COVER STORY

Singer Imelda May is back with a new look and a nwe album – and says her experiences have hurt her but have also made her stronger

Imelda May lies on a couch, a white coat with tousled feathers falling off her hip as she stares towards the ceiling. Though she understands they’re part and parcel of promoting a new record, the Dubliner is not a big fan of photo shoots – not that you could tell as she seems totally at ease with today’s proceedings. In between outfit changes, she moves to the floor and in a navy tracksuit with a white stripe, she laughs while doing the splits with ease.

It’s almost two years since the star’s marriage to musician Darrel Higham ended after 18 years together. The Imelda May that sits across from me today seems an entirely different woman. The quiff has been straightened, the rockabilly style changed and the make-up pared back.

Her new album – Life Love Flesh Blood – has been widely described as a break-up album inspired by a new boyfriend following her marriage split. But to reduce the record to this is selling Imelda short.

‘It’s not a break-up album – probably the first two singles are and people think that’s the full album,’ she says. ‘ This is a full circle album and I did seem to go full circle during the course of that year. You have to open your heart up to meeting new people and loving again. Your heart might get broken again but isn’t it much better to be open to new experiences than to close yourself off ? That would be terrible.

‘You go through bad times and good times in this album – falling in love again or the possibility and the guilt of being happy. It’s the sort of emotion that the Irish do very well. Then letting yourself go to levitate and rise to where you need to be – it did go full circle.’

Whatever your thoughts, it’s impossible not ➤

➤ to be caught up in the raw emotion of some of the tracks. Call Me, lyrically, is deeply personal, almost like the singer is grieving for a loving relationship. Black Tears is another deeply sad and sorrowful song: ‘Inside I’m dying, it’s a sin what we have done to love.’

But there’s also an empowering and uplifting end to the record, which leads you to believe that Imelda is doing just fine now. She is also quick to point out that this is only her version of events.

‘Daryl has written his own album so if you want to hear his side of things you can go and listen to the songs on his album,’ she says. ‘He knows I’m a songwriter and he knows that’s what I was going to do and that’s what he did. That’s good, it’s healthy and it’s the way it should be.

‘We are both really supportive of each other, which is great. We’re fine, we’re good. You presume people just say that in public and you never believe it but we are actually fine. We make it work because we have a daughter and she’s our priority – as long as she’s happy, we’re both happy. She’s our focus, she’s great and we get a lot of laughs out of her. She’s a little whirlwind. She’s a wild child – she takes after her mammy!’

Four-year- old Violet is flying in from their English home in Hampshire to spend the weekend with her mother’s family in The Liberties, where Imelda grew up. The mere mention of her daughter sends a broad smile across the singer’s face, lighting up her eyes.

‘I’m meeting her after this – I can’t wait to see her. It has only been a couple of days but it feels like forever. We’ll work it out. I’m a single working mammy and I juggle it like most women do – some men do it as well but most women certainly do.

‘She’s a happy little camper and her dad jumps in and minds her when I’m gone away and when I have to work – he’s very good. I have a big family and everyone pitches in. She knows mammy has to go to work and she’s ok with that. She also has mammy wrapped around her little finger so she has it good like that.

‘She is everything and the reason for everything. I want to get it right for her and I will keep doing my best and keep her the focus of everything.

‘She helps me pick things – she helped me pick the album cover photo – so she’s involved.’

Imelda is one of Ireland’s leading musical lights and enjoys global fame. She sang for the Obamas in 2011 and is championed by Bono and U2.

On this album, produced by the legendary T Bone Burnett, both Jeff Beck and Jools Holland – who ‘discovered’ her in 2008 – perform duets. The idea that Imelda would document her painful break-up and subsequent reinvention is an obvious form of therapy for such a creative writer – though it’s only hitting home now just how much.

‘It was cathartic but I didn’t think that one through,’ she says. ‘It’s just dawning on me now what I have done, dear God! I wrote everything down, I just needed to do that – it’s what I do as a writer and it helps.

‘I suppose the crux of the music is that I didn’t do it for anyone else, I just wanted to write. I didn’t go out to write an album, I didn’t have a plan. I wanted to write how I felt when I was in the middle of this without thinking about what I was doing or thinking of touring or how the songs would go as part of a live show.

‘I just wanted to feel and write and that’s what I did. I’m happy how it has turned out.

‘I haven’t toured it yet so I don’t know how I will react. I might be a basket case after it but for now I’m good.

‘I have lots of great family and friends and a fabulous daughter and health and so far the reaction to the album has been positive.’

There is something very calming about speaking to Imelda.

She has an engaging gaze and the rockabilly image that was once her calling card has been cast aside for sexy punk rock haircut.

‘ The reaction to the hairstyle change has been interesting,’ she muses. ‘People were very cross with me for changing my hair. There are a lot of people with tattoos and they will have to redo the hair on them! But you can’t stay the same forever.

‘I had different styles before that but I suppose I was just known for that period of time. I’ll move on and change again, otherwise I would be emotionally stunted. Life changes so I follow life – it’s not a plan or a strategy. I didn’t put out a new album and a new look to go with it. My life changed, so I followed it.

‘I just got a new hairdo to make myself feel good. I wasn’t feeling it any more.

‘I always go by my gut – I always have done and I always will. When I was into music that wasn’t mainstream, I was told it wouldn’t do

➤ well but I went with it and it’s the same this time around. I made the album I had to make.’

Imelda has also just announced an extensive UK and Ireland tour for May, including a night at The London Palladium and three nights at Dublin’s Bord Gáis Energy Theatre – May 29-31. She is still in the rehearsal stage but says that the show will be based around the new record along with some of her older hits.

‘I have the same guys but I have added to it – there are ten of us instead of five now – so I will never make any money again,’ she laughs. ‘Double the musicians and double the crew – my manager is sweating because he gets 10% of what I make!

‘I can’t wait to do the whole album, it sounds great in rehearsals and we are all loving it. It’s a complete album and I wanted to work it as that because when I listen to an album I want to hear the journey from start to finish. I want to hear depth because it’s a moment in time of a writer so I want to hear where they are, all corners and all sides.

‘I wrote way too much for this album and when I was picking the tracks I was looking at it as an album. Some of the songs, if I was looking for singles, I may have picked different ones. But I looked at it as an album, as a piece of work.’

Recorded over seven days in Los Angeles, the autobiographical opus is at times difficult to listen to such is the raw emotion as Imelda lays bare her soul. But there is a maturity to the writing that explores finding love in the face of pain and then losing it again. ‘Mentally, no I’m not more mature,’ she says with a laugh. ‘Emotionally, I hope so, but I don’t ever want to grow up.

‘I don’t think musicians ever do. You live life and you learn from life and if you don’t, you’ve missed the point. I suppose as you get older you have more life to learn about.

‘Has it put me off men? No, not at all. I love men. I’m not anti-men, I just think women are bloody great! I think we are fabulous and I think we should rule the world. We kind of already do but officially we should get the gig.

‘But I’m good now, I’m in a great place. I wrote that last year so there’s nearly two years that have passed but people like to poke and prod and get a reaction. I have no regrets. I did what I needed to do and I will deal with the consequences.’

For all the accolades she has accrued, Imelda has remained resolutely down-to- earth. She has a global fanbase but remains inherently a proud child of the Liberties.

She is also a proud mother and feminist and believes that it is a very important – if somewhat dangerous – time for women globally with the election of Donald Trump and some of Vladimir Putin’s recent policy changes.

‘I think I’ve lost half of my American fans by showing my distaste for Trump,’ she says. ‘I said something about him online recently, which I don’t often do but I felt I had to. I had to say where I stood because it’s a really tough time for women at the moment, it’s a very dangerous time.

‘I think women do a lot. For a lot of women, me included, you get to the point where you are minding the husband and the baby and the dog and going to work and getting the shopping and the cleaning and you get to that point where you ask, who is taking care of me? I think everyone has that moment. A lot of women do certainly.

‘I don’t mean it as an anti-man thing but women do tend to juggle a lot. Men are great but the mammy is the mammy. I find it horrific that Russia has just decriminalised domestic abuse and Trump is anti-women, the most misogynistic president that has ever existed. That’s two of the major countries in the world that you thought were advanced and you realise that they’re not.

‘ Then you realise it was women that voted Trump in – that’s flabbergasting to me and I wonder how that could have happened? My fan base has 100% suffered because of my opinions on Trump. So be it though. I’m not political, I don’t want to make big political statements. But I have to be honest.’

You only have to listen to her album to see that honesty is simply part of Imelda May’s fabric.

LIFE Love Flesh Blood is out now