At a certain point in our discussion about music, I show Imelda May footage of people singing at a party I recently attended. They’re accompanying an older man who is singing about the Napoleonic Wars. She’s moved by it, so much so that she grabs my forearm as she listens. “Beautiful,” she says softly.
The singer, poet and actor has been telling me about the musical culture she grew up with in the Liberties, in Dublin. She is clad all in black, with a leather biker jacket. We’re sitting outside on a sunny day at a hotel in Montenotte, overlooking Cork city. She has, she says, been trying to conjure up the spirit of Irish singing sessions in her gigs.
“I never remember music not being a huge part of my life. Singsongs were natural in our household. My mam was a dressmaker, a seamstress. She had me later in life. I was the surprise baby.
“So my mam was the same age as my friends’ grandmothers, and I got an insight into something from before. She worked in the factories. They weren’t allowed to speak, so they sang all day.”
When one finished singing another would start, and they’d all join in.
“My mam knew all the songs, and it was a lot of Hollywood stuff, and Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Mona Lisa and Somewhere over the Rainbow. Jerome Kern songs.”
And she brought it home to family parties, May says.
“There’d always be a point where my mom or somebody would say, ‘Right, who’s going to start?’ And then somebody would break into song and we’d be there all night.”
She still does it. “Every party. Every birthday. It’s just part of my life.”
What does she like about singsongs? “You get to see people in a different light,” she says. “A family member who might maybe be a bit more serious or shy would just break into song and throw their head back and you’d see a new side of them.
“I love seeing them as them rather than who they were to me. You could see a version of them in what songs they chose. And I was lucky to see that.”
What did she sing at those family parties as a child?
“All kinds of things my mam taught me. I’m Always Chasing Rainbows … A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing. She used to make me sing that for her, and she’d roar crying.”
May bursts out laughing. She has a healthily raspy laugh. “It’s just a miserable song.”
She sings a bit: “‘A mother’s love’s a blessing, no matter where you roam. Keep her while she’s living, for you’ll miss her when she’s gone. Love her as a child, although feeble, old and grey, you’ll never miss your mother’s love, till she’s buried beneath the clay.’”
Imelda May: ‘I never remember music not being a huge part of my life.’ Photograph: Justin Farrelly
She laughs again. “And I’d stand there as she cried.”
Her mother, Madge, died in 2021. “We sang that in the funeral. We were laughing and crying and we remembered all that. And [the song] was right!”
May is in Cork in the run-up to the city’s Midsummer Festival, where she’ll be performing Raised on Songs & Stories; the event is partly an attempt to re-create those nights.
“It’s hugely improvised. I have the bones of an evening and then it changes depending on what people shout out or what pops into my head and whatever the audience gives to me. They get the vibe and they totally go along with it. People are coming to it again and again …
“It’s very much a collective of energies. It’s not a ‘show’. I got the set done up like my sittingroom, because I wanted to bring everyone to my sittingroom … I ask people up on stage to sing if they want to sing … Another time I was asked to sing a song and I forgot the words, and the women who asked for it sang it. It was lovely.”
May never really decided to become a musician. It just happened. “I started singing blues and jazz and rootsy music in Bruxelles,” she says, referring to the bar off Grafton Street in Dublin. “I was only 15 or 16 and I was singing in Leeson Street at some nightclubs. A lot of musicians would have a night off on a Monday and have a dance session, and they’d sneak me in.”
‘My granny was Cumman na mBan and my grandad was Fianna Éireann, so the political discussions were fiery in my house’
— Imelda May
She fell in with some bikers, the Devils Disciples, and sang at biker clubs and festivals.
“They’d have me onstage with the blues band to sing, and they were so supportive. I loved it. I was definitely their pet. I was really minded. I was so young … I remember Ronnie Wood getting up on stage when I was 16 at Bruxelles …
“When I was about 18, BB King came to town and did a free gig. One of his guitarists asked me did I want his autograph. And, cheeky as I was, I said, ‘No, but would you like mine?’ And he roared laughing. I said, ‘I’ll be singing with you in a few years.’”
Where did that confidence come from?
“I think I got some of that from being in the Liberties,” she says. “It felt like we were always observed. Because I remember a lot of the tourists used to come around the area on their way to Guinness’s, and they’d be taking photographs of the area.
“I remember people taking photographs of us sitting on the swings and things like that, being aware of being observed. Like a local animal, a wild creature. I remember being aware of that when I was young. So maybe when BB King came to town it was a very inner-city-Dublin-kid reaction.”
May never studied music formally, but she studied singers she idolised, such as the blues singer Mary Stokes, and took notes on how they walked the stage, on how they sang and on how they led their bands. She went to art college. “I’d always be late, because I’d be singing in Leeson Street until five or six in the morning.”
Imelda May: ‘Sometimes, weirdly, I feel more comfortable on stage than I do off it.’ Photograph: Justin Farrelly
She released her first records and ended up touring with Jeff Beck and Jools Holland. She closely observed other musicians she worked with over the years, such as Wanda Jackson, Robert Plant and Lou Reed. The blues legend Hubert Sumlin told her a story about how Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf came to blows over him, “rolling around, fighting on the street. And I said, ‘What did you say?’ and he said, ‘I just stood back and watched.’”
She laughs.
“I love being in the space of brilliance. I love watching it and learning from it. I want to smell it. I want to taste it. I want to experience it. And I’ve been lucky enough to do that.”
In recent years May has experienced a lot of change. She co-parents her daughter with her ex-husband and bandmate, Darrel Higham. And she has lost both of her parents. Her father, Tony, died in 2024. Does she process her grief and her emotions through music?
“It’s my therapy. And sometimes, weirdly, I feel more comfortable on stage than I do off it. I’ve been there since I was 15, and it makes more sense to me than the world sometimes.
It upset me. I was clever. I was daydreaming, but I was clever
— Imelda May
“I don’t get the rules that are put on everything. I don’t see the sense in it other than to make people perform, to make people lesser. I’ve always questioned. At school I’d always put my hand up to say, ‘Why?’
“It didn’t gain me popularity with the teachers. But I suppose being a musician or being an artist, or creative, immediately sets you up as the outside looking in. So maybe the stage is a bit more comfortable to me.”
What rules does she dislike? She waves her hand around. “All of it. It’s not working, is it? Nobody feels good. It’s like you can’t breathe. All these apps you’re given to make it easier. They’re supposed to connect us, but it’s isolating us.” She sighs.
“At the moment I’m totally disillusioned. I’m disillusioned by people trying to find differences. Imagine if you were an astronaut looking back at this.”
May sees herself as a storyteller these days as much as a singer. She has published poetry, including a poem called You Don’t Get to Be Racist and Irish, which went viral in 2020, and acted in a film, Fisherman’s Friends.
She also performed as Kathleen Behan, mother of the writers Brendan, Brian and Dominic, in the one-woman show Mother of All the Behans, which Peter Sheridan adapted from Brian Behan’s book, and was originally performed by Rosaleen Linehan.
“Kathleen took over me,” she says. “I was almost possessed by her.”
Raised on Songs & Stories: Imelda May on stage. Photograph: Ewelina Stachurska
The play reconnected her, she says, with a rich working-class intellectual and cultural tradition that is often written out of history.
“My granny was Cumman na mBan and my grandad was Fianna Éireann, so the political discussions were fiery in my house. And they were well informed. There was a lot of reading going on, a lot of research.
“That was a big part of my growing up, was political and social awareness. I think a lot of working-class kids are underestimated. I was often told very, very clearly [at school], ‘You will amount to nothing. Aim for not getting pregnant. Aim for a job with the local council. Aim for the Guinness factory if you’re lucky.’
“I remember thinking, ‘F**k you. You’re underestimating me.’ It upset me. I was clever. I was daydreaming, but I was clever.”
May believes that a lot of the Behans’ cultural power came from being “working-class people gathering together and singing songs … If you cut people off from the grandparents, you immediately cut them off from songs about what happened in that area or at that time.
“I think the oral traditions are massively important for passing things along … I hope to God that working-class kids are breaking through. Talent and creativity will always be in working-class areas …
“But that working-class kid won’t have the luxury of time or money to fall back on, or even a garage to practise in. If you’re in two rooms with the rest of your family, how do you learn to play the drums? That’s where government needs to step in.”
May’s passion about her art and the world around her is visceral and sincere. In 2019, possibly in a throwback to her art college roots, she was involved in an installation at the Latitude festival where she simply sat writing poetry inside a big glass box while people around her were encouraged to do likewise. She loved it.
“I wanted it to be an escape from the noise of the festival,” she says. “People came in and I thought they’d come and leave, but they stayed and they’d write as I was writing. It sounds bonkers, but it was really lovely.”
She thinks for a moment. “I love the beauty of, not the show, but the creation‚” she says. “Turning up somewhere like we are now, and nothing exists, and within a certain amount of time something exists that didn’t. And it’s not perfect.
“I hate writing songs sometimes. It upsets me. Because it’s uncomfortable trying to fit things together … But it’s kind of like making love. The end result isn’t the be-all and end-all; the getting to it is. It’s the intimacy and it’s the moment and it’s the beauty and the imperfections. That’s actually what makes us human.”
Imelda May: Raised on Songs & Stories is at Vicar Street, in Dublin, on Tuesday, June 9th, and Wednesday, June 10th, and at Live at the Marquee on Friday, June 12th, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival