CMAT on the advice she got from Charli XCX, and why 'authenticity' is over-rated
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.
Having released her first CMAT single in April 2020, as the world was coming to terms with lockdown, she is, moreover, one of those rare Irish artists who have, with seeming effortlessness, built a profile both at home and abroad. The Guardian has praised her “hook-laden country-pop mashup”; the NME celebrated her “heartfelt, playful pop from the funniest person you know”.
She has done this while challenging many of the received wisdoms holding sway in Irish music. Songs such as her debut single Another Day (kfc) – a heartbroken lament doubling as tribute to her favourite fast food – and Lonely are fun and funny. She isn’t moody or pretentious. And her music is the spiritual opposite of a rainy night in a small venue watching earnest singer-songwriters.
“Dublin and the Irish music scene in general has the exact same thing going on that Nashville has,” she says. “Where authenticity is regarded as the single most important thing of anyone’s artistic ambition. Which is ridiculous, because nothing is authentic. Everything we do as people – not to get philosophical – but there is no pure-bred creativity. Everything is derived from influence and references.”
Thompson’s influences are worn on her sleeves but this does not make her music any less engaging. Drawing on her love for Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell, Katy Perry and Charli XCX, her forthcoming debut album as CMAT, If My Wife New I'd Be Dead, is one rollercoaster ride after another. And the whole thing is glazed in an amplified melodrama rooted in her passion for the Nashville songwriting tradition.
“The reason I was attracted to country music in the first place is because I am very romantic. I wear my heart on my sleeve. And I definitely am more sensitive than a lot of people I know. That's always why I liked country music. It’s so melodramatic. ’My boyfriend left me/ I'm going to die”. That was very relatable. It’s worked very well, the two together. Me and country music.”
Because she is a woman making pop music, early in her career there was a suggestion that Thompson was playing a part and that her CMAT persona was an affectation. That she was a novelty act, essentially. Nothing could be further from the truth: her larger than life pop songs are an expression of what she is like as a person. “I’m kind of doing the same thing that KD Lang would have done when she started out.”
She loves country because it “takes itself so seriously”. But she acknowledges that its great strength is also its biggest weakness.
“It can cause problems when you're looking at the good old boys of Nashville culture. They're really intent on 'authenticity' over everything else. For me, I hate the notion of authenticity in country music. Because to me, what that says is, ‘country music should be exclusive’. It should be made exclusively by a particular group of people. And if you fall outside that category you’re not allowed to. That’s very stupid. And I hate that. And because it take itself so seriously it does the uncanny valley thing of becoming camp. And everything I like is camp. So make it campy, as it should be. It shouldn’t be serious, I think, or weighty.”
There are, she believes, parallels with Irish music. “The scene we’re talking about – the scene that is priding itself on authenticity, and is priding itself on being real music… I actually love that music. I think that music is great. The problem I have with it is that it’s taken over so much of the scene in Ireland that trying to do anything outside of that makes you immediately starting off on a lower ledge. I was really grateful a couple of weeks ago when I released Lonely that Fontaines DC posted it on their Instagram stories. Fontaines DC were supporting it. That is really cool. They understand, as well. The people who are the head of ‘real music and authenticity’… they understand it’s wrong [to dismiss pop as inferior].”
Like all great pop dramas, CMAT has an origin story. Thompson was born in Dublin, spent much of her adolescence in Dunboyne, Co Meath (where she went to secondary school) and then moved to Finglas. Aged 18 she went to Denmark for three months, having dropped out of Trinity, to write songs in the bleak Scandinavian winter. Later, she formed Bad Sea with a musician she’d met on dating app Tinder.
Though it eventually fizzled out, the project wasn’t quite a dead loss: Bad Sea played Dublin’s Hard Working Class Heroes Festival and the Other Voices Music Trail. But Thompson’s straight-from-the-heart lyrics eventually became a source of tension.
“The reason that band dissolved because I was writing lyrics and making songs that were specific to me, and my experiences and were honest. And the feedback that I was getting was like, ‘we can't release joke music’. Like, this isn’t a comedy act. And I was like, ‘I’m not doing comedy music, I’m writing the way I talk to people. The way I communicate is exactly the way in speech and amongst friends as it is in music’.
“So doing anything else is actually dishonest. I do think the exploits of women – particularly anything hyper-feminine is treated as novelty, as a joke.”
In 2018, she had moved to Manchester with Bad Sea. But nothing was happening with the group and she was becoming disillusioned. That July she travelled to London to attend a songwriting workshop by the artist Charli XCX Afterwards they got talking. And Charli XCX’s advice was blunt.
“She was like, ‘ you need to sort yourself out… You seem like you’re really good at music. But you don’t know what you’re doing right now. You need to figure that out. You need to move back home, or you need to move to London. Why would you stay in Manchester? You don’t know anyone there’. I was getting the bus back to Manchester.
“And I was like, ‘I have to go home… I have to go home’. It was immediate. I have to blow my life up because Charli XCX told me to. It was the best thing I ever did. It was the best advice I ever received.”
As CMAT one of her first priorities was to take ownership of her persona as a musician. Thompson had always been struck how women in the 'indie' world were reflexively demur, tomboyish and anti-glamour.
“When I was growing up the alternative music scene, not just in Ireland, but also in the UK and in America and stuff… the women were skinny, and not wearing makeup. And they were very modest and very reserved. And they weren't loud, and they weren’t talking a lot,” she says.
“And there was always this element of, ‘oh don’t look at me too much because I don’t want anyone to think that I have any pride in my appearance… because that would be embarrassing’. Alternative guitar music from the 1990s was very much like, ‘we have to stay behind this wall because if anyone thinks that we’re loud then we get the Courtney Love treatment’.
“Because Courtney Love was loud and hyper-feminine. She was edgy – never androgynous. She was big and took up a lot of space and wore a lot of makeup. And people f***ing hated her. People ruined her and dragged her through the mud.”
CMAT is looking forward to getting her album out into the world. The past two years have obviously been surreal for us all. But they’ve been especially strange for Thompson who has built an entire an entire pop persona during a time when live performance has been largely impossible.
“The first single came out in April 2020. It was always scheduled to come out in March 2020. We thought, ‘Let’s leave it a couple of weeks. Once we’re all out of this Covid thing in a couple of weeks, maybe we’ll release it then’. About two weeks in, it was like, ‘let’s just release it now while everyone is still at home. And we get everyone’s full attention Because nobody’s doing anything else’.
“And then obviously everything else happened. It was really just good timing I’d recorded everything in October, November 2019. We were always planning a couple of release in March 2020. I hate to say I took advantage of it because it was obviously a horrible situation. But I kind have had because I had nothing else to do. So I released the music as planned. I was stuck at home with little else to do other than tell people I was being a pop star.”
- If My Wife New I'd Be Dead is released March 4
- CMAT plays Live At St Luke's in Cork on Wednesday March 9
