She's Ireland's biggest musical export since Westlife, and now she's following them to the O2. Imelda May and fellow Dubliner LAUREN MURPHYexchange festive how'r'yas
IMELDA MAY would like to make one thing clear: if she has to answer one more question about Findus Fish Fingers, she might regret her actions.
You can’t blame her, really. Who wants to spend time talking about a throwaway radio ad undertaken as a teenager, when you’re one of Irish music’s biggest exports since... gulp... Westlife?
In many ways, the rockabilly queen's dominance has stretched even further afield than that of the pop puppets, particularly since the last year's Mayhemfortified a fanbase won over by 2008's breakthrough album Love Tattoo.
Grammys performance? In the bag. US primetime chat show appearances? No problem. Ego kept in check throughout? Absolutely. Life may be lived inside something of a bubble these days, but Imelda May Higham is as normal as they come – for a superstar-in-waiting.
"Maybe if it all stopped, you'd think 'God, we've done this and done that', or sometimes – say when we were doing Jay Leno,when he's introducing you and he starts saying everything that you've done – then I get impressed! I say 'That does sound good'," she says with a gleeful machine-gun cackle.
“In a way, it’s been all very gradual for me – and I suppose, being that little bit older as well [she is 37], you take it as it comes.”
Has she been starstruck by anybody she’s met along the way? “I thought I was gonna be starstruck by David Bowie, but he was so nice that he made me feel at ease. I suppose Clint Eastwood. When I met him, I couldn’t string a sentence together, apart from ‘I love yooouuu!’
“And the other was Eartha Kitt. She told me off, because I told her it was a ‘great gig’ and she said she doesn’t do those anymore: “It was a show, darling.” Then I went to shake her hand and she put it out for me to kiss it. So that was a bit odd. But yeah, I’m gettin’ around. It’s mad, isn’t it?!”
It’s hard to imagine May getting ideas above her station, although many people wondered if perhaps fame had changed her when stories surfaced earlier this year of her allegedly kicking support band The Ettes off a US tour for allegedly trash-talking her in an interview.The Dubliner tells another side of the story.
“I’m not one of those people who do tit-for-tat stories; they were doing interviews left, right and centre, so I said I’d just leave them to it,” she says.
“I like to help support bands out in the exact same way I’ve been helped out. You’re trying to get out there to a bigger audience, a different audience. And I always pay the support band well; a lot of bands won’t pay them, or use a DJ or comedian, or whatever. I make sure they’re fed, and that they have plenty of beers in the fridge, and make sure they can sell their CDs.
“In saying that, I’m also a big believer in support bands being easy to deal with, so when I’m turning up to my own gigs, I have no problems. And I just can’t say that for that band. I sent a message to them asking them to turn up and we’d have a chat, smooth it all out, and it’d all be fine, and they never turned up.
“They went mental instead. So I said, OK, forget it. It wasn’t worth it for everyone who was working for me, they were having a hard time too.”
Much has been made of May’s roots in inner-city Dublin, her supportive family and her proud neighbours. Yet because of her background, the press has conveniently molded her into a “working-class hero”. Isn’t that uncomfortable for any musician who wants to be judged by their music alone?
“It’s definitely about the music, but there’s no point denying who you are, either,” she shrugs. “You can’t pretend you’re anything that you’re not, and I’m very proud of being working class. It’s very rare that you get working-class people involved in music these days, actually, so I’m happy to fly that flag and represent them, if it encourages others. I was brought up to believe that if you work hard enough at anything, you can do well. And you don’t have to go to a big music college, or stage schools to do what I’m doing, anyway.”
Regardless of the location of her upbringing, one constant in the Clabby household was music. Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran featured alongside usual 1980s pop suspects such as Wet Wet Wet, Rick Astley and The Communards, until the teenage May began rock‘n’roll crooning in clubs such as Bruxelles in Dublin’s city centre at the weekends.
After school, an assortment of jobs followed – one in a nursing home for the elderly where she “ended up singing to them anyway”. A career in music was inevitable. “I was thinking about going into musical therapy after that if the gigs didn’t work out, but I’m glad it did.”
But May can't quite pinpoint the catalyst for Love Tattoo's success. How does a performer of what is still a niche musical genre end up bringing rockabilly songs into the pop charts?
“You’re right, it’s niche music, and I never expected it to take off like it did,” she nods. “I honestly thought I’d be selling CDs from a suitcase at the back of the gig, which is what we were doing for a while, because I hadn’t got a record company. I think something happened when I started this band. I noticed the audience was getting bigger very quickly. We’d do a gig, and there’d be 20 people at it. The next one would have 50, and the next would have 100, and so on. To me, that seemed to be down to word of mouth. Other than that, I don’t know.
“I suppose I had a lot of belief in it myself. I was enjoying myself, I knew the audience were enjoying themselves – or, I hoped that they were – and I think it was time for a bit of rock’n’roll. It seems recessions work that way, too. People want value for their money; they wanna go to a gig and see the music performed well. There was no big campaign with millions of pounds behind it. We were just gigging, gigging, gigging – and we still are, because that’s what we love to do.”
With so much gigging afoot, it’s difficult to write on the road, when “daydreaming” is a luxury, although she plans to take a couple of months off early next year. Her new material won’t bow to the commercialised charts or make allowances for her success, either.
"The next album will still be me and my band – the same influences – but I'll be touching more on the rawness of the rockabilly edge. With bands like The Cramps, and The Pretenders and The Clash, you could hear the rockabilly influences. I wanted to pick up on that post-punk on Mayhem, and I'd like to explore more of that with the next album. I just want it to be out-and-out rock'n'roll."
And where will the next few years take her? Projects for the near future include a pilot rockabilly show for BBC Radio 2 with husband and guitarist Darrel Higham (to be broadcast next Thursday at 11pm), and although she says her ultimate ambition is to record a Bond theme ("ever since I was a little girl and saw Gladys Knight singing License to Kill"), she'd be happy to delve further into film scoring work – preferably with Quentin Tarantino, "if he ever needs anything".
“Other than that, I’m happy to traipse around the world gigging. I’m very, very happy with how it’s all going, and we’ll just continue to do the same, really. People can see through you very quickly, and I don’t think you should ever underestimate an audience. I think people can smell insincerity a mile away, but I think people realise that with me, it’s my whole life. It’s what I’m into, I’ve been into it my whole life, and I do it with as much passion as I can. It’s not a gimmick.”
Home for the holliers
‘I’VE NEVER NOT been in Dublin for Christmas – I’d cry if I wasn’t! In the past few years, I’ve gone in to Glen Hansard’s Christmas Eve busking session on Grafton Street with my dad, pass the hat around and make loads of money for the homeless.
And there’s always lots of mass, too. I think we’re the only family I know that goes to mass on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. My sister and her husband sing at Christmas Day mass and lately she’s been asking me to join her on some harmonies, so that’s turned into a family do.
Otherwise, just the normal. Doing the last-minute preparations for the food, putting up the decorations, making mince pies, eating as much as you can until you feel ill and fall asleep with a party
hat on.and hopefully have a good oul’ sing-song at the end of the night.”
