.
“You need it because then you can get rid of that and then expel that and then bring you to a more gentle place.
“I’m not exactly sure why it’s got to be all these different feelings or going through different emotions but I think you do it for yourself.
“When Bowie and Leonard Cohen passed, I missed them.
“I include them in this because I love their work and it’s about sending love back to those artists.
“But with Shane and Sinead, this is the most personal.
“This is friends and therefore, it has a different feeling it’s ever had that will be something I didn’t do before and people have recognised that.
“I think this was a necessity for me to sing it.
“And there’s something celebratory in sharing it in a very emotive way.
“I usually hate social media and Facebook but when people sadly pass, there’s a great beauty in people sharing it. That’s what the show is about.”
Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter is at Soho theatre until 6 December.
To book or for more info, click here.