“It’s fitting”, says Camille O’Sullivan that her new show, Loveletter, her twentieth at the Fringe, will be in a church.
“We’re doing it in a beautiful church, the Assembly Roxy – which I love.”
The Irish singer has created the work as a tribute to her friends Shane MacGowan and Sinéad O’Connor, who both died in 2023.
MacGowan and O’Sullivan were particularly close. She toured with The Pogues when they toured ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’ and often stood in for Kirsty MacColl when they performed ‘Fairytale of New York’ after MacColl’s death.
“He told me he always felt bad about singing it with me. He loved Kirsty so much.”
MacGowan, for all his fierceness, was all about love. “I was always teasing Shane – going ‘You little softie’ – in his songs there was always a dream, or a kiss. He was a romantic.”
He was hit hard by the death of Sinead O’Connor – as was O’Sullivan. There will be grief in Loveletter of course – but also a real appreciation of the bravery and spirit of these trailblazing talents.
“She was a free bird and she was real. It cost her so much that she was living in the public eye.”
O’Sullivan remembers O’Connor tearing up the photograph of the Pope on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in 1992 and being upfront about issues such as sexual abuse and abortion. “If you look back at the things she said, she was ahead of her time.
“She wore her heart on her sleeve.”
“Both Sinéad and Shane were child-like. I remember her chasing me round the back of the stage and laughing, then going on stage. She was fearless.”
O’Sullivan plans to perform O’Connor’s songs ‘Take Me To Church’ and ‘No Man’s Woman’ together with songs written by Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Radiohead and Nick Cave. “With my stuff it is all about interpreting songs – finding different emotions.”
She’s not sure whether or not to do ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ – the huge international hit written for O’Connor by Prince.
“Do you think people will want to hear ‘Nothing Compare 2 U?” she asks – genuinely interested in what I have to say.
In conversation O’Sullivan is nervy, uncertain, gushing, lyrical and funny. She says her French mother said she’d be too serious a performer if she was all French. “She said it’s a good thing you have the crazy Irish part of you.”
Even after twenty years she says: “Edinburgh is a scary place.” But it’s made her the artist she is, from subversive late-night spots with the original nightclub circus show La Clique to appearing in the cavernous Assembly Hall on the Mound in her own sell out show.
“If I hadn’t had Edinburgh over the years I don’t know where I’d be. You have to keep finding new ways to do things.”
She says as she’s grown older, she’s become looser on stage, more able to explore her uncertainties in public. For one show she even appeared on show in curlers and a nightie.
“Someone said to me after a show: ‘I loved you when you were enigmatic – but now you’re losing it I love you more. It’s like being a child on stage.”
That emotion, that child-like simplicity mixed with intensity, is what she loved in both O’Connor and MacGowan, and what she hopes to bring to her interpretation of their songs.
“Of course, you make a song your own – but it takes a long time. It took me a year to figure out’ The Ship Song.’
From the Shane MacGowan songbook she’ll probably choose ‘The Old Main Drag’ and ‘Rainy Night In Soho’.
She will definitely include ‘The Majestic Shannon’, which will always reminds her of that day in December at Nenagh Tipperary, when she sang in the church MacGowan went to as a child and visited the tiny house his family owned in the countryside.
At Shane MacGowan’s funeral, in front of the cream of Irish musical talent, in a crowd that included his family, Johnny Depp and Nick Cave, O’Sullivan sang MacGowan’s song ‘Haunted’, “I want to be haunted by the ghost.. Of your precious love.”
“I remember looking at the coffin and thinking: ‘What would Shane do?’ And of course the answer was: ‘Go for it.’.”
Camille O’Sullivan, Loveletter, 21.35 Assembly Roxy, July 31 – August 17
https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/camille-o-sullivan-loveletter
