CMAT in Dublin: A night of real emotion in one of the best gigs of the year

CMAT

Fairview Park, Dublin

★★★★★

You get a better class of sign in the audience at a CMAT gig. Some artists might just get general declarations of love, but CMAT’s fans are much more specific. You wouldn’t see “I sold you cheese in Blanch” at a Taylor Swift show, and that’s Taylor’s loss. “Ten or 11 years ago I was playing an open mic night in the Bleeding Horse” says the artist also known as Ciara Mary Alice Thompson at the start of the night. “Now I’m playing in a tent to 8,000 people.” There’s a beat. “And no one is more surprised than me.”

She shouldn’t be. CMAT is an astonishingly good songwriter, whose lyrics are as dazzlingly witty, smart and insightful as her melodies, and musical arrangements are original and satisfying. “What did I think/That a bouncy-castle Catholic/could give me/ but a little wine and God?” she asks in the opening verse of California. She plays it shortly after emerging on stage in a specially frilled Dublin GAA kit and strappy leopard print heels, and performs it with the intensity that most artists reserve for their encores. CMAT is a superb performer, mugging hilariously and shredding a guitar with the same enthusiasm with which she performs delightful dance routines with one of her bandmates, all of whom are dressed in striped tops, neckerchiefs and shorts. The front row seems to be almost entirely girls in their teens and twenties. They couldn’t ask for a better heroine.

“I’d make you torso of the week/If I still bought Heat magazine,” she sings in ‘Whatever’s Inconvenient,’ one of the finest songs on her last album. But even amid the smart and often very funny jokes, there’s always real emotion, especially when she reaches the gorgeous, lolloping melody of the chorus and croons “Why do I fall in love and out of love again? A needle underneath my skin.” The crowd sing along with gusto, and you would have to be without a soul not to sing along too. A cowboy-shirted John Grant joins her for ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight’, a gorgeous and melodically complex song that he and CMAT perform while doing a synchronised dance routine. Elsewhere CMAT pays homage to her Dungarvan, Waterford roots. “I’m genetically 100 per cent Dungarvan,” she says. “We’re probably inbred. But do you know who else is genetically from Dungarvan?” And then she launches into a spectacular cover of Wuthering Heights by the second-generation Dungarvanite Kate Bush.

[ CMAT breaks the UK: ‘It’s definitely happening over here. She’s getting bigger and bigger all the time’ ]

Ode to liberty I Wanna Be A Cowboy Baby is dedicated to a free Palestine, to huge applause. She finishes with the Fleetwood Mac-esque Stay for Something, which builds to the totally heartfelt lines “They tell me I should hate you/Say you put me through it/Lord, I know I used to/ But I just can’t do it.” Every single person in the tent sings along at the top of their lungs.

In a Guardian interview last year, CMAT said she made her music for people on the margins “like queer people or 14-year-old girls who have no friends and weird hobbies.” Maybe that’s part of why the atmosphere in this packed out tent is so full of joy. There’s a sense of community among the audience, and an awareness that we are lucky to be there, to see an artist truly come into her own. Few of us will attend a better gig this year.