New look, new album for Imelda
After a tough break-up, a new image and album...
Even before Imelda May finished recording her 2014 album, Tribal, she knew her next record was going to see a radical departure from her trademark rockabilly style. How that would manifest itself, she didn’t know. Then, to quote former British prime minister Harold Macmillan, ‘events, dear boy, events’ dictated the writing of what would become Life Love Flesh Blood, which will be released on Friday.
Many of the tracks are heart-rending ‘torch songs’ reflecting her feelings on the split from Darrel Higham. The man who was her husband, her guitarist and father of her child, Violet.
She changed her appearance to look something like the long-lost daughter of Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders. The first releases from the album, Call Me and Black Tears, showed the 42-year-old Dublin singer was holding little back emotionally. The show-stealing, rapturously received performance of Black Tears on Jools Holland’s top-rated New Year’s Eve Hootenanny indicated her instincts on her new direction had proven correct.
‘You’ve got to go with your gut,’ she says. ‘I also wanted the songs to lead me as opposed to me taking the songs in a certain direction. I didn’t know what I was going to musically and that was quite liberating. Then life events dictated where the album was going to go.’
Those life events, the parting of the ways, though documented in the songs, can’t obviously reflect where her heart and head are now.
A little reticently she says: ‘We’re good, we’re all good. We’ve gone through a tough time and came out the other side. Ages ago, two years ago, I knew Darrel was leaving the band before we split up. He said: “I love playing the gigs but I’m itching to have my own band again.” I said: “You could do both” but he said No.
‘I encouraged him to get a band together. Vice versa, he was very supportive of me. He was saying: “You’ve got to push yourself.” He could see as well that I was chang- ing direction and it wasn’t the one he wanted to go in.’
When I remark that it seems as amicable as these matters can be she says: ‘Oh it is… He has gone on to make his own album; it’s coming out shortly. It’s called Hell’s Hotel. He has Robert Plant on it singing a song. I do backing vocals; it’s a great album.’
As is always the case with an album which charts the arc of a parting, Imelda admits she doesn’t know how she will feel singing Call Me, Black Tears and others such as The Girl I Used to Be and Should’ve Been You on her upcoming tour and beyond.
‘I’m sure it’s going to be incredibly difficult but I’ll just have to see,’ she says. ‘It will also be really hard to sing the songs that I wrote when we were madly in love or just meeting for the first time.
‘I don’t sing Kentish Town Waltz (the 2010 song which reflects hers and Higham’s struggles before they became successful). I haven’t done it for quite a few years. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sing that one again. Songs are a snapshot of your life at the time; little entries in a diary.’
One little entry was the song When It’s My Time, a song she dedicated to the victims of the Westminster attacks when she sang it on BBC Radio Five Live’s Danny Baker Show last weekend, saying: ‘Sometimes you feel you can’t get up in the morning that you can’t go on, but you do. You carry on.’ Her song was very apt and hugely appreciated by the show’s listeners.
She could have selected I Choose Love (from the deluxe version of the album). ‘I wrote I Choose Love after the Bataclan shootings in Paris,’ she says. ‘One of my French record company guys was shot in it. He was called Thomas. He worked on my last album.’
Thomas Ayad was 34 when he died on November 13, 2015. He worked with Mercury Music, her record company in France.
‘I was in the Paris office last week and I felt so sad. They’ve kept his desk, with everything on it as it was. He was only young. The song is about choosing love over fear and hate. To be happy, to be truly happy that’s the only thing you can do.’
Imelda plays the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin in May.
‘It’ll be really hard to sing the songs I wrote when we were madly in love’