An unlikely encounter between Jools Holland and a man in a pub in Sheffield set Imelda May on the way to a rewarding career after more than 20 years of performing. How is the Dublin singer handling her success?
SUMMING UP THE capricious nature of show business, the screenwriter William Goldman famously said: “Nobody knows nothing.” But Goldman didn’t allow for a man in a pub in Sheffield. Sitting nursing a pint one night, our man in the pub spotted Jools Holland at the bar. He sidled up to him and bent his ear about a new Dublin singer he had seen playing a few weeks previously. Christ, she could belt them out, and she looked great with her rockabilly quiff. Her name’s Imelda May: you should check her out.
"I'd been going 20 years at that stage. I started singing in Bruxelles, off Grafton Street, when I was 16," says May in her unadulterated Meath Street accent as a smile plays around her lips. "Weddings, office parties, bar mitzvahs, the launch of a boat. The office parties were the worst – people shouting at you to do Kylie Minogue songs. I must have sang Robbie Williams's Angelsa million times. The drunken men would try and grab the microphone off you, and you'd have to, well, tell them off.
"I was living in London with my husband and, yes, times do get hard for an unemployed singer. There'd be times when I'd open the kitchen cupboard and there'd only be a tin of Ambrosia sitting there – oh wait, don't write that down, my ma will kill me! But I had left the day job behind, and as a professional singer you need an album. Darrell converted this cowshed and we begged, stole and borrowed to get Love Tattoorecorded. We had to produce it and mix it ourselves – we all took turns sitting by the desk, wondering what button did what. And, for all of that, every single record company turned it down."
But the man in the pub in Sheffield had started a butterfly effect. Looking for a support act for a show at Kew Gardens, Jools Holland remembered the tip-off and got Imelda May to support him. “He tried to get us on his TV show, but it’s not up to him; the producers decide that, and to them we weren’t a name act,” she says. “He kept pushing for us, though, and one week Natalie Cole fell ill and couldn’t appear, so we got on. The moment the show went out my phone started ringing and wouldn’t stop. The record companies who had turned down the album were now saying, ‘Okay, we didn’t get it last month, but we get it now.’ That’s how mad it is.”
ONE OF THOSE labels picked it up, gave it a lick of paint and watched as it stormed to the top the Irish album chart. But the butterfly effect started by the man in the pub in Sheffield was still working on the chaos theory that underpins the workings of the music industry. Also appearing on Later . . . with Jools Hollandthat same night was one of the best guitarists of the rock era, Jeff Beck, who had never heard a vocalist quite like May before. "I got to walk out on to the stage of a packed Royal Albert Hall because Jeff had us on as support, and then when the Grammys asked him to perform live at their big show earlier this year he got me to sing with him."
The rapid ascent from singing at drunken office parties to singing at the world’s biggest and most-watched music showcase hadn’t left enough time for May to master the art of the award-show goody bag. “There’s this big room backstage and all these tables full of free stuff. You actually have a woman following you who puts the stuff you want into a bag for you,” she says. “But I’d get talking to all the people at the tables, listening to how they started their companies and hearing their life story. I only managed to get a camera, a suitcase, a pair of gold runners and some face cream before I had to go and get ready. Jeff was laughing at me later, telling me that all the good stuff, the Gucci and all of that, was down the other end and that you’re supposed to just go in and get what you want and not spend your time talking to the people behind the tables. I was raging, and raging again to find out that I couldn’t use the voucher for a facial in New York and the voucher for the florist in Los Angeles and the free holiday that I got, because I had to go straight back on tour.”
THE YOUNGEST OF five children, the 36-year-old grew up in a music-loving family. “My father had loads of Elvis, Bing Crosby, Judy Garland and Deanna Durbin records,” she says. “I used to love when the record ended and I’d run to the record player and turn over the album for him – just the feel of the vinyl.
“And then my mother and some of her friends set up the Liberties Musical Drama Group. This would have been during the 1980s, when there was a lot of unemployment and drug use, not just in the Liberties but in all parts of Dublin. The council had ripped up the playgrounds because of the amount of compensation claims, and while the boys could still play football the girls had nothing. We loved the music and drama group – we weren’t like stage-school kids today, not looking to make a career out of it. Everyone got their fair share, and sometimes, deliberately, the shyest child would be given the lead role. We were in Tops of the Towns and everything.”
Instead of bedtime stories May would get bedtime songs. "My mother loves her music. I'd jump into bed with her at night time, and we'd listen to music radio together – fantastic memories. She'd always sing Judy Garland's I'm Always Chasing Rainbowsfor me." She stares out of a window and softly sings: "At the end of the rainbow there's happiness, and to find it how often I've tried. But my life is a race, just a wild goose chase, and my dreams have all been denied.
“I come from a great area, a place where families go back generations,” she says. “I’m always down in Fusco’s chipper or in Jack Roche’s grocers. People are great, always saying to me, ‘Who did you meet this week?’ and, ‘We’re living all this through you.’ ”
IF, AFTER 20 YEARS, she has finally made some sort of impact, there are huge expectations for what follows now. Her new album, Mayhem, is having a big promotional budget thrown at it, and there could well be a number-one single before the end of the year with her best song to date, Kentish Town Waltz. With faint echoes of Fairytale of New York, May sings about the good old, bad old days as an unemployed singer:
Do you remember we traipsed around From pub to pound shop through Kentish Town
Only a fiver to our name,
The drunk on the doorstep had more to our shame . . .
The stews that lasted three days into four The bailiffs returned to our door
but we stuck with each other with all our might
We pulled it together and held on tight
And I’m glad for us, I’m glad mo chroí
But it’s nothing to anyone except you and me.
Written about her husband and the lone tin of Ambrosia in the cupboard, this beguiling guitar ballad is a step away from May's usual rockabilly sound, and Mayhemin general shows an artist dipping deep into newer genres for her – straight-up blues, country-inflected numbers and touching torch songs. "There's also a cover of Tainted Loveon there, and I wanted to reclaim that as a female voice, because the first person to have a hit with it, well before Soft Cell, was Gloria Jones ," she says. "We had been on the Dermot O'Leary radio show on the BBC, and you have to do a cover version when you go on. He didn't know heroes of mine such as Wanda Jackson, so we settled on that because a while before we had had this lock-in in a pub in Portsmouth after a gig. I remember a fox running in and eating all our Chinese takeaway, and we lost our double-bass player and had to use satnav to find him. And everyone in the pub was belting out Tainted Love."
A photo shoot awaits her now. Pausing to examine my shoes, thoroughly approvingly – “Never stint on shoes,” she says – she hugs me to near death before grabbing a case full of outfits and making her exit. As her mother used to sing to her as a child, “at the end of the rainbow there’s happiness”. Imelda May’s dreams are no longer being denied.
Mayhemis released on Friday
