At home with... Camille O'Sullivan

Camille O’Sullivan’s house is quite unlike any other. Rather than decorating it with paintings or photographs, the Irish chanteuse uses stage-clothes to adorn her walls.

“I don’t really put up paintings – if I do, they’re just little postcards, nothing to wreck my head. I love using things from my shows and putting them around the house, hence I have shoes going the whole way up the stairs and I also have lots of dresses hanging on the walls,” she grins. “I sometimes have visitors saying things like, ‘Hey, I used to live like this’, and then I start to wonder what that’s supposed to mean. It’s like, ‘Oh God, I haven’t grown up yet’, but I like to have the house the way I’d like to have it on stage.”
“My lifestyle is mad enough as it is, so I have one room in the house which is all white,” she adds. “I think people are a bit shocked when they come into the room because they expect a bit of colour but no, I need to unwind, so in that room, I have some white dresses hanging up on the wall.”
Camille describes her CD collection as “very eclectic. I love classical music, so I have a lot of Debussy, as well as Chopin and Tchaikovsky, because after being at gigs, I love to have something to switch off to. Recently, I’ve been hoarding a lot of Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash. One of the most recent CDs I bought was Leonard Cohen’s Songs Of Love And Hate, which is brilliant: I’d heard ‘Avalanche’ through a recording by Nick Cave, who I also love.”
Camille researches a lot of the songs she sings on stage, and so her collection also includes lots of old German and French songs. “I have a lot of old songs from the ’20s, and from the likes of Ute Lemper, Scott Walker and Jacques Brel.” Her collection also includes The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Kate Bush and David Bowie.
Many of her oldest records are still in her parents’ house. “The first single I bought was David Bowie’s ‘John, I’m Only Dancing’, but before that we used to have the old Cartridge 8’s, and we had nearly all The Beatles’ albums – it was hilarious because they looked like Fisher Price toys. We also had lots of records – everything from Deep Purple to Gilbert O’Sullivan. In a way, I wish I had a record player here because there are some brilliant records, even old comedy ones like The Pyjama Party and Benny Hill records. This was the kind of madness we were brought up in,” she laughs.
Sheet music takes up a considerable portion of Camille’s house. “When I get an album that I really love, like Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks, I’ll buy the sheet music for it. I can play the piano a bit, but I usually grab the closest musician and get them to play it,” she smiles.
While she does read a lot, she’s finding it increasingly difficult to find the time to settle down with a good book. Her favourites include Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things, Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs, Memoires Of A Geisha and the Tintin comic books. Most of her books are kept at her painting studio, and these include mainly art and architecture titles (Camille is a qualified architect). It’s not all highbrow, however.
“I do have a lot of books on cats,” she grins. “I’m mad about cats and friends tend to give me presents of books about cats. The Secret Thoughts Of Cats is hilarious. It’s about ‘the infinite subtlety of cat expressions’ and it has the same expression for sad, mildly amused, fascinated, bored, not thinking, thinking… Parole De Chat! by Robert De Laroche is a French book about a cat’s life which was given to me by a journalist friend recently.”
The most prized part of Camille’s book collection is made up of black Daler sketch books: “I must have about 30 or 40 of them. When we were studying, we used to draw all the time, and the habit stayed with me. I use it as a diary and sketch. It’s great when you go away, because you get a real chance to draw.”
Camille is also a big movie fan, particularly of old films, and loves “anything by Billy Wilder, especially The Apartment, and Woody Allen: I adore Annie Hall. Other favourites of mine are David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, The Third Man and Bonnie And Clyde.
“I recently bought Wim Wenders’ Wings Of Desire on DVD,” she says. “When I was living in Berlin with a group of Irish girls, we rented the video and it was just an amazing film. I also bought Nick Cave’s God Is In The House, which is a live concert recording.
“I love a lot of comedy too. I recently went home and nicked an old Kenny Everett tape, which has mould on it because it was hidden down in the basement of my parents’ house.”
From Hitchcock to Benny Hill, Tchaikovsky to Tintin, there’s far more to the multi-talented Camille O’Sullivan than meets the eye.

Camille O’Sullivan plays Dublin’s Sugar Club on April 18. See her website, www.camilleosullivan.com, for live dates etc