Camille O’Sullivan & Earl Slick on Their Union Chapel Reunion

Thirteen years after they first shared a stage, Camille O’Sullivan and legendary Bowie guitarist Earl Slick are reuniting for a pair of highly anticipated shows at Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre and London’s Union Chapel. We caught up with the pair to discuss stage fright, surviving fame, and unscripted rock ‘n’ roll.

Editor’s note: The following feature contains strong language, preserved verbatim from the interview.

‘I hate normal. Normal really goes between putting me to sleep and aggravating me. I don’t do normal.’

Speaking across a cross-continental video feed with Earl Slick, the legendary guitarist—the man who anchored the sound of David Bowie from the Diamond Dogs tour through to The Next Day, and stood beside John Lennon for Double Fantasy—he isn’t just offering an easy soundbite; to me it sounds more like a biological fact.

Sharing our screen from her own respective corner of the globe is Camille O’Sullivan. The formidable Irish-French interpreter of Brel, Cave, and Waits is ostensibly here to discuss The Art of Falling Apart, her upcoming live spectacular coming to Dublin and London this November, where Slick will join her as a special guest.

What actually happens over the next hour is a sprawling, fiercely funny chat between two kindred spirits who clearly view the live stage less as a polished showcase and more as a site for unpredictable combustion.

It is a reunion over a decade in the making. The pair first crossed paths in 2013 at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown Festival at the Royal Festival Hall, performing a shattering rendition of Lennon’s ‘I’m Losing You’.

‘I had just three weeks beforehand had my first little baby girl, kind of losing my mind, having just broken up with my partner,’ O’Sullivan recalls of that initial meeting. ‘I stepped on stage and saw this incredible man. We saw something probably in each other which… well, I don’t know if Earl said, “You’re as crazy as me,” but there was definitely a kindred spirit. When you’re beside a person like that on stage, it’s like there’s a bonfire going off and you’re just dancing around it.’

The spark lay dormant until January of this year, when both artists found themselves at the Dublin Bowie Festival. For Slick, who had sworn off Bowie tribute shows since 2019, the decision to play was a reluctant one, swayed only by the presence of old friends like Mike Garson and Mark Plati—and O’Sullivan.

‘We were like three little musketeers just hanging out, enjoying each other’s company as if no time had passed at all,’ says O’Sullivan. That Dublin reconnection gave her the bravery to ask Slick to join her London headline show. ‘I grew up in a village in Cork where I had to run up the back laneways to church, so I stayed very insular, listening to music in the house. I would have heard his guitar playing through my sister’s bedroom wall first. Between hearing his guitar playing and Bowie’s singing, I thought, wow, you can be anything. You can be this small girl from a village in Cork, and yet this makes you want to dance, sing, and laugh.’

“I hate normal. Normal really goes between putting me to sleep and aggravating me. I don’t do normal.” — Camille O’Sullivan

The Lion and the Introvert

If O’Sullivan’s on-stage persona is a chaotic, hula-hooping, floor-crawling force of nature, she traces its roots back to a rather specific, peculiarly Celtic source.

‘Having learned singing in a really kind of crazy church where there was only four people there in the choir singing out of tune,’ she recalls, ‘there was a woman who I used to look at who was quite eccentric, with dark dyed black hair, red lipstick, and blue eyeshadow. I realized I bloody turned into her. I thought she was so fucking crazy.’

It is a persona fuelled by an unexpected, deeply rooted introversion. She notes a recent ADHD diagnosis, laughing that she initially assumed her conversational hyperactivity was simply a byproduct of being from Cork.

‘I have a real love of people, and I have a shyness that I cannot sing at a party in Ireland,’ O’Sullivan explains. ‘Irish people are fucking singing at the drop of a hat in a pub, and I am not that girl. My sister told me that when I was six or seven, I used to be so shy I kept my eyes almost closed, as if I thought people couldn’t see me. But when I sang, I felt I was me. I’m very scared of an audience, but once the light is on me, I am like… somebody in Cork said they saw me walking backstage like a mouse, but I came out like a fucking lion. It’s almost like the audience are this animal, and I’ve got to be a bigger one than them.’

It is a feral abandon she likens to a possession, though it comes with a culturally specific comedown. ‘There’s complete shame of an Irish person at 4 a.m. in the morning waking going, “I cannot fucking believe I let that rip,”’ O’Sullivan laughs.

The ship is going down, so let’s enjoy it. Sometimes the stage is working out for therapy; it’s the most joyful place in my life.” — Camille O’Sullivan

This tension between the shy girl and the fierce performer is the engine behind The Art of Falling Apart. Hearing her speak, the title feels less like a lament and more like a manifesto.

‘As a woman, it’s interesting because as you get older and you don’t look like the fucking poster, and the wheels are coming off… when I say falling apart it’s not about “Oh God, it’s all going wrong.” It’s like, do you know what, it’s probably been going wrong for years, but let’s enjoy that. The ship is going down, so let’s enjoy it. Sometimes the stage is working out for therapy; it’s the most joyful place in my life.’

The Antidote to Fame

Slick, meanwhile, operates without any divide between dressing room and footlights. Accompanied on our call by his massive, singing-prone dog, Tank, he insists that the man wrestling with a pet on the sofa is the exact same man who shreds alongside rock royalty.

‘I’m no different in the goddamn house than I am on stage,’ Slick says. ‘That’s why it’s hard for me to work with certain people. If there was a camera in this house, I’d have the best reality show on the planet between me and Tank. I don’t change myself from the dressing room to the stage, or the stage to the fucking grocery store.’

For Slick, the goal was always the guitar, never the glittering periphery of the industry. He cites watching Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and Lightnin’ Hopkins as his true north.

‘When I picked up a guitar it was because I loved playing, and I had no aspirations of anything,’ he shrugs. ‘I never thought about, “I’m gonna be a rock star and make a lot of money.” The fame part that comes along with this thing is the part that I detest the most. And I’m not a famous guitar player—I guess I’m relatively well known in the business, but the star is the guy that I spent 50 years with. When you spend that much time around somebody like him, people view you a certain way and I fucking hate it. It makes me very uncomfortable. Even my family does it sometimes and I’m going, “Dude, we have the same parents, I seen you shit your diapers when you were three years old, why are you treating me like that?”’

The Rebellion Against Safe Music

That absolute demand for authenticity seems to be why Slick and O’Sullivan clicked so immediately. Neither has any patience for technical perfection if it lacks emotional blood. In fact, both view their upcoming gigs as a necessary corrective to an increasingly sterile live music industry.

‘If life is woke at the moment, music has become a bit woke too,’ O’Sullivan notes sharply. ‘It seems all a bit not paint-by-numbers, but a little prescriptive. You certainly know people look a bit shell-shocked as if they’ve been electrocuted in a good way, which is exactly what you should be going through [at a gig].’

Slick wholeheartedly agrees, recalling a recent experience that crystallised his disdain for overly schooled musicianship.

‘I did a gig in Scotland about a year and a half ago, and there were some very well-known guitar players, more well-known than I,’ Slick says. ‘I sat in with them… first night, and I flew in doing this blues thing, and I was absolutely fucking miserable. This was all by the book, fancy chords and all that shit, and I’m going, “That’s really white. You motherfuckers are too white.”’

It is a rare artistic alignment. For all her global touring, O’Sullivan counts the musicians who truly understand this feral approach on one hand.

‘I think I’ve only met probably maybe seven musicians in my life [like that],’ she admits. ‘And not like Earl—only one. You travel the whole world, and you think of all the people you’ve worked with… you cannot explain it. It’s like a spiritual thing.’

It is a standard she demands from her own band, instructing them to bring their emotional baggage rather than just their proficiency to the stage.

‘I realised that every person in my band had to have some fucking problem going on in their life,’ O’Sullivan admits. ‘One day we got a drummer, and it was one of the worst gigs I’ve ever done. I really love him, but there was no passion. I realised he’s just a really nice guy. What I need to play with is somebody who maybe has major fucking issues in their life, because I have issues, and I’m probably fighting with myself on stage. I told the band, “I don’t give a fuck, I just want you to play with everything. If you’re angry at somebody, then be angry at them in the song. I don’t want you to play nicely.”’

O’Sullivan recalls taking this manic energy to the Sydney Opera House with Australia’s top jazz drummer.

‘I saw on his script one time written “cuckoo,”’ she laughs. ‘I was like, “What’s that?” He said, “The first time I saw you rehearse, I wrote cuckoo.” But he didn’t realise until he was on stage with me what I actually did. We did Mack the Knife and I said, “No, it’s the moment she gets fucking killed, this is the moment.” I turned around, and he had a fire hydrant with a knife, and he was hitting the cymbals. He said, “You brought me on this journey I never knew.”’

Ripping Up the Setlist

Slick similarly views the stage as a space for genuine danger. He refuses to play the same solo twice.

‘I drive Mike Garson (David Bowie, Nine Inch Nails, St. Vincent, Duran Duran…) out of his mind,’ Slick grins. ‘They don’t know what I’m going to do. And neither do I. Thank God with David, that was one thing he loved about me. I would come off and do some shit that was like, “What the fuck did he just do?”, but he liked it. A lot of singers would fire you with that shit. I don’t like going to see a band, and it’s exactly the record. I could just stay home and listen to the record.’

Slick’s refusal to play by numbers extended even to Bowie’s biggest hits.

‘Before we went on the last tour, we were in the dressing room, and David comes in,’ Slick remembers. ‘He goes, “Slicky, what the fuck’s going on with Let’s Dance?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “You’re not really putting your heart into it.” I go, “I hate the fucking thing, I hate that song, and I hate playing it.” He looked at me, started laughing, and said, “You know what, it’s out. I’m done with it anyway, thank you.” And that was the end of that song. But we had to know any one of 70 songs at the drop of a hat. He’d come in and literally remove half the setlist and put a whole other half in there, 10 minutes before a show.’

Union Chapel and The Unknown

So, what exactly can audiences expect on 20 and 21 November? By all accounts, not even the people on stage know for sure. O’Sullivan is carefully curating a narrative arc, moving from hymnal beginnings to the wildness of Nick Cave and Jacques Brel, setting the stage for Slick’s arrival. But she is adamant that the anarchy remains a work in progress.

‘If you clip that wildness, that’s the danger,’ O’Sullivan says, comparing the required energy to one of her former tour-mates. ‘It was a bit like Shane MacGowan. Shane was just… there was that thing to him too, and that anarchy. This is not something you’re going to bake in the fucking oven before. This is going to be baking in the oven on stage as you see it in live time.’

Slick, characteristically, is already plotting how to throw a spanner in the works.

‘She doesn’t know what’s going to happen anyway,’ Slick chuckles. ‘Camille sent me a whole list of songs which I love, but last night I was sitting playing with some stuff and I got a couple of new ones that she doesn’t know about that I want to try. One of ’em is a relatively obscure Bowie song that I love, and the other one is a John Lennon song that I’m not going to even say now until me and Cammy talk.’

That shared anticipation is exactly what makes these gigs such an intriguing prospect. O’Sullivan gives a vivid sense of their respective pre-gig energies, noting how differently they channel the impending chaos.

“Once I’m up there, every bloody thing in the world goes away. Every fucking thing. No rent, no dogs, no groceries, no fucking thing at all… You cannot domesticate my ass; it doesn’t work.” — Earl Slick

‘I’m always like a horse trying to get out of the traps like neeeh backstage,’ she laughs. ‘But I’m looking at Earl like he’s a genie in a bottle that’ll just be, you know, the bottle will be opened, and we’ll put him on stage.’

For Slick, the appeal of stepping onto stages such as the Union Chapel remains startlingly pure. It isn’t about legacy. It is entirely about the alchemy of the moment.

‘Once I’m up there, every bloody thing in the world goes away,’ Slick says. ‘Every fucking thing. No rent, no dogs, no groceries, no fucking thing at all. I don’t care what people think about what that is, but I know one thing: when I’m hyper-focused like that, I’m happy. Because I don’t function otherwise. You cannot domesticate my ass; it doesn’t work.’

His co-conspirator feels exactly the same. For both artists, the stage they’ll share isn’t just a performance space—it’s a sanctuary for their particular brand of madness.

‘I think basically I’ve lost my marbles years ago,’ O’Sullivan smiles as our time draws to a close. ‘And it’s the stage that’s letting me express it.’

Featured Image: Camille_O_Sullivan_2026_-_Earl_Slick – taken from Camille O’Sullivan on Facebook.