Imagine if Dolly Parton had a baby with Benny Hill in 1990s Dublin. You’re some way towards picturing CMAT. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson opened her show at the O2 Academy Brixton perched on a white banister. Wearing a ravishingly odd combo of shades, short shorts, white tights and cowboy boots, she launched into her piano-driven ode to self-destruction “Janis Joplining”. What followed was a lesson in songwriting and slapstick.
Thompson’s lyrics range from the smartly satirical to the downright insane (on “Running/Planning” she sings about ripping off someone’s head and buying it a Nintendo). Her dance moves are somewhere between a drunk hoedown and a Carry on… film: heel toe with lots of arse smacking. She rightly declares her song “California” to be “a real tit slapper” before thwacking herself in the breast.
The show is a darkly comic reflection on the Noughties. Thompson moves from “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”, a song about her hatred of the celebrity chef, through to “Euro-Country”, an anthem about the Celtic Tiger’s economic crash. Now 29, she’s grappling with her Irishness in London, and does a good chunk of her crowd work in EastEnders-worthy mockney.
Thompson is part of the wave of artists taking country music, with its inherently conservative rep, and making it a vehicle for fresh, subversive pop. When she performs “I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby”, she leads the audience in a line dance while we wrestle with the lyric, “I feel bad, ’cos I didn’t cry/When someone I grew up with died/But I break down every time I’m on the scales”. In a world obsessed with pretty, Thompson sings her ugliest thoughts.
When CMAT missed out on the 2025 Mercury Prize for Album of the Year – losing to Sam Fender – she declared: “I was fucking robbed”. Watching her bring Brixton into her brilliant, bonkers world, it’s impossible not to agree. Don’t let the comedy fool you: this is an artist who demands to be taken seriously.
CMAT headlines LIDO Festival in Victoria Park on 12 June
[Further reading: Radiohead restored]
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This article appears in the 04 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Books of the Year