Rock and Pop: Interview - Camille O’Sullivan
Published: 24 February, 2011
by ROISIN GADELRAB
I’M a big scaredy-cat,” Camille O’Sullivan declares, explaining how she first turned to singing.
It’s not how one might describe a woman who abandoned a safe career in architecture after a serious car accident to pursue a not so stable life as a singer.
But that’s how the Irish-French singer sees herself.
Audiences who witness Camille’s stage antics – including being electrocuted and burned after wrapping Christmas lights around herself, stumbling over speakers and landing on glass, teetering on the edge of tables in heels – might disagree.
She may loosely inhabit the cabaret genre, but to confine her to that term would do her a disservice.
Camille uses her wild, dark, storytelling streak, to interpret the likes of Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Jacques Brel and Arcade Fire by becoming their most vivid characters.
Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody recently wrote a song for her and she’s performed with Shane MacGowan, Tim Robbins and Damien Rice. Camille is holding a charity Q&A at the Shaw Theatre in aid of Mayor of Camden Jonathan Simpson’s Roundhouse Trust charity (March 3).
But she fears the idea may suggest she’s an “egomaniac”, adding: “As long as people know I’m not going (affects luvvie voice), ‘I’ve so many things to tell the theatre’ – that would horrify me. I always hoped someone could’ve guided me and I’m happy to share my experience in what is quite a closed, unstable profession. I still think I’m on that journey, it’s not authority, I spend my time worrying about the next gig.”
Camille says she loved singing from an early age but it wasn’t until she went to Berlin that she realised she wanted to emulate the types of characters personified in Brecht and Eisler songs.
She said: “It’s good to have good fun but it’s also nice to go to a dark place to make people have a bit of black humour. You’ve got to have a certain amount of obsession to keep singing people’s songs that aren’t your own.”
As an architect, Camille flirted with the idea of becoming a professional singer but it was a terrible accident, that changed her life: “I was on morphine and euphoric to be alive. I was like, ‘what are you doing? This is your life’. I don’t want to be 80 and look back and think I didn’t try. It took a year to use my hands, walk again and hand in my notice.
“I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I placed every obstacle because I was blooming nervous and not confident. I’m a big scaredy cat.”
Her days are now a whirlwind of tours and Camille avoids hotels. She recently shared a flat in Soho with the “rubber man” (who can put his body through tennis rackets) and is currently staying in a cottage in Stratford, while working with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
She said: “I want globetrotter luggage but I know it’d cost too much. It’s my dream that I would actually look like a cool traveller when I’m going places instead of the wheel that’s falling off the suitcase today.”