(Credits: Far Out / Sarah Doyle / Apple Corps LTD)
Sat 3 January 2026 8:00, UK
In my mind, there is no life without The Beatles. They have been effervescently present ever since my first musical memory, but it seemed CMAT was a bit of a late bloomer.
In fairness, the Irish pop star is a world away from anything the Liverpudlian legends ever produced in their heyday, not that one is any better or worse than the other, and it’s simply the fact that Paul McCartney is a man in his 80s with musical inspirations rooted in the blues, while CMAT is a 29-year-old “Dunboyne Diana” with an early obsession with country music.
Some things are just different from each other, which is perfectly fine. But even still, it doesn’t stop the admiration and adoration from flowing, particularly from one icon to another. Once CMAT discovered The Beatles, she knew in an instant that there was no going back to the way life was before.
All it took was one specific song to open the floodgates, and it was a tune that spoke to the more forlorn side of CMAT that people less commonly see. It was the smoking, melancholy remnants of ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’, taken from The White Album.
“This is a White Album song, and I really could have picked anything off this album, because I loved it so much,” the singer explained when listing off the songs which have defined her life in a 2021 interview. “I went through a very extreme Beatles phase for about three years where I didn’t talk about anything else, I didn’t think about anything else.”
She sounds like pretty vast swathes of the rest of the world, in that case. But it seems that although the intensity of the obsession may have since waned a little, it is never going to fully leave. “To this day, there are members of my family who still gift me with coffee table books about The Beatles at Christmas,” the singer revealed.
Although some of those books might have found their way to the bargain bin, they weren’t without precedent from CMAT herself in the lengths she went to in order to feed her Beatlemania: “I managed to get my hands on lots of The Beatles fan magazines and newsletters from the ‘80s, and they were deranged, and I loved them. I lost three years of my life to The Beatles, and I don’t regret a moment of it.”
That’s truly a mark of a musician who will stand the test of time – one that will go to any measure to fuel their interests, passions, and desires. The Beatles may have been quite different from CMAT’s own sonic efforts, but it just proves the age-old theory that no matter what obscure corner of the musical landscape you find yourself in, the Fab Four will never be far from view.
And you never know, Macca might love himself a bit of ‘The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station’. They may be genres, eras, and histories apart, but one thing definitely does bind CMAT and The Beatles together: the fact that, at heart, they are both just musical geeks.
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