Camille O’Sullivan has built a reputation by impregnating the words of Cohen, Cave, Waits and Bowie with new meaning.
In 'Anthem', Leonard Cohen sang that 'there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in'. In Ancient Rain, Camille, in collaboration with Australia’s Cohen, Paul Kelly, seeks to find hope within the work of Ireland’s greatest bards.
In 2014, Camille, accompanist Feargal Murray and the Royal Shakespeare Company brought melody and orchestration to Shakespeare’s 'The Rape Of Lucrece'. Last year, Paul Kelly released 'Seven Sonnets And A Song', his own homage to Stratford-upon-Avon’s most famous resident.
A pairing, then, between the two artists of proud Irish heritage is as logical as it is sublime.
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Ancient Rain, like a Shakespearean tragedy, is not all lollipops and rainbows, but the darkness is not for wallowing in; it serves a purpose, as Camille explains. “People know when they go to see Shakespeare, it’s not going to end well.
“There’s probably going to be several people killed, there’s heartache but you’re not going for that; you’re going to possibly learn something about yourself and your life.
“It’s that black humour, that melancholy, the catharsis that you get from sharing grief. What moves me as a singer, usually a love song is not about how well it’s doing, it’s about how bad it’s gone; you’ve lost something and that’s what binds an audience, that’s what binds people in the yearning for something.”
Ireland and its poets are famously morose, but with good cause. It is an isle historically blighted by famine and occupation, a land of religious conservatism and nationalist fundamentalism.
Camille and Paul, when selecting poems by Yeats, Joyce and other Irish luminaries to perform in the show, were not advancing a political agenda. “What we all cared about when we sat down at Paul’s place and he was feeding us lunch, we all said we wanted to do stuff that moves us; there’s no use any of us standing up on that stage singing these old poems if they don’t mean something to us.”
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While some poems were penned a world away and a century ago, the heart of the work resonated with Australian audiences when Ancient Rain made its Australian premiere in Melbourne last year. “There was this incredible moment where these Aboriginal elders came to a show and they were very tearful after it, and they said that these poems describe [their] lives.
“I hadn’t thought about it in that way but then I thought 'of course' because the Irish situation with the republic, a lot of the poems were about trying to separate themselves from the English.”
Camille was not daunted by the challenge of merging the literary with the musical; her whole career has been spent navigating these waters.
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“Because of the writers I’ve chosen [to cover] like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, they’re very much narrative writers anyway; they’re very wordy, so there is no problem [interpreting poetry] because some poems, you’ll usually know within the first line how it is going to indicate the rhythm of the piece.”
Ancient Rain takes place at Dark Mofo (Hobart) 9-10 June, QPAC (Brisbane) 13 June and Adelaide Cabaret Festival 15-16 June.
