Singer, occasional songwriter and mother of four Carmel McCreagh knows all about twists and turns. Life, she says as someone who knows only too well about such things, is not a linear journey. Just when you think that the path is smooth and clean, something jagged comes along to trip you up and rip the skin. Just when you think life is a glass half-full of Brandy Alexander, someone or something comes along and spikes it. She has, as the television ads would say, lived a life less ordinary.
Carmel recalls a time when the ordinariness of life as a child in Nenagh, County Tipperary, was all she had. She remembers the freedom of playing in the streets and the greyness of domesticity positioned next to the explosions of colour in the local cinema, where American musicals mixed gaudiness with great songs. She recalls, in particular, how her love of music was developed through an older brother’s love of poetry, literature, opera, jazz and blues. “Opera, jazz, musicals - they’re the things that sustained me,” she remarks.