Review: Camille O’Sullivan at The Embassy

Camille O’Sullivan: Loveletter at The Embassy
Saturday, March 1, 2025

Camille O’Sullivan is an utterly engaging, wild, wonderfully messy, all-too-human, all-too-Irish singer. And that’s just her stage presence. When she opens her mouth to sing, she reveals an unearthly, powerful and captivating voice. Sultry, soaring, sustaining notes for an impossibly long time, yet capable of reaching down softly into the tenderest part of your being. Marianne Faithfull, Edith Piaf, Marlene Dietrich, PJ Harvey, and her very own favourite and friend, Sinead O’Connor, come to mind.

Loveletter, O’Sullivan’s Perth Festival show at the Town Hall, was a tribute to O’Connor and their fellow Irish singer, the late great Shane McGowan, whom O’Sullivan also knew and worked with. The show was peppered with stories of these two iconic characters, their flawed humanity and giant hearts. But the repertoire extended beyond them to include songs by her other late heroes David Bowie, Jacques Brel, and Kirsty MacColl, as well as her still alive and singing favourites Nick Cave, Tom Waits and Radiohead.

Apart from two pre-recorded band tracks—Cave’s Jubilee Street and MacColl’s In These Shoes—the songs were presented in a spare style. O’Sullivan’s sole accompanist was her long-term MD and collaborator, Feargal Murray. Alternating between grand piano and electric keyboard with one dextrous moment doubling on trumpet, Murray provided all the support O’Sullivan needed. On two occasions she even dispensed with that: her a cappella renditions of Jacque Brel’s The Port of Amsterdam and Sinead O’Connor’s Is This Heart were among the show’s most moving moments.

It can be unsettling for both singer and audience when a performer looks directly into someone’s eyes while singing. Many singers choose to focus on the cheek or forehead instead lest the eye contact throw them off their lyrics. Not so O’Sullivan. Not only were the people in the front row subjected to the unexpected intimacy of her eye, but she twice left the stage to walk through the room and engage candidly with individuals. After the show, signing CDs, she was similarly warm and engaging, talking her heart out to everyone who came up to her—to the point that the ushers had to kick everyone out so they could sound-check the next show.

This intimate attitude comes in part from Sinead O’Connor, another famously down-to-earth person who thought nothing of speaking from the heart and engaging warmly with her fellow performers—though she tended to be a bit more frosty with her audiences.

O’Sullivan’s approach to singing is captured in this quote from an interview.

“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 difficult, provocative, dark songs.’ 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.”

And push herself she did. At the end of some songs, she collapsed onto the stage—after one, she rolled onto her back and waved her legs in the air; after another, she burst into tears. And always she launched into a babbling stream of chaotic anecdotes. She claimed to often regret this the next day—”Oh, no, did I really say that? Why can’t I be enigmatic?” She needn’t worry. Her overall shambolic demeanour and quips about her worn-out boots held together by gaffer tape were hilarious and endearing. You were watching a warm human being let it all out.

As well as an accomplished singer, O’Sullivan is a highly regarded actress on stage and screen. She won a prestigious Herald Angel Award for her solo performance in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Rape of Lucrece at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2012 and more recently appeared in Woyzeck at the Barbican. Her film credits include the vaudeville star Jane in Stephen Frears film Mrs Henderson Presents (2005), performing opposite Judy Dench and Bob Hoskins, as well as roles in Rebellion and Pick Ups.

Her ‘Best Music’ awards include the Dublin, Brighton and Melbourne Festivals. She won the Spirit of the Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 and the Irish Tatler Woman of the Year Music Award in 2011. Her sold-out run at Sydney Festival in 2015 won her a Helpmann Award for best performance. She gave a show-stealing appearance on Later with Jools Holland in 2009 that has been voted among the top 25 performances ever on that legendary BBC program and was chosen by Yoko Ono in 2013 to perform Double Fantasy Live at Meltdown Royal Festival Hall alongside Patti Smith and Sean Lennon. As Mojo Mag put it, “O’Sullivan’s lyrical performance was the real show-stopper.”

In addition to these accolades as a performer, she was formerly an award-winning architect and portrait painter. She studied architecture at University College Dublin, graduating with first-class honours and the highest marks in a decade. While studying, she took any and every opportunity to air her voice and became known around campus as ‘the singing architect.’ She continued performing in local clubs when she launched her architectural career, along the way picking up an award from the Architectural Association of Ireland—not for her singing moniker but for her designs.

The ‘Embassy Ball Room’ was the perfect cabaret setting for her Perth show. The Weimar feel of O’Sullivan’s laddered stockings, flapper’s veil, and quirky accoutrements—the manikins laden with op shop gowns and furs, the taxidermied fox’s head, and plastic white rabbit—sat delightfully against the decorated hall’s bunting and swags, round lamp-lit tables, and vast echoing vault.

The stand-out songs in the show included her rendition of The Pogues’ A Rainy Night In Soho and her Bowie medley Where Are We Now/Quicksand, as well as the finale of Nick Cave’s ever-popular The Ship Song, where she coaxed the audience into singing along with her. The Perth crowd ‘made a little history’ by proving themselves a rich impromptu choir.

But the unexpected highlight of the night was not one of her songs but O’Sullivan’s moving recitation of the closing to James Joyce’s short story The Dead, a paragraph that runs deep through the Irish soul. To bastardise Joyce’s closing line:

“[The audience’s collective] soul swooned slowly as [they] heard [O’Sullivan’s voice] falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, on all the living and the dead.’

That’s a fitting summation of a show that, in such a grand, chaotic style and through such an amazing voice, paid loving homage to so many great songwriters, living and dead.

IAN LILBURNE

Photos by Luke Riley