CityLife

Camille's diva of dark cabaret

ALTHOUGH she has French blood from her artist mother (her dad is a racing driver!), the Irish minx Camille O'Sullivan, who brings her brilliant La Fille du Cirque show to The Lowry this weekend, is definitely not to be confused with the similarly-named French art-rocker Camille.

Our Camille, who has been one of the big hits of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the last few years, is a performer who brings cabaret thrillingly up to date, mixing the familiar likes of Brecht and Brel with Tom Waits and Nick Cave, not to mention Bowie and Kirsty MacColl.

It's all rendered in a style that's overtly sexual and, as she says, "can be a bit mad. Sometimes afterwards I can be a bit embarrassed by what I get up to on stage, but the point about these songs, and the reason why I love them, is that you can really inhabit them. My audience think I'm this feisty thing but I'm more eccentric, I think.

"You should always push yourself as a performer, to see how far you can go. If you're scared of something, that's usually what you should go towards," she maintains.

"I feel it's necessary to not just do things to please. I sometimes worried about that in the past. I thought, 'If I don't want to alienate people, I shouldn't perform'. But I would have given up if I'd stayed doing Dietrich and Piaf in a studied way, that cafe-cabaret version, where you're making it easy instead of pushing yourself."

These days, she can sell out venues such Sydney Opera House and Edinburgh's Spiegeltent without much trouble but it was by no means always certain she'd go down this career path. She studied painting for a year in Dublin, but left because she felt "if I study any more that might kill my love for it."

University College Dublin

She enrolled in University College Dublin to study architecture, while singing in clubs at night. During a year off her studies, she took a job in an architect's office in Berlin where she regularly attended the cabaret clubs.

"It was the most extraordinary summer of my life and I thought I could spend the rest of my life singing this type of music," she enthuses. The famous cabaret singer Agnes Bernelle encouraged her to do just that, adding "to do this right, you have to be a better actress than a singer, it's all about the story."

Returning to Dublin and graduating in 1996 with the highest marks at the university in a decade, she then worked as an architect during the day, winning an Architectural Association of Ireland award in the process, while continuing to perform in clubs at night. But in 1999, she was involved in a near-fatal car crash.

"The accident was the thing that catapulted me to get up and do the things in my life," O'Sullivan says.

Full-time

"I was always scared to do performance full-time before that. When I had the accident, I was a year out from everything, learning how to walk and do the basic things. I couldn't give a damn whether I could do architecture or not, because at that stage you're happy to smell the flowers.

"That was when I realised, 'What am I wasting my time for?' Even if I am scared of going up in front of people, even if I do fall on my face, I thought, 'I'm going to have to do it now. Because I only have this one life and it could have all ended then.'"

Since then, O'Sullivan's vampish lack of inhibition on stage has been her one of her most striking assets.

"When you're doing it every day it can be a bit exhausting, but I need it," she says. "I am not that kind of person offstage, I'm very reserved. It's like most actors, it's an excuse to be able to liberate yourself and liberate any reserve - and I have plenty of that. So I can see why I'm doing it.

"Even if you're playing wonderful places such as Sydney Opera House, you'll always be that performer out there by herself, like you were when you started all those years ago," reflects the singer, who debuted a "darker and madder" show at Edinburgh this year but returns to La Fille du Cirque for this first British tour.

"It's like you're constantly challenging yourself, and you think, 'If I stay at this another five years, I'll be different again'. So you just keep going."

Camille O'Sullivan plays The Lowry on Sunday, August 31. £17.50. Click here for tickets.