CMAT: ‘I had my first-ever lesbian experience at Koko – it was 10 out of 10’

‘I almost pooed my pants before going on stage at Glastonbury.’

This is a level of candour that’s not unusual for Irish singer-songwriter CMAT. Because despite her glittering career (her 2022 debut album shot her to fame) and her cast-iron confidence (we experience this first hand in a karaoke booth later), she still gets stage fright.

‘My keyboardist was dry heaving, and our horn player was going like this –’ she says, hand on heart, breathing heavily pretending to hyperventilate.

We’re hanging out with CMAT – real name Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – at Rowans bowling alley in Finsbury Park. On a sober Tuesday afternoon, the grown-ups’ play palace – with its garish neon and sticky floors, combined with the faint smell of beer mixed with bleach and a cacophony of bleeping from the arcade – is an assault on the senses. It’s a fitting place for a cover shoot with the 29-year-old singer, known for her bold outfits with clashing prints, striking red hair (often worn in a towering beehive) and her signature row of gnashers, adorned with gems of varying colours and sizes. 

Three years ago, Thompson released her debut album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, a witty and assured record full of soulful indie-pop hooks and country-spliced melodies. It was an immediate success, rocketing straight to the top of the Irish charts. Fans went mad for her tragicomic and painfully honest lyrics about breakups and body image, packed with cultural references to things like Marian Keyes and Sex And The City (‘I’m such a Miranda’).

Then with her second album in 2023, Crazymad, For Me, came mainstream British fame, bagging her a spot on the BBC Sound Of 2024 list and a performance on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny. The clip from the programme went viral thanks to Thompson’s odd dance moves, featuring the running man, a lot of jazz hands, and a bit where she lay splayed out across the floor on her stomach (‘Everybody in the audience seemed very confused when I collapsed,’ she tells me). But perhaps Thompson’s biggest headline moment of 2024 was when she bared both butt cheeks on the BRITS red carpet, wearing a custom black velvet dress designed to show just the right amount of crack – something she has since called a ‘political statement’.

Now Thompson is gearing up for the release of her third album Euro-Country, which arrives on August 29. ‘I was trying to imagine what country music would have sounded like if it never traveled over to the States,’ she says. With influences from the Plastic Ono Band, to Katy J Pearson and even Little Simz, Thompson says Euro-Country’s sound is both ‘sparse’ and ‘groovy’. 

I spent six or seven years in my bedroom just thinking about music

Thompson is one of many Irish artists in the spotlight right now, joining the ranks of Fontaines DC, Dermot Kennedy and Kneecap in the Gaelic exports hall of fame. But unlike those other artists, who thrive in their realms of indie, pop, and political rap respectively, Thompson has blazed her own trail, thanks to her singular poppy country-western music and wry, confessional lyrics. With an invigorating voice that sounds like it could belong to a 1950s starlet, she’s been compared to everyone from Dolly Parton, to Kesha and Kate Bush (Thompson is one of the few artists who can pull off the high warbles in ‘Wuthering Heights’, often working a cover of the song into her live shows).

Back to the start 

Thompson had a small town Irish upbringing. She was born in Dublin, before moving to Dunboyne, a ‘grey cement’ commuter town in County Meath, where she grew up as one of four. 

‘I grew up in an estate that had like, a patch of grass that you could kick football around on, and there were no buses. There was a train that you’d have to walk for half an hour to get to Dublin City Centre,’ she says, now reclining on a squidgy sofa in the back room of Rowans, surrounded by the bowling alley’s discarded retro American signage and tenpin trophies. She’s changed out of her shoot outfit (an oversized pink, yellow and brown knitted jumper) into her own clothes, now wearing a holey white t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Pamela Anderson, paired with green snakeprint cowboy boots and a shock of blue eyeshadow swept across her eyelids.

As a precocious and socially awkward teenager who felt like she didn’t quite fit in, Thompson found solace online. ‘I was in a fan forum for Bombay Bicycle Club,’ she says. ‘I had blogs about them and I wrote fan fiction about them. I didn’t really have that many friends or do social things in secondary school. I spent six or seven years in my bedroom just thinking about music.’

Thompson is still a music nerd at her core. ‘I’m first and foremost a fan girl,’ she says. Speaking in her rapid Dublin lilt, Thompson rattles through the myriad of artists she loves and adores. Often she trails off on a tangent, dropping deep knowledge about the songwriting of Leonard Cohen, or her undying love for Cate Le Bon.  

At around the age of 15, Thompson started coming over to London on the ferry to attend gigs, where she would stay with her Auntie Sarah on a council estate on the Caledonian Road. ‘London was this magical playground, because it was full of indie music, and everybody cared about it as much as me – a lot of bands wouldn’t come over to Dublin,’ she says, her eyes lighting up. ‘I would get to come over by myself maybe four times a year, and then I’d have to go back to my village in Dunboyne, and it was all I would think about.’

London was this magical playground, full of indie music

These gigs weren’t only an opportunity for Thompson to fangirl over her favourite artists like Everything Everything, Little Comets and Bombay Bicycle Club (who she’s seen live 15 times, she says proudly), but were also movie-like coming of age experiences. ‘I went to see Little Comets at Koko in Camden. I had my first ever lesbian experience in the pit, and it was a 10 out of 10.’

London life

Despite the mundanity of growing up in a village, the singer is glad she didn’t spend her younger years in London. ‘I don’t think I would appreciate it as much.’ Now she lives in Hackney with flatmate Mia and a pit bull named Paris. On the weekends you’re likely to find her gallivanting around east London, drinking orange wine at La Camionera. ‘They serve the strongest wine I’ve ever drank,’ Thompson enthuses. 

If not at London’s hypiest lesbian bar, she’s often found singing karaoke at the Karaoke Hole, or sipping côtes de provence at the Star of Bethnal Green, Paris the pitbull likely in tow. ‘I love to be in [Dalston’s] Voodoo Ray’s Pizza, really drunk and continuing the party,’ she says.‘My favourite thing to do on a night out is dance and talk to people.’

This proclivity for a good natter is how Thompson ‘ended up drinking beers with the security staff at the Royal Albert Hall’ after a gig supporting Wet Leg in 2022. ‘They brought me into the staff room and everyone was just like “wheeeey!” I love the Royal Albert Hall, they have massive pictures of Shirley Bassey everywhere. It’s my dream venue for a London headline show.’ 

Thompson also shouts out two more favourite haunts; Hackney’s Paper Dress Vintage for its indie music nights, and pub The Sun of Camberwell. ‘They put their whole pussy into it,’ she says – it’s not unusual for her to use the kind of esoteric slang you might hear on RuPaul’s Drag Race, or queer TikTok – when talking about the ‘almost posh pub food’ at the south London boozer. 

Star quality

I get a peak of what Thompson might be like on a night out when we find ourselves squeezed into one of Rowans’ snug karaoke booths together. No surprise, she’s the life and soul of the party. ‘This is not dissimilar to how I looked on Saturday night,’ she says, showing off an ankle-length fur coat. Thompson is talking us through her favourite karaoke songs, queueing up ‘Road Rage’ by Catatonia and ‘I Touch Myself’ by Divinyls, before launching into a rendition of Tammy Wynette’s ‘Stand By Your Man’ which she claims ‘makes the ladies cry’ when she belts it out back home in Ireland.

In person, the 29-year-old has the same eccentric charm that comes across in her ‘Big Gay live shows’ (which is what she calls her gigs). But for all her silliness and love of a good gossip – we’ve just spent five minutes gushing over the new Addison Rae single ‘Headphones On’ – she takes an earnest approach to being an artist. 

‘You can’t just be a product. You have to be in this for the right reasons,’ she says. ‘I think of myself as a songwriter that is entertaining people to back up my songs.’

Somehow however, Thompson’s true-to-herself approach has led to her becoming known as quite the comedian online, thanks in part to her viral crack-bearing BRITS moment and a handful of interviews where she refers to herself as a ‘viral pop sensation’. Despite her natural wit, being known for humour alone is not something she’s entirely comfortable with. ‘I feel a bit like a clown,’ she frowns, recalling a time she was stopped by a fan in public who didn’t know her music, but recognised her as that woman who’s ‘funny on the internet’.  

If I don’t have an opinion on something really important, I better go and get myself one

‘I have never actually tried to be funny. I take myself very seriously, I think I’m a genius,’ she says, half joking. And this has paid off – last year, Thompson bagged herself BRIT, Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello nominations, and in April 2025 she was named one of Forbes’ 30 under 30. But she’s not stopping there.

Brutally honest

With fame and power comes a platform, and Thompson makes sure to use hers to its full potential: the singer has spoken publicly about Irish politics, and is vocal in her support for Palestine and trans rights. ‘I have loads of 15-year-old girls that listen to everything I say, and my take is that if I don’t have an opinion on something really important that’s happening in the world, I better go out and get myself one,’ she says. ‘I really do fucking care about this stuff.’

In 2025, should pop stars be political? Thompson can only speak for herself, but she feels she owes it to her fans to take a stance. And she’s not just paying lip service. In her giant cream leather bag – which is decorated with ‘Free Palestine’ and trans rights stickers – Thompson carries a book of Leonard Cohen lyrics (‘I genuinely do not go anywhere without it. He’s the best songwriter of all time’), four pairs of sunglasses, a massive bedazzled water bottle, which she tells me doubles up as a good weapon, and a stack of radical political pamphlets, covering everything from abolishing the Met police, to getting rid of private schools in the UK and a practical guide to fighting transphobia.

When we meet, the weekend just gone in London saw one of the biggest trans pride rallies to date, with more than 20,000 attendees according to British Vogue. People turned out in their thousands to protest the recent Supreme Court ruling that says trans women should not be recognised as biological women. Thompson was one of those protesters. ‘All my friends are gay and fucking trans,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to avoid activism when it’s about issues that are affecting my life day to day.’

She also feels she owes her fans honesty, which she admits can make her life harder (her confessional lyrics about messy past relationships make dating virtually impossible). But that doesn’t mean Thompson is going to pull up her emotional drawbridge any time soon. On her new album Thompson candidly sings about experiences of body shaming, broken friendships, and the pressure women feel to settle down, get married and have kids. ‘In a lot of the songs it's me begging for a sense of community,’ she says. ‘Begging to make sense of what’s going on around me, and begging for someone to explain how things work to me.

‘I hope that people listen to the record and then go outside and try to also get a sense of community.’

Thompson herself has garnered her own clan; an ‘intelligent and funny’ fan base she feels lucky to have. ‘I literally love them,’ she smiles, flashing a sparkle of tooth gem. ‘I have music-making friends who get into sticky situations with fans, because they get held up on too much of a pedestal. I can have a half-hour conversation with my fans in the pub.’ 

‘They also slag me off,’ she says, adding that they often jibe at her online for her ‘bad taste in music’. 

Future moves 

I understand what Thompson means when she calls herself ‘serious’. She may be silly, but under it all she is a music nerd who is deeply invested in her pop persona. From ’80s Top of the Pops, to old English folk rock bands, her whole performance is built on references on top of references. At the same time, Thompson talks a lot: she comes across as someone you’d want to have at your house party, or to meet in a pub smoking area when you’re waiting on your pals. She is warm, enveloping me in a hug when we say goodbye, and chats to everyone – at one point Thompson makes a point to chinwag with our art director Bryan’s mum, who is also Irish, and observing the shoot. 

As well as her upcoming album release, Thompson is preparing for a Brixton Academy headline show, and a bumper festival season including a major slot at Glastonbury. ‘The thing about Glastonbury is everybody tries to do something special, but it’s never rehearsed enough to deal with this scaredness and fear that you will feel when you walk on that stage,’ she says. 

Still, she backs herself to put on a killer show. With or without any pre-set, toilet-related panic. 

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