CMAT
DESCRIBED BY the Guardian as “pop’s gobbiest, gaudiest star”, singer-songwriter CMAT has a penchant for sharing her opinions on a wide range of topics. It’s a tactic that has served her well thus far, as by having a go at Bertie and pulling out of festivals over their sponsors, the 29-year-old from Meath has effortlessly generated plenty of headlines on both sides of the pond.
She also infuses her country-pop music with a side helping of fiscal and political commentary and is an interviewer’s dream, with sound bites such as: “I’m crazy and I do crazy things and I have crazy relationships with people”. And telling the Guardian that “I was hallucinating the whole time” while making her new album Euro-Country, ably demonstrates why the singer has very quickly become media catnip.
CMAT grew up in Clonee and Dunboyne under the less exotic name of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson. After a six-month stint studying in Trinity – during which, she told the Irish Times, she probably had a “full mental breakdown… I wasn’t eating, I was taking loads of painkillers, I wasn’t sleeping” – CMAT started her music career in Dublin but later moved to Manchester.
She declared Dublin to be “a wasteland” for women trying to pursue music. “I felt I was this tokenistic prize of property,” she told 6 Music. “The minute that someone found out that there was a woman singer-songwriter in Dublin, I was suddenly getting booked for every support slot under the sun because they wanted to make themselves look good by having a woman on their line-up.”
The bisexual singer released her debut album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead (sic) in 2022 and the follow-up Crazymad, For Me in 2023. She declared it to be “absolutely shocking and appalling” that she didn’t have a female producer or recording engineer on either album.
Hot Press magazine said her first album was “undoubtedly one of the most thrilling Irish pop debuts of the century” and it won the Choice Music Prize for Irish Album of the Year in 2023.
The mouthy singer’s fans include Elton John, Robbie Williams and Charli XCX, and Irish influencers and personalities love to publicly worship at her altar.
Her current album, Euro-Country, explores “Ireland as a case study for capitalism”.
CMAT hit the headlines when she told Hot Press in 2023 that if Bertie Ahern was to go for the presidency, she would make it her “personal fucking mission to make sure that he doesn’t win”. She went for the former taoiseach again in the title track from the album, which she describes as the “best thing I have ever made”.
Singing about the recession that occurred in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, the song contains the lines “All the big boys, all the Berties, all the envelopes, yeah, they hurt me…” and “I was 12 when the das started killing themselves all around me.”
Naturally, these lyrics generated plenty of attention, which led to CMAT telling Vogue in seemingly doe-eyed surprise that “people are using me as a talking point”.
“To have now released a political song, I feel like I’ve just been fed to the wolves,” she complained.
Bertie later released an audio message in which he said the economic crash was a “worldwide” one and false claims about the politics of the Celtic Tiger era had “not dissipated”, adding: “In fact, intensified, pushed by a handful and reached a new generation. That’s not good,” in comments generally believed to be related to CMAT.
In Glamour UK CMAT took a pop at the “fake version” of Irish identity that is “being built up by Americans and English people and claimed for themselves”.
“Why am I seeing Claddagh rings everywhere?” she said. “ The GAA jerseys? Why is everyone pretending we had this exact same childhood? There’s this very romantic vision of Ireland, but I grew up in a place where it’s not very fun to grow up.”
On the basis of her surprise around the reaction to her “political song”, the bolshy singer was probably equally astonished by the attention generated by her outfit for the 2024 Brit Awards, when she was nominated for International Artist of the Year. Her dress, conservative from the front, had a very low-cut back that showed much of her bare backside. When being interviewed on stage, CMAT spun around to make sure the audience got the full effect – a move the BBC called “an attention-seeking intervention”.
She has publicly railed against fat-shaming and told BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour that her outfit caused a stir “because I’m a size 14 as opposed to a size six”.
“The backlash was crazy,” she said, adding that people were “horrified… really angry and aggressive in comments, telling me I had to go to the gym.”
But she certainly knows how to win fans and her rise to fame was helped by her single ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’, which sparked a TikTok dance craze.
She is also a vocal supporter of transgender rights and has built a significant fanbase within the LGBTQ+ community, declaring that she creates music “for the girls and the gays, and that’s it”.
Another shrewd move was partnering with Transgender Equality Network Ireland on a charity T-shirt that states: “The T in CMAT stands for Trans Rights”.
Her new album contains reflections on economics and identity, and CMAT describes it as being about “the type of loss, pain and lack of community that I feel we are suffering from under modern capital isolation”.
Speaking of capital, the column inches haven’t exactly catapulted the singer into Bono territory yet. Having made a loss of €40,200 in the year to the end of August 2023, things improved a tad by the end of August 2024. CMATbaby Ltd recorded a small profit of €3,300 that year, bringing its accumulated profits to €28,600.
There was huge coverage of CMAT’s decision to pull out of the Latitude Festival in Suffolk in May 2024 over the festival’s sponsorship by Barclays, with campaigners accusing the bank of increasing its investment in arms companies that trade with Israel amid the war in Gaza. “I will not allow my precious work, my music, which I love so much, to get into bed with violence,” said CMAT. After Barclays suspended its sponsorship, the singer returned to the bill, declaring that she would donate her entire fee to Palestinian relief funds.
At the end of her Glastonbury set this year, she led the audience in a chant of “free Palestine”, which earned her plenty of kudos.
While undoubtedly talented, there is a sense that CMAT knows exactly how to garner attention. It boils down to championing the right causes, saying and doing things for shock value, and targeting people – like Bertie – who are guaranteed headline winners. The commentary and general drama the singer generates suggests that there is more than one person who could be justifiably described as “the most skilful, the most devious, the most cunning of them all”.
