CMAT – Irish country-pop singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – writes funny, bone-deep songs about love and other horrors. She also plays her white acoustic guitar like an axe hero. Not for Thompson the smiley, rhinestone strum of the classic Nashville artist. She kicks out, flings her hair, drops into deep lunges, exuding all the energy of a final encore. It’s only the first song.
The slinky California (which rhymes with “don’t say I didn’t warn you”) opens her latest album, Crazymad, for Me, released last month – a concept record about a woman wanting a time machine to stop herself having a disastrous relationship. Named for a Sheena Easton song lyric about infatuation and domesticity, it is among the finest released this year, a confection of Adele-level heartbreak cut with unruly energy and a hammy, everything-everywhere-all-at-once-ness. “I wanted to write Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell for the girls,” she told an interviewer.
CMAT more than lives up to her remit. Tonight, in a Leeds University student union venue, she brings a backdrop dominated by her name in lurid neon lights that eventually settle into the Irish tricolour. Her female-forward energy is universal, but CMAT also seems to channel an Irish contemporaneity that encompasses the gimlet eye of a Sally Rooney and the righteousness of the 2018 Irish abortion campaign into one flame-haired charm offensive. The high cost – financial and emotional – of rent is mentioned more than once. She is very retro and very now all at the same time.
This is an effervescent show (“the CMAT panto!”) in a tightly packed space. Centre stage is a stepped podium dressed with a large, ornate mirror where CMAT periodically sings to herself, as though holding a hairbrush, acting out all her bedroom pop star fantasies. Before going solo, she was in a band called Bad Sea. For a long time, Thompson tried to become better known, but it was only when Charli XCX told her to “sort her shit out” at a writing session that CMAT sharpened up her act. Tonight, she jokes that she’s an “unwashed version” of fellow country-pop alumna Taylor Swift. “The ITV version!”
Her terrific band abet CMAT’s acting out, clad in pyjama-like workwear and sparkly black berets, like glam cult members. Keyboard player Colm Conlan duets with her on Where Are Your Kids Tonight?, Thompson’s 80s-adjacent collaboration with John Grant, where CMAT wonders why a man is in a nightclub if he’s got kids at home. Conlan is also roped into dance routines: Strictly, if it were line-dancing week. At the end of Peter Bogdanovich, CMAT does the splits.
For Have Fun!, a standout tune whose funky, mid-70s roll recalls Elton John, she begins prone on the podium, her strong voice somehow reaching the back of the room despite the singer lying on her stomach. I Don’t Really Care For You, a self-coruscating standout from her first album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead (2022), is elongated by false endings, a dance interlude and swooping, dramatic passages.
“CMAT! CMAT!” chant the crowd early on. Later, it turns into “Leeds-mat! Leeds-mat!” after Thompson riffs on her love for the city, revealing that her father is a Leeds United supporter – and stoking rivalry between tonight’s crowd and a show in Sheffield where someone proposed to their loved one. “We all love a love story, don’t we?” she asks, before making a face. “Not if you’re at a CMAT gig you don’t!”
Given all the posing and high jinks, it would be easy to forget how sad CMAT’s songs are. Every one has its own signature blend of granular detail – someone else’s false eyelashes on a CD case – self-abnegation and rueful insight; most of her songs are played for laughs at least part of the time. Her album is about as much fun as a record about a toxic power imbalance can be.
As a teen, Thompson fell in with a man many years her senior. Crazymad, for Me addresses how people are meant to get over things that happened years ago, even when they rankle at the cellular level. “As you may or may not know from my entire discography,” CMAT points out, “I remember everything.”
These songs explore taking responsibility for your own mistakes, while not exonerating the offending party. Only once or twice does she really lean into the misery of her experience. On Such a Miranda, she begins alone with her acoustic guitar, lit dramatically. “She was a good girl, so I pay the price,” sings CMAT, “I have to stay broken to be worth your nights.”
Because every song is like an encore, the end itself ramps up to 11. “If it’s all right with you I’d like to milk the shit out of this chorus,” she says of I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby!, falling into a kneeling backbend with her guitar.
Stay for Something finds closure, with CMAT hitting vocal and emotional peaks, wanting to hate her ex. “But I just can’t do it!” she shouts at gale force, before hanging like a rag doll.
