Imelda May

Thu 10th Mar, 2011 in Features

There is a lot that hangs on the mood of an interviewee. If they are feeling chatty and in a good mood then an interview is great fun. They answer your questions at length, and you can really get stuck in, and usually get some really interesting quotes that go beyond the (not very interesting) basics. An interviewee in a bad mood, on the other hand, is absolutely miserable. It becomes impossible to get any real conversation happening and it becomes more about going through the motions than anything else. Very rarely do these conversations add anything that I wouldn’t have been able to get from a press release.

But when I get Imelda May on the phone, I know that everything is going to be alright. Even if she weren’t a vivacious personality in the first place, the day that she has had would serve to put even Mark E. Smith in a good mood. Because, in addition to doing a whole bunch of press for her new album, she found out just today that her new single has been added to high rotation on a bunch of radio stations. And to add a very large cherry to the top of that cake, that same album has been nominated for the Choice Prize, Ireland’s equivalent to the Australian Music Prize. “A very good day”, as May puts it, her excitement positively jumping down the phone line at me.

This good day is surely one of many that May must have had over the past couple of years. Having begun her career twenty years ago at the tender age of sixteen “singing in a blues club in Dublin that played rockabilly, and blues and roots music”, May’s first album, 2005’s No Turning Back was only a moderate commercial success. However it did well enough to attract the attention of Ireland’s Ambassador Records, who released 2008’s Love Tattoo. This was the real watershed moment for May, receiving overwhelmingly favourable reviews, catching the eye of influential English broadcaster and musician Jools Holland and doing well enough to see her awarded Female Artist of the Year at Ireland’s national music awards. It was on the strength of this album that May was signed to Universal for album number three.

Of course, it is usually about this time that spirited and successful independent acts lose the plot – sometimes because of their success, sometimes because of the pressures of working with a major label, sometimes for other reasons entirely. But I get the impression that Imelda May is a tougher nut than that to crack.

“The only pressure I felt was from myself, in that I wanted to do the best I could, and to make this album a little bit better than the last”, May explains, after I ask whether she ever freaked out in the process of making her major label debut. “I wanted to be a little better on the producing side, a little better on the writing side, and I wanted to make sure you could hear the band very clearly. I wanted to capture the excitement that we have live – when we do a gig it’s very exciting, and we go crazy, and I wanted to get some sort of feel of that. But I didn’t want to lose any charm, I didn’t want it over-polished, or over-produced, I just wanted to have fun on it.”