What Dreams May Come True
On the eve of her biggest ever date, a homecoming gig at Dublin's O2 Arena, rockabilly queen Imelda May reflects on whirlwind year, talks about the scourge of heroin when she was growing up in inner city Dublin and tells how it feels to be acclaimed as the "Irish Amy Winehouse".
Olaf Tyaransen, 16 Dec 2009
“Had I ever been to America before? Not with a working visa. Em, only on me holidays... with instruments! Ha, ha!”
Imelda May has a delightfully infectious laugh that’s 100% pure Dublin. It’s the kind of loud, throaty, dig in the ribs, “g’wan-outta-dat” expression of mirth that simply can’t be faked. Within minutes of meeting her, the impressively-quiffed Liberties girl utterly charms you with her sheer genuineness and humour. “You’re not gonna write that, are ye? Ye are? Ha, ha!”
Imelda has had an awful lot to laugh about in 2009. By any standard, it’s been quite some year for the 35-year-old Dubliner. It’s mid-November and we’re sitting in a ridiculously spacious fourth floor penthouse suite of the Galway Radisson, looking out over Loch Atalia and the bay, marvelling at the glorious view. Tonight she and her band will be playing a show at the city’s Black Box Theatre - her 128th gig of the year so far.
No overnight success, she tells me that she can barely believe what’s happened (“I keep pinching meself!”). Following years of obscurity and relative struggle, gigging for a living with no record company support, May’s big break came about 12 months ago when she was invited to perform on Later with... Jools Holland. Although she’d already self-released a critically acclaimed blues and rockabilly fused album, Love Tattoo, and supported Holland at several gigs, appearing on his TV show proved a definite turning point in the musical fortunes of the singer once lazily described as “Ireland’s answer to Amy Winehouse.”
“That’s really where all this madness kicked off,” she explains. “We had gigged with Jools before. We were invited to open for him in Kew Gardens, and he heard us, some of his people heard us or whatever, and then we were sent the date sheet to open for him for as many as we could do.
“So that was great and then, bit by bit, he’d come listen to us and then invited us backstage for an aul' curry and asked us, ‘What are you up to, what record label are you signed to?’ And I said, ‘None! Nobody wants us, we sent the stuff around, got turned down, made the album anyway.’ And he was just saying, ‘I can’t believe that, I have to get you on my show’. So he got us on the radio show first, and I think he got a good response.”
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