Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, or CMAT as she’s professionally known, says she can clearly remember writing the song that changed her life. She was 22 and having moved from Ireland to Manchester, was working in TK Maxx and, at the weekends, as what she’s fond of calling a “sexy shots girl”: “Cash in hand, £8 an hour, 11pm to 3am, teetering up and down the stairs of a nightclub in the building where Joy Division shot the video for Love Will Tear Us Apart with a tray of Jägermeister shots they’d put a bit of dry ice in – burned your skin if you got it on your hands – selling them for three pound each. Terrible job. And just getting absolutely stoned out of my bin all the time, doing whatever drugs anyone would give me for free. I had absolutely no friends.”
An attempt to get her musical career off the ground, “trying to make hyperpop because I loved Charli xcx so much”, had come to nothing. She had just broken up with her “old, weird” boyfriend and was “completely alone in a flat in Chorlton, thinking: ‘What have I done?’ I got really, really, really upset. I kind of looked at myself in the mirror …” She lets out a snort of laughter. “I feel like there’s so many film scenes where people write songs and I’m like, ‘that didn’t fucking happen like that’, but this one did. So I’m crying, grabbed my guitar and wrote I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! in like 20 minutes. And that was that. I thought: ‘I know what I need to do now.’”
A couple of years later, I Wanna Be a Cowboy, Baby! was one of a trio of smart, witty, country-inflected songs that catapulted Thompson to lockdown-era fame in her native Ireland, turning her into what she calls “a big fat pop star” in a matter of months. Her debut album, If My Wife New I’d Be Dead, entered the Irish charts at No 1, its success spreading to the UK, Europe, Australia and the US. Her second, Crazymad, for Me, featured a duet with John Grant and was nominated for an Ivor Novello award and the Mercury prize. Success all happened “purely because I’ve got better at writing songs”, and came surprisingly easily, she says. “Whenever someone’s like, ‘Oh, is it really difficult?’ There’s parts of it that are difficult, but in general, I’m just like ‘This is class, no issue at all. This is great.’”
