Playing stadiums and causing dance crazes, the Irish singer-songwriter is going supernova – and whether opining on trans rights, body shaming or capitalism, she’s more forthright than ever
Ciara Mary-Anne Thompson, or CMAT as she’s professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she’s fond of calling a “sexy shots girl”: “Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they’d put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for three pound each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.”
An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, “trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli xcx so much”, had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her “old, weird” boyfriend and was “completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: ‘What have I done?’ I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror …” She lets out a snort of laughter. “I feel like there’s so many film scenes where people write songs and I’m like, ‘that didn’t fucking happen like that’, but this one did. So I’m crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: ‘I know what I need to do now.’”
Continue reading…
