CMAT walks onto stage and immediately collapses. It’s offbeat silliness expected from a dramatic Irish artist who relishes in doing a bit. Somehow her record-perfect soaring vocals for “Have Fun” emerge from underneath her mop of auburn hair, as a violinist goes off. The enormous crowd who have gathered for this 1.40pm Glastonbury main stage set have almost certainly done so knowing this will officially kickstart the fun of the festival - and seem to know every word of the country-pop chorus.
Within 10 minutes of the set, the artist known as Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson has done the following: yodelled, swigged from a can of heineken, sashayed around the stage with an acoustic guitar, and stuck her tongue out with glee, multi-coloured teeth gems sparkling. Crucially, while vacilating between wildly expressive and self-deprecating comedian, she's also begun to bring to life those wink-wink happy-sad country songs about being a bit of a mess.
While this is characteristic of a CMAT set, there could be extra meaning to this performance for her, beyond the fact it's just her most signifcant opportunity yet. In the behind-the-scenes video for her breezy but biting recent single, “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”, she explained its inspiration. “It’s about the fact that whenever I perform on the BBC they have to turn the comments off because everyone calls me a big fat ugly b****,” referencing the occasion in 2024 when the broadcaster disabled comments on an Instagram video of her performance at the Radio 1 Big Weekend. She alchemised this online tedium into one of her biggest songs to date: “Take a Sexy Picture of Me”, a fizzy mid-tempo bop about what women put themselves through to look good. The actual music video at this time has 1.4 million views on YouTube and produced a TikTok dance trend with modern-day It Girl Julia Fox and Chicken Shop Date host Amelia Dimoldenberg participating.
Now she has turned her BBC televised slot on the mother of main stages into what will retrospectively be a launch pad for the next chapter of her career. She tells a version of this fatphobia story today, subsequently stripping off into a blue leotard and calling herself sexy before singing the track - which, again, the entire crowd knows. Even the security guards and staff are spontaneously doing the TikTok dance.
A highlight is the new hyper-specific track “The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station”, a driving rock anthem that builds to a balladic tragi-comic realisation that she should stop hating people irrationally (cue: CMAT ripping a sticker off her breast bone to reveal another sticker, of Jools himself). It has some in the crowd so moved that they’re genuinely crying over an artist wailing about Jamie Oliver. Across these and other hits like the stomping “I Wanna Be a Cowboy” and the wonderfully histrionic “Stay For Something”, she showcases everything she possesses: the warmth of a soap opera nan meets a West End musical diva in a package that’s more camp than Graham Norton reading a copy of Susan Sontag. The moment is right for her to shine ahead of the release of her third album, Euro-Country, in a pop climate that feels more primed, post-Chappell Roan, for another queer female artist making alt-pop similarly inspired by country, musicals and drag culture.
But CMAT is a unique prospect, and is certainly a musician who has to be experienced live. Her crooning and thick scooping vocals cut through the air like a machete, and that larger-than-life presence has a majestic quality to it, emphasised by the impression you get that she absolutely loves what she does.
By the time she’s screaming the final bars of “Running/Climbing” from the floor, splashing a can of water over and flicking it around while headbanging like she’s in a Celine Dion video, there’s no doubt that we’ve witnessed someone who has squeezed every last drop of potential from this opportunity. If she collapsed with exhaustion for real after leaving the stage, you wouldn't be surprised.
