What Dreams May Come True

“Had I ever been to America before? Not with a working visa. Em, only on me holidays... with instruments! Ha, ha!”

Imelda May has a delightfully infectious laugh that’s 100% pure Dublin. It’s the kind of loud, throaty, dig in the ribs, “g’wan-outta-dat” expression of mirth that simply can’t be faked. Within minutes of meeting her, the impressively-quiffed Liberties girl utterly charms you with her sheer genuineness and humour. “You’re not gonna write that, are ye? Ye are? Ha, ha!”
Imelda has had an awful lot to laugh about in 2009. By any standard, it’s been quite some year for the 35-year-old Dubliner. It’s mid-November and we’re sitting in a ridiculously spacious fourth floor penthouse suite of the Galway Radisson, looking out over Loch Atalia and the bay, marvelling at the glorious view. Tonight she and her band will be playing a show at the city’s Black Box Theatre - her 128th gig of the year so far.
No overnight success, she tells me that she can barely believe what’s happened (“I keep pinching meself!”). Following years of obscurity and relative struggle, gigging for a living with no record company support, May’s big break came about 12 months ago when she was invited to perform on Later with... Jools Holland. Although she’d already self-released a critically acclaimed blues and rockabilly fused album, Love Tattoo, and supported Holland at several gigs, appearing on his TV show proved a definite turning point in the musical fortunes of the singer once lazily described as “Ireland’s answer to Amy Winehouse.”
“That’s really where all this madness kicked off,” she explains. “We had gigged with Jools before. We were invited to open for him in Kew Gardens, and he heard us, some of his people heard us or whatever, and then we were sent the date sheet to open for him for as many as we could do.
“So that was great and then, bit by bit, he’d come listen to us and then invited us backstage for an aul' curry and asked us, ‘What are you up to, what record label are you signed to?’ And I said, ‘None! Nobody wants us, we sent the stuff around, got turned down, made the album anyway.’ And he was just saying, ‘I can’t believe that, I have to get you on my show’. So he got us on the radio show first, and I think he got a good response.”
Even so, landing a slot on the hugely prestigious Later was far from guaranteed. It wasn’t until singer Natalie Cole fell ill and cancelled that Imelda got her last moment shot at the title.
“I think he was having a hard job getting us onto the TV show, with the producers, and there’s also a huge backlog to get on that show. And of course it takes a lot of record labels and bigwigs to get them on. And then Natalie Cole got sick and then we got a call saying, ‘Hi, this is the producer from Later with Jools Holland - you’re on in two days’. I was in Dublin and we were all screamin’!”
Imelda performed two songs from Love Tattoo on the show, appearing alongside the likes of Jeff Beck, Elbow and Roots Manuva (indeed, Beck made a point of telling Holland that he was only there to see the Dubliner). Almost immediately afterwards, things started to happen. First came the record deal...
“Universal in England, who I had initially been turned down by, rang back and said, ‘We want to have a chat’,” she recalls, smiling wistfully. “Pretty soon after that, I got signed to Decca – which I think is quite a cool label to be on. I’m delighted with that.”
Love Tattoo was swiftly re-released, becoming a number one in Ireland and was also a hit the UK.
“The album had already been out, but we were only really selling it at our gigs. My husband Darrel, who’s also the guitarist, he built a studio, him and a friend of his, so we went there to record it and just begged, borrowed and stealed to get a few bob and pay the lads and kind of make it happen. So I never thought it would be heard other than the people who were buying it at the gigs. And then it was re-released in January once we were signed to Universal, because they thought it would be quite a nice idea to get it into the shops.”
Needless to say, she’s delighted with the album’s success: “The thing that I love about it taking off was, I’ve said this before in many interviews and it sounds cheesy and I don’t mean it to, but it’s the old fashioned way. It was from the audience first, and that doesn’t happen as often as it should anymore. People just reacted to it, emailed my manager like a nutcase, the emails were mental I think, Jools Holland got a good response – anytime we got radio play or anything they were bombarded with people calling and emailing saying, ‘Where can we get it?’.
“And that’s the way it’s happened, that’s how we got the interest from the record company because they could see what was happening. And it’s been quite nice that it’s been that way, people have been coming to the gigs, say you get ten one week, everybody would bring a friend, then you get twenty the next week, everyone would bring a friend, so it doubled and tripled. So I loved that it happened in a kind of ‘power to the people’ way, you know?”
She’s spent most of 2009 gigging around Ireland, the UK and Europe – playing support to everybody from the Scissor Sisters to Van Morrison along the way. Two months ago, the album was released in America. She’s just returned from playing a small but successful club tour over there.
“There was no big plans to conquer America, as they say, or ‘break’ America,” she says. “There was no big plans to go over there but we just got such a good reaction – the same thing was happening again, emails, phone calls, all over the internet: ‘Where can we get this album?’ So that’s why we said, ‘Well, let’s release it’. When we went, we got invited to open for Chuck Berry which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I was absolutely chuffed getting to meet him, I was told, ‘Don’t go near him, he’ll bite your head off’, but he was really lovely.”
She laughs that throaty laugh again. “Somebody said to me afterwards that it did help that I was wearing a tight skirt. He’s 82, but I think he still likes the ladies. Ha, ha!”

The youngest of five children, Imelda Mary Clabby was born in Dublin in 1974. She and her siblings (two brothers, two sisters) grew up in a small two-bedroom house in the Liberties. As in many working class households, music was always a big thing for the Clabby family.
“We were a typical Irish family, lots of good aul singsongs and fantastic parties and all that,” she recalls. “My sister Maria sang in church and she was also in The Liberty Belles, that were a big hit in the Seventies. She taught me my first chords on the guitar and I thought she was the coolest thing in the world. I used to go to Mass with her, and strum along – she’d write out the chords for me to play. And then at family parties, everybody had a song.”
What was your standard?
“I think when I was four me big one was ‘The Red Red Robin’,” she laughs. “I even had a dance to go with it! Me aunty Joan would be going, ‘Oh Jesus, here she goes again!’ I thought I was great!”
As a six-year-old, she got involved in an amateur organisation called The Liberties Music and Drama Group, which her mother helped set up.
“They set it up – me mum and lots of other mums from the area – because there was nothing for kids to do. It was when people started suing for things so they ripped all the playgrounds up. So they were thinking, ‘Well, the kids need something to do, they’re bouncing off the walls’. There was loads of joyriding and all that going on so, fair play to them, they thought kids needed something to do.
“And there was loads of different clubs set up and things like that for us to do, and my mother and other mothers set up The Liberties Music and Drama Group. We sang things like Showboat and all the old fashioned stuff, it was great. We all danced and got our twenty pence or fifty pence a week and we would buy our bag of chips on the way home. We loved it.”
She reckons that the group was responsible for changing a lot of lives for the better. Many of the kids that were involved then are now working in the arts.
“For a lot of kids that did change their course of life, me included, but there was somebody I have heard of since who has done lighting and somebody else is doing camera work in RTE, you know, somebody else is now doing set design. So it did change the course of a lot of the kids’ lives. It gave everybody the confidence, I suppose.”
Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games growing up in the Liberties in the 1980s. Heroin wrecked an awful lot of lives, and Imelda played first hand witness to the devastation.
“It was heartbreaking to see all that, and I don’t often go into it because an area doesn’t want to be known for that, and that alone, when there’s a whole lot more to be offered from it. And it was quite tough at the time, I mean you’d be going up, sometimes, up the stairs, the stairwells of the flats, and you’d be literally stepping over people lying there with needles up their arms.”
People that you knew personally, obviously.
“Yeah,” she affirms, nodding sadly. “Families you knew, but you never thought ill of them because you knew their whole family, and you knew their mother and their father would be absolutely heartbroken, and doing the best they could. Some of them had lost two, three sons already and this was the fourth one about to go.
“And that’s why I’m so proud of being from the Liberties, that’s why the Liberties means so much to me, because they all really pulled together like no area I’ve ever heard of or seen before. They pulled together, they used to have regular meetings, there would be vigilantes trying to stamp it out because the police – their hands were tied a lot of the time.
“There was huge, huge big movements. They used to have meetings where they’d invite somebody who was really heavily addicted, and invite their mother down, and have a one-to-one with the mother and them and the whole area trying to convince them not to hurt their mother. It was very emotional and hard, but it did work a lot of the time.”
Chronic unemployment was another devastating scourge on the community. “You’d know the hard times everyone was going through, like the jobs that had just been lost, whole families out of work, and it was quite shameful for a lot of people going to the dole. I helped working for a while cutting up cheese around Christmas time actually, cutting up lumps of cheese and ham and butter and all that that the government was sending, but people used to only come at night time to get it. They wouldn’t come in the daytime because they were embarrassed to be seen.”
Would this have been St Vincent de Paul or something?
“St Vincent de Paul must have been doing it, yeah. I used to help out in kids clubs. I was only a kid meself but they’d give you a little badge and say you were a leader of 40 of them – and you thought you were the bees knees when you were only about 12 yourself! And they’d get you to help out wrapping them and weighing them. And we had great fun doing it, but I remember the men coming at night time, and I thought that they didn’t want to be seen during the day getting handouts. Which is a complete different attitude to a lot of people now.
“And the area really pulled itself together, absolutely did... Like I said, it wasn’t judgemental, friends of mine that I went to school with had an awful, awful hard time and I grew up with them and they were good people, great parents, great families, it was just a really, really tough time, if you went down the wrong route. Unfortunately if it was the hard stuff, you were done for.”
Were you ever tempted to try it yourself?
She looks horrified at the question: “No, not at all, absolutely not at all, certainly not, not with that, because I’d seen what it had done to so many people. Heroin just killed off whole families in a very short space of time, the numbers of family members would dwindle rapidly, so I was never, never, never tempted with that just by seeing what it did. So like I said, the area, to me, is a magic area because they pulled together and they got help before rehab was a word that was known. They pulled a lot of people together and helped them out and got families back together again. So that’s one of the reasons why I’m so proud to be a Liberties girl. I never normally say that in interviews, because you don’t want an area to be known just for that, but it’s not a bad thing to be known for, I suppose, pulling together and getting on with it, you know?”
As a typical young working class Dublin teenager, Imelda was into the usual escapist chart music. However, a cassette tape she purloined from one of her brothers broadened her musical horizons somewhat.
“Ah, I was into the usual stuff – Wham, Bros, Aha, Wet Wet Wet, all that. I did like Rick Astley for a while – he’d a good voice, I used to sing harmonies along with him. And I’d have posters of River Phoenix on me wall, just the normal teen thing. But I did go mad into – it was a tape my brother had that I had nicked from his room, and I’ll never forget it; it was Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. And I studied that tape.
“I had a Fischer Price plastic tape recorder that I got for Christmas and you could press play and record and sing into it, you know one of those little – I actually still have it at home, a little children’s one – I listened to it over and over and over again. You know the way teenagers get obsessed.”
And so the seeds of a future rockabilly star were planted. “That music just blew me mind,” she laughs. “And then I got myself a little quiff, got meself loafers, got me turn-ups on my jeans and my check shirts, that was that. And I went through different styles and different music but that definitely flipped a switch in me head. I absolutely loved it! It blew my mind what they were doing, and Gene Vincent screaming! I mean you could hear them screaming in the background on some of the tracks going into the solos and I just thought, ‘What is that?! That’s mad!”
She can still vividly recall buying the Lady Sings The Blues soundtrack album with a HMV gift voucher given to her for her 15th birthday. “Actually we got to open for Diana Ross for a gig a couple of year ago, and I wrote a little note and I just shoved it under the door. It just said, ‘You doing that movie changed me life, so thanks for that’. I don’t know if she ever got it.
“We were told not to look her in the eye so I thought I’d just shove the little letter under her door, somebody might throw it out, I don’t mind. So anyway, that’s how I got into the bluesy side of it.”
By the time Imelda turned 17, her musical tastes had utterly changed. “The pop stuff on the radio had gone and it was mainly Elmore James, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson. It was going in all different various directions – Chet Baker, Louis Jordan – it was a broad spectrum, but it was all old stuff that seemed to have some kind of link to it in some way and that’s where it went. I was hooked then.”
Having completed her Leaving Cert at the Holy Faith Convent at the age of 16, Imelda studied art for a year at Ballyfermot Tech.
“I was very young finishing school. I wasn’t mad about it, kept my head down, got on with it, got it over with and got out. Art and Art History were the two things that caught my attention mostly in school so I went to study them.”
However, her heart wasn’t really in it. “I did a year just of graphics and sculpture and life drawing and photography and all that kind of stuff. And I loved it but I knew it wasn’t for me. I was talking to someone who was in the art college, and she said that when she was sad she paints and when she was happy she paints. I thought, ‘Jesus, I sing when I’m sad and I sing when I’m happy’. And I just thought, ‘Shite – I’m in the wrong thing!’”
The very first time she ever sang in front of a paying audience was at a blues night in Bruxelles when she was 16. “We went down to Bruxelles Blues Club with my sister and my brother, just a gang of us. They snuck me in and, when I got called up, me knees were knockin’. It was the first time I’d sang at a gig. It was a song called ‘Heaven’s Rain’. I forgot the words. It was six verses and I think I sang the same verse six times over! So everyone gave me a big cheer at the end, probably going, ‘Thank God she’s finished!’”
After dropping out of Ballyfermot Tech, Imelda worked at a variety of odd jobs, singing at gigs and open nights whenever she got a chance.
“I’ve worked at everything,” she says. “I’ve worked in garages, worked in the launderette for a year, washing people’s smelly socks and clothes – I nearly set fire to the place once with the dryers. I worked in cafes, restaurants, nursing homes... all kinds of stuff. I did face painting on Grafton Street at one stage. I sent leaflets around, I did window painting for Christmas, actually, on the windows, anything like that, anything I could try and earn a few bob off.”
Gigs were few and far between, though, most especially paying ones.
“I was trying me best, I was guesting a lot,” she recalls. “I was being invited on open mic jam sessions and people were asking me to guest. But one day me uncle Paddy sat me in his Herald van – he did the papers for the Herald – and he says, ‘So, Imelda, you’re busy are you?’ and I was going, ‘Yeah, getting really busy now!’ And he said, ‘How much are you earning?’, and I said, ‘Ah sure nothing, I’m delighted to be asked’. I was so enthusiastic! ‘Well’, he said, ‘if you’re that cheap you’ll never be idle!’ She laughs at the memory. “So I thought I better start asking for a few bob!”
When a friend of hers started managing Satchmo’s Restaurant in Parliament Street, she asked him for a regular gig.
“They wanted it as a jazzy place. I asked him for a gig, and he said yeah, and that was the first time I set up my own band. I was probably about 18 at the time. And I got fantastic people to play with me, just asked loads of different people. I’d get the name of a session musician off other musicians and they’d be saying, ‘I don’t know if he’ll do it – you know he normally charges like a hundred pounds for a gig, he’s up there, he’s doing Hothouse Flowers stuff’. And I’d say, ‘Well, I’ll chance it’. I’d ring him – ‘will you do a gig, I’ll give you thirty quid and a dinner?’ And lot of them would do it.
“So I was getting great musicians coming in, and at the end of the night, you’d get a dinner and a bottle of wine and I was getting it for thirty quid... almost different musicians every week which was a challenge, but it was really – like that was me first gig on my own with me own band and I was singing everything from Ray Charles stuff to... I’d finish it with Strange Fruit which was such a downer! Everybody used to weep into their dinner and go home miserable!”
In her early twenties, Imelda divided her time between working at various jobs and singing whenever she could. She didn’t really have any fixed plans. Around about this time she met the man who’d eventually become her husband, English rockabilly guitarist Darrel Higham.
“I met Darrel at a gig in the UK, came back home, carried on doing me thing. I’d get a gig a week, or two gigs a week if I was lucky, and I always had shift work so it meant I could swap if a gig came in at the last minute. And then I joined a couple of bands. I sang backing vocals for Dave Gooding and John Angel from No Sweat with Josie Doherty who’s now in the Dublin Gospel Choir. We travelled around in a little van all over the country singing, got into a soul band called Mother Nature, sang up in the Dublin Mountains, did loads of other bits and pieces, tried to do a bit of session work if I could. But when I met Darrel, came back to Ireland, carried on...”
Was it love at first sight?
“Yeah – well he says it was for him,” she laughs. “I’m only saying that back because somebody asked him that before and he said, ‘It was for her’. But we did click and we hit it off, but then I went back home and didn’t hear anything for ages. Then I got a call afterwards and we were obviously both thinking of each other and then we got together – he dragged me over to Finland on the pretence of me singing on his album, but I think he had other things in mind. He was just getting me off to Finland on my own. Ha, ha! That was great, we really hit it off and then one of us had to move and so I moved over to England.”
She eventually moved to London in 1997, set up home with Darrel, and started trying to break into the music scene there.
“It was hard at first,” she says. “I had to start from scratch and meet new musicians, and I didn’t want to do it under his name – he was quite successful, like he says, ‘A big fish in a small pond’, and he was well known in the rockabilly scene, but I didn’t want to do it under his steam. So I went off in a different direction and I got into different bands. I went down the rhythm and blues route, and I got into a swing jazz band, did some backing vocals on country, bit of session work and all that and all went well. So I worked and as I was going along, met musicians, got people’s numbers and all that.”
Did you prefer the scene over there to the Irish scene?
“I wouldn’t say I preferred it, there was just more of it. There was just more things happening, more gigs, it’s such a huge place – which was good and bad. It made it harder in trying to meet people; in Ireland it was a small scene, you got to know people pretty quickly, which was great, and of course I was a kid, I suppose it was quite odd seeing a child that young singing blues. But it certainly wasn’t easy.”
She says that her strong Catholic faith helped her through those early years in London when Darrel was often away on tour.
“When I got to England I was a little bit older and, like I said, I didn’t know anyone and in that way, I suppose, going back to my faith, it drew me back because I felt a bit lost. So while Darrel went off on tour, I was left on me own for a couple of months and I got the shingles and... Ah, I was in an awful state, crying my eyes out and missing home, and I went into the church at the top of the road, I needed some kind of home comfort, and that kept me going from then on.”
Even today, she regularly visits churches to light candles while on tour.
“When I’m travelling around and all, it keeps me feet on the ground and it keeps me realising, I suppose, what’s important. It lets me, at least, keep close to me family and all when I’m far away, or if somebody is sick you can feel attached to them when you light an aul candle. You know, it keeps you connected.”
After five years together, she and Darrel eventually married in 2002. That same year, having sung with various other bands for ages, Imelda finally put her own band together.
“I was in a swing band for ages. I learned a lot from being in a swing band. I never sang with an eleven-piece band before and it’s a different ball game, you can’t wing it as much as you can elsewhere. And if things go wrong, it needs to get back on track pretty quickly, or else you have eleven people playing different notes so you have to be able to pull it back into some kind of structure quite quick.
“So I gradually got me confidence, I suppose, it was building up a bit, I was enjoying meself a lot and I thought, ‘Maybe I am actually alright at this, maybe I am doing it properly’, because there’s always times when you think you’re winging it... And I was always writing, and this is how I got me own band together. I got itchy feet, got fed up with being in other people’s bands, constantly asking, ‘Do you mind if we try this number?’ I thought, I really want to do this song, I really want to do this song and then I really wanted to start doing originals, I got fed up with doing other people’s songs. I thought, ‘Right, now or never’...
“And I asked a few people that I was in different bands with, would they be interested. Went up to Birmingham, somebody gave us the lend of a little hall, and we just trashed out the songs. I’m not musically intellectual in any way, I’m not musically educated, in that I can’t tell you where it should go into a G minor seventh or something like that, but I can tell you, I can hear it in me head, and it is a difficult process trying to get it out, and the lads were great, so I’d sing them the song, tell them what feel I wanted, I’d describe the mood, paint them a picture almost of what I wanted the song to be. Where I wanted to go quiet and big and, ‘Could you do, maybe, a death march on that?’
“I hadn’t got the technical terms or the names but I knew what I wanted on it, and I’d say, ‘Can you do a minor key on that?’ and they’d play a minor, and I’d say, ‘No, not that one, could you do another? No, not that one – up a bit – back to that one – yeah that’s the one!’ That’s how we got it together – they were very patient and worked through it with me until I got the songs how I kind of wanted them.”
Although the band quickly became a full time (albeit precarious) career for her, it’s only in the last three years that Imelda started writing original material. Around the same time, Darrel finally came on board as guitarist.
“Yeah, it’s really only in the last three years that I’ve been doing me own stuff. So I had me band, then I thought it needed guitar, there was no guitar it was piano, and it needed a bit of balls to it. So the best guitarist I knew was Darrel, me only reservation was that he was my husband.
“And he was wanting to play in the band as well, and I thought we’ll see how he goes, because we were really happy together, and I thought, I don’t want to turn into bloody Ike and Tina or, killing each other from being with each other every day, absolutely every day, like anybody who is setting up a business together, you have to wonder, do you think we’ll be able for this? But it’s been great, his guitar sat in perfectly immediately, he felt his feet and it was the first time we had been in a band together playing the same stuff.
“We had always jammed together, always played at home, or if either of us were doing a gig we would get each other up guesting, so we’d always played together but never in a band. So anyway, it was fantastic, and it has worked great so far. The two of us are obsessed about it, similar interests, so it’s great. I got the perfect band that I wanted, and everybody in it, and it just started to get juicier and juicier. And we all started to gel, and get used to each other. We’d played with each other all a lot but started to know each other’s style, and I think it has come to a nice little golden nugget now, you know?”
Although they’re busier now than they’ve ever been, Imelda still wants to start a family – just not right now.
“I’d love to have kids, yeah. Tick-tock tick-tock, yeah! Ha, ha! But I mean it’s just kind of going so well recently, and the two of us have been working hard for a long time and made many, I suppose, sacrifices. Somebody was asking when our last proper holiday was – I do go home to see me family, but we had a week off for our honeymoon seven years ago, and I think that’s really been it.
“We are really nerdy and obsessed about music and love it and get itchy feet when we’re not doing it. So once we worked hard and money wise we struggled pretty badly sometimes. I never told me family, because you’re a bit proud about these things and you don’t want to tell anyone, but it was very tough at times. And I’m not saying that as the old violin [mimes playing a small violin] to everybody but most musicians would back me up on that, or anybody who is self-employed, you’ve good times and bad times and some days you might have five gigs, then you might not have a gig for a month.
“And you’re stuffed then, especially when the two of you are in the same band. And when I was trying to make this band work, I wanted to pay me musicians – sometimes I wasn’t getting enough, well most times at the beginning I wasn’t getting enough to cover the band, let alone all the transport. It was costing me for every gig and I was starting to really get worried on it and luckily it started to turn around when people started coming in, if you were getting paid on the door you think, ‘Oh Jesus, thank God we’ve broken even on this!’
“And then if you sold a few albums you’d say, ‘Great, I could take twenty quid tonight’, but I wanted to make sure the band were paid at all times because they were giving up a lot of their time and doing it for a good price for me and supporting me so, bit by bit, it started to work. But anyway, to answer your question, I would like to start a family but, ah sure, me mother had me when she was almost 40 so hopefully I’ll have a bit of time left in me. It’d be a shame to give it up now when it’s only starting to go well. Like I said, we were struggling for ages and now that it’s taken off you’d go mad if you said, ‘Alright, let’s pack it in now.’”
What are your plans for 2010?
“More gigs, more work, some time off, not just for myself but for the band as well. Maybe a holiday. We’ve been doing back to back tours really, we’ve been working almost every day since last February. Which has been great. We’ve already started the next album, I’ve been writing like a mad thing.”
Does it have a title yet?
“I think we’re going to call it Mayhem – after one of the songs. We started it months ago and then we got a bit more time from the record company which is great, because I rushed it - we had two weeks off - rushed everybody into the studio, we were all bags under our eyes but we really enjoyed it, then we got back out to gigging again, got a bit more time off, then the record company moved the deadline back because they thought it might not be a great idea to have an album come out around Christmas time and getting lost in Michael Jackson’s hits and all the rest of it – Girls Aloud and X Factor and all that, multi million pound stuff. So we thought, well we’ll wait until after Christmas, we’ve got a bit more time. So now I’m getting time to tweak it, which I’m delighted with.”
Before the mayhem of 2010 fully kicks off, though, she has to have a minor operation on her back. “Yeah, me back’s in bits – I’m even wearing this bloody thing,” she explains, opening her jacket to reveal a white support corset. “I’m apparently gonna have to take six weeks to recover. Can you imagine me sitting for six weeks being quiet?”
Imelda May laughs at the very thought and shakes her head. “Poor Darrel. I’m probably going to do his head in.”