The last time I saw CMAT – Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – was in the middle of a grey afternoon at a festival. She brought a charismatic refusal to be embarrassed to the day, and walked off with rather more fans than she had walked on with. Three albums in, she’s become a big deal – big enough to have screens at the side of the stage for the 10,000 people watching, who knew almost every word of her songs.
CMAT’s appeal, I think, is that her aesthetic is that of an ordinary woman acting out and acting up the Charli XCX image. The latter had said that her ‘brat’ aesthetic was: ‘Just, like, a pack of cigs, and, like, a Bic lighter, and, like, a strappy white top. With no bra. That’s, like, kind of all you need.’ CMAT’s version of brat summer seems to be more about late sessions at Wetherspoons than falling into the dawn from the doors of a club. A mess, not a sexy mess.
Though one presumes the stage persona is an exaggeration, the songs ground it in a recognisable, if sometimes ambiguous, reality. One of her standouts, both on record and especially at Ally Pally – in which the voices of thousands of women made it very plain how real its words felt – is called ‘Take a Sexy Picture of Me’. It is very much about the pressure to conform to male expectations of beauty: ‘And make me look 14 oh/ Or like ten, or like five/ Or like two, like a baby/ Whoever it is that you’re gonna love/ So you’ll be nice to me’. She could have just hit you over the head with a Men Are Crap message but the lyrics are substantially more uncomfortable and unusual than that.
CMAT reminds me, oddly, of Jonathan Richman, not that she has anything in common with him musically (she plays countryish pop). But like him, she embraces embarrassment and demands the audience forget their own: she gurns, dances deliberately terribly, avoids what one might expect from a young woman pop star. Silliness was baked into the show: Harry Hill was, for example, brought on dressed as a dartboard. Additional panto-ish interludes might have turned everything too silly, but CMAT had the ability to turn on an emotional sixpence. She would be ringmaster one moment, leading the crowd in a singlaong to ‘Tree Six Foive’, then silence them with something as wracked as ‘Running/Planning’.
Both Cardinals and Little Grandad have been in this column before – at gigs where they were playing to fewer people than there are words in this sentence. The former have just released their debut album and have been touring the UK. The latter have since signed a three-album deal with Communion, a label that has an impressive record.
Cardinals have blossomed into an Irish Oasis. They played with an arrogant swagger and at a volume that was either absolutely necessary or absolutely unnecessary – I’m not sure which. They have the same mid-paced fury as Oasis, but where Oasis tread a straight line, Cardinals lurch from side to side, their songs stuttering appealingly, punctuated by accordion where a rhythm guitar should be. That doesn’t make them sound Irish so much as like drunken sailors spoiling for a fight on shore leave. I happened to see Little Grandad opening shows twice the other week, and I truly believe they are the next big British rock band. Nothing they do is unfamiliar – they’ve clearly listened to a lot of Neil Young, Wilco, Dinosaur Jr – but they twist the constituent parts into pleasing shapes and indelible melodies. They should perhaps also think about adding a couple of songs that just go from A to B, rather than all round the houses. But they are already terrific, and manage to appeal to both those who’ve seen it all before and to their own contemporaries. I can only imagine how great they could become.
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