Music Feature
Imelda's rock 'n' Yule
Monday 27 December 2010
"Is that a rip in me fishnets!?" Imelda May is playing up for the camera again. She's cooing coquettishly, throwing some burlesque curves and well, getting just a bit saucy for the lens. It's what she's good at, especially when she's decked out in a Santa outfit that would melt icicles.
Miss May is just off the plane from touring Spain and she really is getting into the swing of this rocking Christmas lark. This is quite a transformation from the leopardskin coat and biker boots she arrived in for our shoot. "I really enjoyed that, great fun. I felt like a '50s pin-up", she says, once she's slipped out of her Santa Baby cozzie and back into her civvies. "I felt like Betty Page with clothes on!"
It's been quite a year for Imelda May, the Liberties Belle who's brought vintage rock 'n' roll screamin' and hollerin' to the top of the charts. On the very day of our photo shoot, her debut album Love Tattoo had turned five times platinum in Ireland. It's the icing on the cake after too many years of marzipan. "I know! That's a lot of records. I don't believe half the things they tell me. It feels as though they're making it up", she says. "I'm going, no! They're saying, yes! I'm going, no! It'll be nice to hang a platinum disc up in me mam and dad's house."
That's 75,000 Irish homes which own Love Tattoo and if that wasn't enough, her second album, this year's Mayhem, has sold a cool 15,000 copies here, hit No.1 and cracked the top 20 in the UK. Those platinum discs will certainly go well with the trademark platinum blonde curl in her hair.
Looks like she's going to enjoy a very merry Christmas and let's face it, there is something very Christmassy about Imelda. A kind of Doris Day, eggnog and starlit sleigh rides vibe hangs in the air as she prances about in her Santa outfit, so it's no surprise that she's a very Christmassy kinda gal. "I love Christmas, always have", she says. "I probably won't get time to decorate my own place this year unfortunately, but when I do, my Darrel (that's her hubbie of eight years, renowned rockabilly guitarist Darrel Higham) goes mad.
"I decorate everywhere, I even decorate the toilet and he goes mad because I put so much tinsel on the telly he can't see it and he gives out to me. I inherited that from my parents. My dad even decorates the ceiling and my auntie Kathleen up the road, she's Christmas nuts. The decorations go up in November and they last 'til January."
Imelda's not quite that bad but she's looking forward to a very Liberties Christmas this year and with a million nieces and nephews running about, it's going to be, well, mayhem. "Lots of presents, loads of food and we're the only family I know who go to both the midnight mass and the morning mass, it's not one or the other", she says.
"My dad builds the whole crib in the house. He nearly kills himself doing it. He hangs angels from the stairs and he has a lighting rig on it and the figures move."
But what does she want to find under the Christmas tree this year? "What I said to Darrel was that I want a box set of Hammer House of Horror movies", she says. "I do love them or Tales of The Unexpected. My dad gave me the love of that. I have a love for horror but I also love my Doris Day and my Bette Davis and my Diana Dors. I watch Doris Day when I'm ironing."
Shoot over, next stop is her mum and dad's house in The Liberties for a quick change and then it's out the door again to take part in another awards show. Phew! "Oh, before I go, another thing I would like under the tree, I keep hinting at it to Darrell, is an emerald ring", says Imelda, before she skates off. "It reminds me of home and I'm an Emerald Isle girl. I love green. Oh! Hahaha! My mam will be reading this and she'll want one too!"
Alan Corr
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