‘All the saddest people I’ve met are the funniest’: CMAT on making bone-achingly funny pop out of misery

On a Wednesday night in a basement karaoke bar in east London, Irish singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, who performs as CMAT, is kneeling on a small stage performing a dramatic rendition of Shakespears Sister’s gothic ballad Stay. Lying in front of her is a friend pretending to be dead (as in the original music video), while the pianist from her band, Colm, provides backing vocals. It’s a display of brilliant theatricality, exaggerated, camp and chaotic. In other words, it’s pure CMAT.

Skills like these don’t arrive overnight: Thompson has been a karaoke master since she was 14 and wowed a French holiday camp with a rendition of I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Later, after working shifts in Debenhams, she would head to Tom Kennedy’s in Dublin to belt out Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man. “I always knew I was a pop star but nobody else believed me,” she says when we meet in a pub in Brighton a few weeks later. “I think everyone thought I was fucking insane. Karaoke was a way to prove myself.”

It worked. As CMAT, Thompson makes emotionally brittle and bone-achingly funny pop that sits somewhere between Dolly Parton, Mike Skinner and Kesha. Her 2022 debut album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, won the RTÉ Choice Music prize for Irish album of the year with its lacerating, perspicacious storytelling about failure, heartache and dejection, complete with references to Bacardi Breezers, Marian Keyes and the Passion of Christ. It also won her a coterie of staunchly devoted fans who saw themselves in her droll and wounded songwriting, and who engage with Thompson with mockery and affection like she’s an old friend.

“I always thought the first album was about the fight between comedy and tragedy,” she says, “and how all the saddest people I’ve ever met are the funniest.” Thompson, 27, could be one of these figures. As a teenager, she led a (somewhat self-inflicted) isolated existence. “I was into the most pretentious things I could get my hands on because all of that was so far removed from Dunboyne, County Meath, where I grew up,” she says. On her first day of secondary school, she prepared by printing out black-and-white pictures of 40s film actresses. “I posted them up in my locker so that everyone could see that I was different.”

It ended badly. A boy spotted her posters and, “like the town crier”, called her a lesbian in front of the school. Thompson, who is bisexual but hadn’t yet realised it, shrugged it off. Instead of spending time with her peers, she spent her school years chatting to people on message boards. “I stayed solidly on the internet for about eight years,” she says. “It’s kind of weird and scary to think about now, but I don’t think that I lived in the real world. And I don’t know that I ever have.”

Things changed when, aged 18, she started a band with her then-boyfriend. Thompson says their five-year relationship was toxic, filled with infidelity and further isolation, this time from friends and family. She turned to alcohol to cope and gained weight: one day, three years in, she didn’t recognise a photo she had been tagged in on Facebook. It led her to quit being a musician. “Being a girl doing music is already a fucking ballache,” she says. “But I felt like I couldn’t be chubby and a woman and play the guitar.”

Depressed and hoping for a new start, she moved to Manchester with her boyfriend, where she worked “as a sexy shots girl” and partied. “I had no friends,” she says. “I might have physically shared a space with people, but I don’t think I talked to anyone for two years.”

An encounter with Charli XCX changed everything. Thompson was one of several Charli fans invited to an in-person listening session at a studio in London, to listen to unreleased tracks and give their opinions. While most were sycophantic, Thompson was “really specific about my criticism; I really went in on her”. After the session, Charli pulled her aside and asked her why she was wasting time by not making music herself. “She looked right through me and said in a slightly mean way: ‘Sort your shit out.’” On the Megabus back to Manchester, Thompson decided to blow up her life: she broke up with her boyfriend, moved back to Dublin and became CMAT.

Thompson’s new album, Crazymad, for Me, exorcises the rage and heartbreak from that period: as she sings on opener California, she’s “harvesting all this misery” for storytelling. “They’re gonna make a movie of it,” she sings, before winking: “Oh no, it won a Razzie!” The Americana tang remains, as does the reverence for country music, but the muscular instrumentation and chest-puffing melodies give her music a new robustness. (John Grant joins Thompson on new single Where Are Your Kids Tonight?, a weary country mid-tempo that fizzes with regret, his gorgeous harmonies lending a weathered texture.) She thought the album might be about forgiving her ex, she says. “But while making it I was like, ‘Fuck that!’ I don’t want to forgive him. I want to be able to move on with my life in the knowledge that I’m allowed to be angry about everything that happened.”

Her anger is laced with wit. On Rent, she stabs at her ex’s incompetence and fakeness, while on the Fleetwood Mac-indebted Stay for Something she winces as she grapples for reasons why she stayed: “Holy God damn you were so annoying / But you had my heart.” Phone Me vibrates with paranoia about adultery (“How can I figure it out / Becky Vardy’s account / I went for dinner with her yesterday”) and on the loose I … Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny, Thompsons cries that she’s into “God, self-destruction and a Britney tune”.

Some have questioned whether her humour and pop culture references make CMAT tantamount to a novelty act. Thompson disagrees. “I think the internet is responsible for my maximalism. I love things that are lyrical and gorgeous, but I don’t see why you can’t also use the things that are around you, too. I think people only feel cringe when something doesn’t relate to them.”

Ultimately, she says, she’s making music for people like her, those who lived insular lives and paid the cost “like queer people or 14-year-old girls who have no friends and weird hobbies. Stewart Lee has a quote where he says: ‘All you need is 5,000 people a year to give you £10 to have a successful career.’ I really like that. I would quite like to be a cult figure.” Given where her career is heading, it might already be too late.