CAMILLE O’SULLIVAN | LIVE REVIEW

St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Thurs 23 Apr

You really don’t know what to expect when seeing Camille O’Sullivan live (unless you’ve seen her before, obviously); I definitely didn’t expect to hear an Oasis cover when I attended O’Sullivan’s gig. I was joined in the audience by a mainly middle-aged crowd in St David’s Hall’s bar area stage as she stopped in Cardiff on her The Carny Dream tour.

O’Sullivan isn’t a big fan of being categorised as a cabaret artist, but that is the nearest existing genre to place her. A better way to describe her might be as a vocal/rock-chanteuse, a modern torch singer who reinterprets other people’s songs by embodying them. The perfect example of this is her performance of the 1960s Leiber and Stoller hit Is That All There Is? In O’Sullivan’s hands this song truly becomes a Weimar-style biographical saga, in the vein of Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin’s The Saga Of Jenny; for a few seconds I found myself thinking “hang on, is she actually talking about herself?”.

Varied is also an appropriate word to describe Camille O’Sullivan’s live gigs. More than once she performed a song in a way that had the audience silent. With Nick Cave’s Into My Arms and Fascinating Aida’s Look Mummy, No Hands the audience was enthralled, you could hear the old clichéd pin drop; similarly with an a capella version of Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam. Her version of Leonard Cohen’s How The Light Gets In is just plain beautiful and at the other end of the spectrum is Purple Rain, where you could be forgiven for thinking O’Sullivan is channelling Janis Joplin.

The night ends with the previously mentioned Cohen and Prince tributes, along with a tribute to Bowie, a huge influence on O’Sullivan. Where Are We Now?, from Bowie’s last-but-one album, leads straight into All The Young Dudes, she finishes the tribute with Five Years from Ziggy Stardust – not the usual Bowie covers then.

words CHRIS WILLIAMS photos GARETH GRIFFITHS