CMAT on the advice she got from Charli XCX, and why 'authenticity' is over-rated

As she gets ready to release her much-anticipated new album of 21st-century country pop, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson talks about the good, the bad and the ugly in the Irish music scene 

CMAT releases her new album in early March. 

When she was 15-years-old, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson saw a picture of the pop star Grimes on the cover of a magazine and decided she wanted to look like her. “I  bought the copy of Hot Press and handed it to my friend, Fiona, who could not cut hair. I was like ‘can you do that to me?’. She cut this side of my hair and that side of my hair. My mother did not look me in the eye for about a week."

Even as a teenager, Thompson got a kick out of standing out from the crowd. A decade later, under the stage name 'CMAT', the young Dubliner is, thanks to her playful, Dolly Parton-tinged pop, poised to become a fully-fledged star.