Annmarie Cullen told David Hennessy about her one-woman musical, Remember That Time? ahead of its Edinburgh run.
Dublin musician Annmarie Cullen first came prominence as co- lead singer of LA- based indie pop band, Saucy Monky.
Formed in 2001, the band would have hit singles such as Flicker and Don’t Want to Know Your Name as well as a cover of I Touch Myself by the Divinyls.
This latter track would feature on hit show Veronica Mars and when the band went into a long hiatus, Annemarie would write for film and TV with her compositions featuring on shows like iCarly and Drake And Josh.
Now Annmarie is about to bring her own one-woman musical, Remember That Time? to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
An inspiring story of loss, change and resilience, the show is semi-autobiographical and also helped its author rediscover their joy for music.
The one-woman, three-character production follows Annmarie, a 40-something musician who leaves LA for love in Barcelona. Trading her musical career for corporate stability, she loses her identity and marriage. Reeling from the breakup, she returns to Dublin after 25 years to start over from zero.
With support from two friends comedian Gearoid Farrelly and musician Naimee Coleman, she embarks on a journey of self-discovery and rekindles her passion for life and music.
The show also features the song Your Ex co- written with Mundy.
The inspiring musical strikes a chord with anyone navigating a crossroads in life and Annmarie has already won the award for Best Performance at last year’s International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival.
How did Remember That Time? start? It’s a new departure for you to write a show, did it happen naturally?
“I’ve written lyrics so I’m a writer but it was different.
“I felt like I was going in like a complete novice.
“But the music, obviously, is very natural because I’ve been doing that since I was 12.
“I think I recorded my first song when I was 12.
“But I’d always wanted to write a musical.
“Remember That Time? actually started out as a movie but then I thought, ‘I’m biting off way more than I can chew with this’.
“A friend of mine Gearoid Farrelly was like, ‘Why don’t you just do it as a play?’
“And I thought that was a great idea.
“Because it is kind of about my journey with my bands and my prior success with my band so I’m using retrospective footage until, basically, it kind of went tits up which brings me back to scene one in the play where it’s me coming back to Dublin after not living here for 25 years to start over from zero, which was pretty much true to life.
“There are some embellishments but it does stick pretty closely to my actual journey.”
I thought there was a lot of you in this story. Like in the story you returned home to Dublin after many years away. What was the feelings of that? You say it went tits up..
“Well the tits up part was kind of gradual.
“I did music in LA.
“I had a quite a good run.
“I wrote for Disney.
“I was in a band.
“It did well.
“But then the music business did kind of wear me down over the years.
“It’s a constant grind.
“It’s very hard to financially plan because you don’t know what’s coming in.
“I have been very lucky but it wasn’t secure so I started to lose a little bit of the drive, I suppose.
“Then I fell in love and I got married to my ex-wife, so I went to Barcelona and that’s when I got a job in tech because I wanted financial security.
“But it kind of sucked the life out of me and I stopped doing music even for fun.
“I just didn’t make time for music which I think is quite typical as you grow older, I think we stop making time for the things that light us up.
“I kind of lost my way a bit.
“And then I lost my relationship as well.
“So the tits up part was my wife saying that it wasn’t working, and she was right.
“But I then just basically had a decision: I could go back to LA or I could go back to Dublin and for some reason, Dublin was calling me because I hadn’t been there for 25 years but I was drawn to it.
“But it was landing in Dublin: I didn’t have a job. I didn’t have a relationship.
“I moved in with my brother for the first while so it was very groundless and that’s basically where the play kicks off really.
“It is just, there I am after getting off my crazy Ryanair flight with frigging hen parties and all of that kind of stuff that just did not match my mood, to start over from zero.
“But really what saved me is that I started to reconnect with the thing that lit me up which was songwriting.
“I live near the sea in South Dublin and during the pandemic people used to go to the sea and get in no matter what the weather was like and I remember walking down and thinking, ‘They seem so connected to what brings them joy’.
“And I just thought, ‘Well, I’ve kind of lost that a little bit’.
“I was kind of jealous of that.
“And bit by bit, I just started (again).
“I bought a new guitar and I just started writing.
“And then the songs just kind of flew out of me like a dam had been broken and then that’s when I started writing my musical and through that process, it just kind of made me feel back in my body, I just started feeling like myself again.
“It just was a real eye opener that I will never neglect that side, the things that light me up again.
“I mean, I used to do music for a living but it wasn’t about that.
“When I was 14, it wasn’t because I wanted to make money out of it.
“I just felt I needed to do it for me so it’s kind of full circle going back to that.
“This play has just been a wonderful experience because it’s given me something new.”
Did you always know it was music for you?
“I would say yes.
“I always remember, even since I was eight, writing melodies.
“The first song I ever wrote was when my dog went missing when I was nine years old and I wrote a song called Chips which was his name.
“That started my journey into songwriting.
“I think Prince was a huge influence.
“Just when I saw him on stage I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do’.
“I played around Dublin for a while. I opened for Jerry Lee Lewis.
“I had a really good start.
“This was when I was really young, 19 or so. I opened for Jerry Lee Lewis and Freddie Starr randomly.
“But you know what? I was so young, I don’t think I realised- I was always grateful for it but now looking back, Jerry Lee Lewis was such an icon and a legend so that was amazing and that further solidified, ‘Wow, this is what I really want to do’.
“At that time Ireland and it’s music was very poptastic.
“I’d always been fascinated by American music.
“I went to LA.
“My plan was to stay for a year but then 21 years later, I was still there.”
You had your music featured in shows like iCarly, Veronica Mars, did you not enjoy those ‘wins’ as much as you should have if you lost your drive for music?
“No, that was wonderful but I have been doing this since I was 19 and what was I? 35 or something.
“I certainly started to feel, ‘Oh my God, am I too old for this? Am I too old?’
“You get those kind of insecurities where you’re just like, ‘Oh, man, am I the joke trying to still kind of go for this as a career when you kind of feel that your time has passed?’
“I did fall victim to that.
“But as much success as I had, I also had a lot of rejection.
“I think I should have just taken a break, but I just stopped.
“I kept doing it but my heart wasn’t in it anymore for a while.
“I knew I needed something different but I wasn’t sure what it was.
“And then I think the play, the musical, that I wrote was exactly what I was looking for because it still is songwriting, it’s storytelling but it’s just a different format that I felt kind of got me excited again.
“It was kind of that slow drip, drip, drip. The air gets sucked out of your tyres but you don’t really notice it because it’s happened so slowly, until one day you realise that things have gone tits up and you just have to do something about it.
“I feel a lot of people, when they saw my play, kind of related to, even if there weren’t musicians, letting go a little bit of what used to light them up, not making time for it.
“I’m hoping that it will inspire people just to get back to what brings them joy because sometimes I think when we get so involved in the details and day to day life that we kind of neglect ourselves.
“And also there’s one part in the play where I am like: When you know, you know.
“And that can be when you’ve found the person you want to marry but also when you know things are going to sh*t.
“We know in our gut when things are off, we feel it and it’s paying attention to that inner voice which I didn’t do for a while.
“That really resonated with people actually.”
You debuted the show at International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival last year, is sexuality a big thing in the story?
“Sexuality is not, funnily enough.
“Even though it’s obviously referenced about my breakup with my ex-wife, it’s kind of done in a very matter of fact way.
“It’s not made into a thing at all.
“It could have been a straight story.
“I kind of like it that way because, especially in Ireland, sexuality was kind of a taboo subject back in the day.”
You came out later in life but then it was a different Ireland that you grew up in..
“I grew up in really the 80s.
“On television, there is a lot of gay characters now.
“I think there’s so much more representation but there wasn’t back in the day so I felt a little embarrassed about it.
“I think I only realised it or allowed myself to realise it when I moved to Los Angeles and even then, I kept it under wraps for a long time because at that stage, I hadn’t told my parents so I didn’t want anyone else to know if my parents didn’t know.
“But in the end, I wish I had come out earlier because everyone was really fine about it so I put myself through torture for nothing.
“I think it was just my own hang ups.
“And then I went from one extreme being very much in the closet to just being the poster girl for gayness, doing all the pride festivals and all of that kind of thing.”
What happened to the band? Did Saucy Monky just run its course or what happened?
“It’s a really good question.
“A few things happened to the band.
“Number one, we were entirely indie.
“We were self-financed and we didn’t even have a manager.
“But it was really hard to sustain that machine financially when we lived in LA and the band were doing well in Europe.
“Number two, I think we were ahead of our time to be honest with you.
“At that stage even though Tom Dunne (Today FM) was so supportive, Hot Press were so supportive at the end of the day commercial radio, especially at that time, didn’t really play women in rock.
“And then number three I was in a relationship with Cynthia (Catania), the lead singer, and just at our pinnacle, we broke up and I don’t think I really gave it credence that that probably impacted it a bit back in the day, but it probably did.
“We were also in the closet back then as well so that didn’t help.
“I think the wind went out of the sail a little bit from all of those things: Losing from the financial end when we were so self-financed, just the industry maybe not embracing women in rock at that time.
“But I have to say that whole experience was probably my most rewarding and fun experience in music because it was all self-financed.
“It was like, ‘Screw it. If we can’t get a major label to sign us…’
“It’s kind of like what I do with my play, ‘Let’s do it ourselves. Screw it’.
“And then the little triumphs are so profound when you do that yourself.
“I’m very proud of what we did.
“Hopefully at some point, we’ll do a Saucy Monky revival because I felt we didn’t have our day in the sun as much as we could have for a variety of reasons.”
What was your highlight of the Saucy Monky days?
“I think opening for the B52s in California.
“That was amazing, sharing the stage with them.
“And I think the first time we played Cork City.
“We’d never played there before but it ended up being sold out.
“It was just a small club but that just felt so triumphant as well.
“We just was like, ‘Wow, maybe we’re managing to do this’.
“Plus we played Oxegen.
“We played a festival in the Czech Republic with Gipsy Kings and Marianne Faithful and I remember we got off the train.
“It was myself, Cynthia, and the drummer Karen Teperberg.
“They sent a van to pick us up and they were looking around, ‘Where’s the rest of your crew?’
“And we were like, ‘We’re the crew’.
“’Where’s the tour manager?’
“’I’m the tour manager and the co- lead singer’.
“But the same with O2 in the park which we played with Westlife and Girls Aloud to 100,000 people.
“We rocked up as one of the only indie, no crew, no manager.
“I think it just showed we were the little engine that could.
“But I have to say even though we had done the festivals and all that, the Cork gig sticks out in my mind because it was our first time playing Cork and I was like, ‘Wow, we sold it out. How did we do that?’”
After writing for film and TV is this play such a joy because it puts you and your music in front of an audience again?
“You’re absolutely right.
“There’s such a kick to hearing your songs on TV absolutely, but nothing beats the energy of a live audience.
“I did miss the performance part so doing 21 shows now, I can’t wait for that but playing with the actual drummer and electric guitars and all of that, that’s something I hope to go back to at some point because that’s such a buzz.”
Sounds like the play has given you back your joy and drive for music, will you do another show?
“I would love to do another one.
“I don’t claim that I’m a playwright.
“It was my story so it wasn’t tremendously hard but what I would actually love to do is collaborate with somebody and just write music for a musical.
“That was my goal actually but no one was knocking down my door to do that so I built my own door.
“I was like, ‘Screw it, I’m going to write my own musical if no one else wants to hire me for theirs’.
“So yeah actually my master plan between you and me- and your readers- is to make this into a movie, what it started out as. The original plan.”
Remember That Time? plays theSpace @ Surgeons’ Hall, Theatre 2 from 1- 23 August 1–23.
To book, click here.
