Review: CAMILLE O’SULLIVAN: LOVE LETTER – ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2025 at Her Majesty's Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Wednesday 5th March 2025.

For Camille O’Sullivan: Loveletter, she is accompanied only by Feargal Murray, playing piano and keyboard, with whom she has collaborated for many years. It began, though, with a recording of the opening lines of Kitty, sung by Shane MacGowan.

Oh Kitty, my Darling, remember
That the doom will be mine if I stay
'Tis far better to part, though it's hard to
Than to rot in their prison away

O’Sullivan toured with MacGowan and The Pogues for many years and this concert honoured him, and her other good friend, Sinead O’Connor. She drew on a diverse collection of artists, all familiar to the audience who packed the auditorium for the second night of this sold-out performance. Her first number was Summer in Siam, another song written by MacGowan for The Pogues.

She introduced Feargal Murray, her “oldest friend”, and explained the three coat racks behind her, topped with masks of two cats and a dog as being “drunken purchases”, which raised a laugh. Between songs, she chatted to the audience, digressing in all directions, the adorable chaos delighting the audience. Laughter, applause, and merriment separated the sometimes joyful, sometimes sombre songs.

Another Pogues number, The Broad Majestic Shannon, led to her talking about her farewell to MacGowan at his funeral, and then mentioned Sinead O’Connor, remembering them both in Haunted, a song they recorded together. Murray joined in on this number, showing that he sings just as well as he plays the piano. O’Sullivan encouraged the audience to join in, community singing that she would repeat on another couple of songs during the evening.

She turned then to Tom Waits with his song, Martha, telling of lost young love and regret. Murray provided a beautifully sensitive, sparse accompaniment. Another kind of sadness, that of loneliness, permeated the Jacques Brel number, Amsterdam, which became a capella after a short piano introduction.

The next song, Nick Cave’s on Jubilee Street, had a recorded backing track which, I felt, was just a touch too loud, rather obscuring the lyrics. The first half closed on a fun note with Kirsty McColl’s In These Shoes?

The second half began gently with Declan O’Rourke’s Galileo, as the emphasis shifted to Sinead O’Connor. She spoke of her friendship and sang a moving a capella version of My Darling Child., going straight into the next song, also about a mother and child relationship.

The wonderfully inventive Dillie Keane is best known for the hilarious songs that she writes for her vocal trio, Fascinating Aida, but the atypical song, Look, Mummy, No Hands, is a poignant piece about a child growing up and becoming independent of her mother, then becoming a single mother herself with her own child growing away from her, as she did with her mother, and now regretting not being closer to her mother who is no longer there. This very popular number has become a regular part of O’Sullivan’s repertoire. Murray’s minimal accompaniment suited the number perfectly and, together, they brought tears to many an eye.

Murray’s wonderful accompaniments cannot be praised enough. It is easy to focus on a singer and overlook the wonderful work of the musicians behind them, on whom they rely so much. The long association of these two is evident in the marvellous way in which they work together.

She then cleverly combined David Bowie’s Quicksand and Where Are We Now?, moving quickly into a wild rendition of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, and then a slow, gentle version of MacGowan’s A Rainy Night in Soho. Nick Cave’s The Ship Song followed, and she led the audience in more community singing, soto voce, at the end, followed by extended applause and whistling.

By the time she reached the encores the performance had already overrun by twenty minutes, but nobody was complaining about that. First up was Fairytale of New York, with the audience joining again, and then Leonard Cohen’s Anthem closed the performance, to even more extended applause.

Her vibrant, irrepressible personality, perhaps enhanced by the occasional sip of ‘Ribena’ (ahem) poured from the bottle secreted on the small table, drove the performance, infusing every song with her own interpretations, not merely sung, but given a great theatrical quality. She stomped her foot in time to one number, paced the stage to another, danced to another, sat on the floor for another, and used her remarkable voice throughout, going from a whisper, to a growl, to a roar, taking each song and rebuilding it from the ground up. There is nothing like a Camille O’Sullivan performance. Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait too long for another visit.