“I was an architect before and I always had in the back of my head a mad idea to run away with the circus,” she says. “Then one day I was looking online and I saw this beautiful mirrored tent. David Bates, who owns The Famous Spiegeltent now, he says he gets about 200 emails a day from performers who are desperate to perform there. I did send him a little card and he said, ‘It was formal but it did the trick,’ in the sense of him listening to the CD.”
This was back in 2004, and before long O’Sullivan was travelling around the UK with The Famous Spiegeltent – landing a key role in Bates’ La Clique, which led to an appearance in Stephen Frears’ 2005 flick Mrs. Henderson Presents, alongside Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. Thanks to her theatrical performance style and compelling recorded output, O’Sullivan’s now a respected artist in her own right. In recent years, she’s appeared on BBC’s Later With Jools Holland, as well as taking the stage at the Sydney Opera House.
Later this month, O’Sullivan heads our way for a three night run at the Arts Centre’s Fairfax Studio. Fairfax Studio is more commonly used as a drama space than a live music venue, which suits O’Sullivan just fine. The singer’s repertoire largely consists of cover songs, but her live shows aren’t about simple reenactment. Rather, she presents an exceptionally active display, which can be theatrically dazzling and brutally emotional.
“Living in Ireland, the big thing in our country is the singer/songwriter,” she says. “The only way I could reconcile with that over the years was the nice thing of people thinking [the songs] were my own. A lot of actresses go on stage and take the same play again and again and a different actress does it. When I look at Tom Waits and Nick Cave, I go, ‘There’s a story in there.’ They are quite narrative – even Radiohead, which sometimes you don’t even know what the lyric is saying – you can find something in it to create an atmosphere.”
For the forthcoming trio of gigs in Melbourne, O’Sullivan will showcase her latest release, 2012’s Changeling. In the earlier part of her career, O’Sullivan focused on songs written by the likes of Jacques Brel and Tom Lehrer. With Changeling,however, she decided to look towards a bunch of contemporary artists.
“Radiohead and Tom Waits and Arcade Fire, it’s stuff I’ve been doing over the years,” she says. “I suppose I looked more at what was in my own record collection. I thought, ‘Look, enjoy yourself.’ As a performer you’ve just got to keep on evolving.”
This decision also led O’Sullivan to tackle songs by Gillian Welch, Nine Inch Nails and David Bowie on Changeling. In spite of this, her setlists aren’t solely determined by her personal tastes.
“You need variety in the show,” she says. “If I had the chance I’d probably be doing all melancholy, dark songs like Nick Cave. But I make sure there’s variety, like things like In These Shoes? [by Kirsty MacColl]. The idea is you can change quickly from being quite light to quite dark or quite funny.
“The interesting thing for me as a woman too is choosing songs that show different facets to yourself. I’m a sentimental person but not in the picket fence kind of way. That’s why I zone in on the more bittersweet darker stuff. As a woman you do want to look good, but don’t take yourself too seriously. Some stuff is really tough songs, really quite hard, and then you go, ‘Right, that was a bitter pill, now let’s give them something really enjoyable’.”
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
