“I had Barack [Obama] doing backing vocals for me… although I had him do an audition first,” singer/producer/poet Imelda May told Irish Times columnist Róisín Ingle on the last night of the Irish Times Summer Nights Festival on Thursday.
Imelda noted that she has met the former first couple on a couple of occasions: “They’re such a charming couple – he’s really sweet and funny.”
Michelle and Barack had also heard some of Imelda’s spoken word poetry during a lunch. In addition to her poem ‘Becoming’, she also recited GBH (or Grievous Battery Harm), an ode to self-pleasure and sex toys.
Summer Nights
“I worry a lot of women find it hard to just chill out with that stuff and relax and accept it as part of normal life, when I don’t think men have a problem with it. To know yourself is wonderful in every way.”
After reciting the poem, Imelda elaborated: “My girlfriends kept asking me to recite it on nights out, Margarita in hand.”
“[My girlfriends] and I call ourselves ‘the coven’,” Imelda added, before hinting that she sent her friends a battery-operated gift.
“I sent them all a Christmas present with the note, ‘because every witch needs a wand’”.
Currently in lockdown in the UK with her seven-year-old daughter Violet, Imelda reflected with Róisín about her teenage years, when her dad dropped her and picked her up from performing at Bruxelles.
“I always had a wildness in me – my parents love to tell me that,” Imelda said. “We didn’t have a phone, so I used to ring Mrs Walsh across the road and do a ‘tell me Mam I won’t be home’ kind of thing.
“My daughter seems to be very similar – she has a wild streak in her,” Imelda added. “She’s rebellious. I asked my Mam what she did with me [when I was like that] and she said, ‘break the bad habits, but never break their spirit’.”
As if to illustrate her point, Violet pulled a ‘Sky News Mum’ and asked for biscuits during her Zoom event with The Irish Times (“She’s milking it. She knows I’m on here. She’s a little Madam.”).
At the outset of her career, Imelda met with several record companies. “\[ONE\] asked me to be the Irish version of someone else, and I was highly insulted. The thoughts didn’t appeal at all,” Imelda revealed.
“I opened for Kirsty McColl at the Jazz Café when I started out. My job was in a restaurant a stone’s throw from the Jazz Café, and I felt glorious on the stage. Then I had to get up early, go to work and empty the dishwasher.”
On her decision to change her trademark rockabilly image, Imelda noted that she finds attention around her image change “really tedious”.
“I changed four or five years ago and I still have people saying, ‘would you not go back to this?’ Dear Jesus, I’ve spent my life writing and trying to improve as a writer. I felt irritated that people would ask about my style more than what I was actually doing.
“I’ll always evolve and I’ll do it again. If I feel too comfortable, it’s detrimental to art. You don’t grow or take risks if you’re not slightly pushing yourself. When people asked me about my hair all the time I thought, ‘I’m sick of this, I’ll change it’, and they’re still asking me about it.”
The Irish Times Summer Nights festival – supported by Peugeot – is a series of online talks that began on Monday 13th. Streams of each event will be made available online to all those who registered when the festival ends. For more, see irishtimes.com/summernights.
