Soundtrack to my life: CMAT's favourite songs - from Dolly and Boney M to the White Stripes
CMAT's music tastes include The Beatles, the White Stripes and The Nolans. Picture: Sarah Doyle
As a child, we had a Boney M compilation CD and this was my favourite song. I was about five when I became obsessed with them, so it makes sense that I loved Brown Girl in the Ring the most because it is essentially a nursery rhyme that they did a funky beat over and performed in the Euro disco style.
Because I was so young, the fact that they were from the seventies didn't make sense to me and I just adored them. I loved Crocodile Rock by Elton John for all the same reasons – that was extremely easy to sing too.
Music television is very important to me. I did a streamed special last year at Christmas and did it with music television in mind. There were skits, there were dance breaks – I actually based it around this Toni Basil special. She was an amazing dancer – she had a band called The Lockers, who were basically her dance troupe.
My one wish for the Covid period is that people get better at live streams. I think people haven't figured out that you can't do a live performance to camera, and expect it to be interesting, because it's not. I wish people would put time and money and effort into realising that live streams are not concerts, and should be thought of in the same way as we think of music television.
This is a White Album song and I really could have picked anything off this album, because I loved it so much.
I went through a very extreme Beatles phase for about three years where I didn't talk about anything else, I didn't think about anything else. To this day, there are members of my family who still gift me with coffee table books about The Beatles at Christmas.
I managed to get my hands on lots of the Beatles fan magazines and newsletters from the eighties and they were deranged and I loved them. I lost three years of my life to The Beatles and I don't regret a moment of it.
The thing with loving The Beatles was that in every piece of literature that I consumed about them, there were always other bands mentioned in the pieces. If they popped up a number of times, I'd make note of them.
Country music was always around me, but I particularly remember hearing this version of Act Naturally and thinking 'this is a banger' and then finding out a little bit about country music and that The Beatles loved it.
I think they were playing a gig in Vicar Street when I was eleven and a girl in school was already obsessed with them. She asked me to come and see them with her and that night I fell in love with them. I had a blog about them. I wrote fan fiction about them, I was a superfan. I actually met my best friend on the Bombay Bicycle Club fan forum.
When I was seventeen I posted my first ever song to Soundcloud. Jamie the guitarist was following me on there (I think out of pity) and he messaged me asking me if it was me singing. He became my first manager and then the manager of Bombay Bicycle Club ended up looking after me for a number of years.
I think I first heard of Dolly Parton from my Mam's friend Jacinta Dooley who is obsessed with her. I remember being a kid and she'd be telling me that Dolly's version of I Will Always Love You would be played at her funeral. I could have picked any Dolly song but I wanted to pick one that everyone might not know.
She was my entryway into bimbo culture as well. I am very into hyper-femininity and I think that's the first time that it was sold to me as being a good thing and I'm very appreciative to her for that.
I was going on a holiday to County Clare and I decided to download all of my favourite Dolly songs onto my iPod. When I got there, I realised that I had downloaded the wrong version of Jolene - I had the one by The White Stripes instead.
This led me to a deep love of the White Stripes who were the first contemporary band I loved - even though by the time I got to them they had all but disbanded. They took over my life. I loved Jack White because he has an amazing ear for melody. I would say that there is a real soft touch to his songwriting.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were the reason I became utterly obsessed with the medium of music television. It took me a long time to listen to contemporary music, and even now I'm very old-fashioned. I just really love the late 1970s into the 1980s because it was such a transitional period musically and visually. Nobody knew what was cool for a solid five years and you just had people making really good music that was uninformed by trends.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band did a version of Delilah on The Old Grey Whistle Test on BBC in 1975. It was the best thing I had ever seen. I loved that it felt like there was far too much effort put into it for what it was. They were supposed to stand there and sing and play, but this band always came with all these extra performance aspects. Everyone in that band was charismatic enough and probably crazy enough to pull it off.
The Nolans have always been there for me. As kids, they were working the nightclub circuits, six days a week. It was vaudeville. It wasn't just music – they were entertaining, they were acting and singing and dancing. In the late seventies, when they were becoming a contemporary act, they were so feminine. The really important thing to know about The Nolans is that when they were popular, everyone who was 'cool' absolutely hated them.
Linda told me that one of the first times they played Top of The Pops they were getting ready to go on, and Richard Jobson from The Skids finished their set, and walked along the stage that The Nolans were to go on and spat on the floor in disgust. They spat all over their stage! That was the level of disrespect they were getting because they were a pack of girls singing disco songs.
I really want to go to the nightclub again. When the nightclubs are open again, this is all that I want to hear because I will perform it.
- I Don't Really Care For You by CMAT will be released on February 23
