Dramatic Irish singer Camille O’Sullivan, who first won over fans as part of La Clique at Adelaide Fringe in the 2000s, has always imparted every line of every song with palpable and genuine emotion.
Following the pandemic years, and the loss of close friends Shane McGowan and Sinead O’Connor, O’Sullivan’s cup of painful feelings is running over, and in 'Loveletter', she poured these, and her soul, out on Her Majesty’s Theatre stage.
A little after the midway point of 'Loveletter', Camille O’Sullivan shared one of many anecdotes told to her by The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan’s sister, Siobhan, in the wake of his death. As children, the literary siblings would recite a passage from James Joyce’s 'The Dubliners' which began with: “one by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.” Joyce’s words, perhaps, became an ethos, an Irish variation of “it’s better to burn out than fade away”. So many of O’Sullivan’s friends and idols have become shades now: Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Sinead and Shane. In 'Loveletter', she was in the full glory of her passion.
O’Sullivan is no stranger to death; in 1999, she survived a near fatal car accident, where she shattered her pelvis, shredded the tendons in her hands and fractured her skull. It was this brush with death which inspired her to leave behind an accomplished career in architecture to pursue singing full time. Her childhood home’s record collection gave birth to a distinct amalgam: Jacques Brel on her French mother’s side, Deep Purple on her Irish sailing father’s, John Lennon blaring through her sister’s wall. When she went to uni, she discovered Nick Cave on cassette. Underpinning it all is narrative. While O’Sullivan has a storm of a voice, rich with all the timbres, she’s a storyteller first. She can captivate unaccompanied, as on Jacques Brel’s 'Amsterdam', which she began in a whisper then roared into crescendo while stomping her feet.
All the foot stomping has worn out all Camille’s best shoes; she self-deprecatingly showed the gaffer-taped soles, as well as her ill-fitting dress, and, displayed on stage, all her COVID-era drunken internet shopping swag. She has always bared the most intimate parts of herself while singing, but said she’s begun to show more of her true self while speaking between songs too. While one of her inspirations, Leonard Cohen, would famously recite scripted patter between songs during his final concert tours, O’Sullivan was loose as she spoke songs by Radiohead, Waits, Cave, Cohen, MacGowen and O’Connor. It was like it was past midnight in an Irish pub in Cork; there was some repetition, plenty of red wine and craic. What it lacked in polish, it more than made up for with truth.
Most importantly, 'Loveletter' was an encouragement to explore the less known songs in Sinead and Shane’s anthologies, such as Sinead’s 'Take Me To Church', which was performed live for the first time. With this show, the late greats were not shades: they lived on in full colour.
