Every year, The Famous Spiegeltent is a key feature of Sydney Festival. The lavishly decorated entertainment venue was constructed in Belgium in 1920 and continues to show up at festivals around the globe.
Not only does the tent’s presence allow punters to watch some excellent contemporary artists in a completely novel setting, but it also possesses the rare capacity to lure in audiences, no matter who’s performing.
Then there are the likes of Camille O’Sullivan, who was practically born to perform in The Famous Spiegeltent. Roughly ten years ago, the Irish singer found images of the tent online and immediately knew she had to find a way to get within its walls. “David Bates, who owns The Famous Spiegeltent now, he says he gets about 200 emails a day from performers who are desperate to perform there,” O’Sullivan says. “I did send him a little card and he said, ‘It was formal but it did the trick,’ in the sense of him listening to the CD.”
This was back in 2004, and before long O’Sullivan was travelling around the UK with The Famous Spiegeltent. “At Edinburgh that year [Bates] decided to create a show called La Clique,” she says. “It was amazing; we travelled all over the world and it’s what really brought me to Australia too.”
Thanks to her theatrical stage show and compelling recorded output, O’Sullivan has since become a respected performer in her own right. In recent years, she’s appeared on BBC’s Later… With Jools Holland, as well as taking the stage at the Sydney Opera House. Still, she couldn’t turn down an offer to return to the Spiegeltent.
“It’s so stunning,” she says. “To perform in it is a really emotional, lovely thing. Usually you travel to a country and play in the venue, and you know it for that. But when you’re in the tent you’re going, ‘Where am I?’ After your show you don’t know if you’re stepping out into New York, Edinburgh or whatever. It has this lovely thing that it’s always home to you.”
During a ten-night run at the Sydney Festival, O’Sullivan will focus on her latest release, 2012’s Changeling. While her earlier work focused on songs written by the likes of Jacques Brel and Tom Lehrer, with Changeling she referred to some more contemporary artists.
“Stuff like Radiohead and Tom Waits and Arcade Fire, it’s stuff I’ve been doing over the years,” she says. “I suppose I looked more at what was in my own record collection [and] I thought, ‘Look, enjoy yourself.’ As a performer you’ve just got to keep on evolving.”
Songs by Nick Cave, Gillian Welch and David Bowie also show up in her repertoire, but the Camille O’Sullivan live show isn’t about simple reenactment. Rather, it’s an exceptionally active undertaking, which can be theatrically dazzling and brutally emotional.
“You need variety in the show,” she says. “If I had the chance I’d probably be doing all melancholy, dark songs like Nick Cave. But I make sure there’s variety, like things like ‘In These Shoes?’ [by Kirsty MacColl]. The idea is, you can change quickly from being quite light to quite dark or quite funny.”
Though O’Sullivan clearly enjoys adopting material written by her favourite contemporary artists, she promises to dip into her back catalogue for the upcoming Spiegeltent shows. “There’s some people who get irked that you’ve done some more rockier stuff,” she says. “I started doing a mixture of Changeling and then kind of the ‘best of’. It’s just been really nice. It spans maybe 50 years of different songwriters.”
Camille O’Sullivan is playing inside the Aurora Spiegeltent on Thursday January 8 – Sunday January 18 as part of Sydney Festival. Tickets can be found here.
