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If you thought cabaret was just about sexy chanteuses in fishnet stockings and bowler hats, you'll be in for a surprise when Camille O'Sullivan plays at the Auckland Festival Club next month. Hailed by Time Out London as "the wildcat who made cabaret cool again", the Dublin-based singer has brought a contemporary edge to the old form.
"I hate to call it cabaret because it's a mixture of music, theatre and cabaret," she says. "Audiences aren't used to that. I'm a very happy person but I like darkness. What I do is lull the audience into a false sense of security in the first act, and then in the second, once they have a measure of you, you can go to this other place. It's about being emotive. I'm used to it because I'm half-Irish, half-French, which is as emotional as you can get. We're talkative and cry at the smallest thing."
At her recent Dark Angel show at London's Roundhouse, O'Sullivan appeared to be on the verge of tears for most of its two-hour duration as she alternated between moments of delicate intimacy and manically throwing herself at unsuspecting audience members and stealing their drinks. "I open like a valve," she says. "I can be quite evil on stage but quite defensive as well."
She proves to be more reserved when we meet at a Soho juice bar around the corner from the Hippodrome, where she was performing as part of fellow Auckland Festival guests La Clique's ensemble cast.
"I'm a completely different person off-stage to what I am on," she says. "You must find that with a lot of people. They're shyer in real life even if they're talkative. People always think that I'm high-octane but you live out your fantasy on stage and that's kind of what it is for me with these songs."
Unlike burlesque queen Dita Von Teese, who spends hours in makeup before her glamorous photo shoots, O'Sullivan prefers a more natural brand of glamour. "She's so beautiful, but I always laugh because I could never keep her style going," she says. "People say to me, 'You don't care if you look ugly as a woman', which I think is a bit unfair. But my nail varnish is always slightly chipped and I'm happy that it's slightly falling apart. It's probably more
Miss Haversham that I'm heading towards."
The daughter of an Irish racing car driver and a French artist, O'Sullivan was born in London but grew up in the small village of Passage West, near Cork. Although she sang in school productions and harboured ambitions to become an actor, she trained as an architect and didn't consider a full-time musical career.
"I hadn't been taught as a singer but I used to listen to Ella Fitzgerald and learn her way of singing," she says. "I probably still don't feel confident in my vocal abilities but I feel more confident that it is my true voice."
Everything changed for O'Sullivan after a car crash put her out of action for a year. "I had to learn how to walk again," she recalls. "I don't want to make it sound like it was easy but I feel like there was a life before that and a life after that. You have so many big fears but 'so what? Just do it!' You have to be brave in whatever career you do. I thought that I'd hate to be 90 regretting that I hadn't done it because at that stage I was in my bed out of my head on morphine."
She started off small, playing to just 30 people while she was still on her crutches. "My parents were horrified but supportive," she says. "They said, 'don't worry if it doesn't work out, you can always go back to architecture'."
At first, she struggled to find Irish venues that would allow her to perform. "They said 'it's French and German and too dramatic'," laughs O'Sullivan, who also encountered resistance because she doesn't write her own songs.
"In Ireland, they're so into the whole singer-songwriter thing that for years I was highly embarrassed to say that I sing other people's work," she says. "But now I've realised that's what I'm good at, inhabiting a song and singing it in a completely different way."
O'Sullivan regularly mixes timeless classics by Jacques Brel and Kurt Weill with more modern masterpieces by Tom Waits, Radiohead and David Bowie. But Nick Cave is her favourite. "I'm obsessed with him, not in a romantic way but purely his music," she admits. "The Brel comes from my mother when I was growing up. The connective thing is that it's all narrative storytelling and they're all emotional but not over-sentimental. They're truthful and I like the truth of people, the truth of songs."
But the most heartfelt moment at the Roundhouse was when she performed a heartfelt version of Hurt, which owed more to Johnny Cash's haunting cover than Nine Inch Nails' industrial original.
"It's a dangerous one to have done because it's associated so much with Johnny Cash and I usually stay away from songs that are too well-known," she says. "But then I thought 'oh God, I like it so much' so I did it from the point of view of a woman, which comes from a different place. It's about the self-pain, the torture that every person puts themselves through."Stephen Jewell
Who: Camille O'Sullivan
What: The Dark Angel of Cabaret
Where and when: Festival Club, March 10-13
Tickets: $40-$45 at www.the-edge.co.nz
