'It really freaked me out that when I actually did go close to evil I didn't see it'

Singer says murderer would have been someone she could have left her own child with

- EXCLUSIVE BY DEREK FOLEY

CAMILLE O'Sullivan is the microphone's femme fatale, standout film noir, Ireland's smoky midnight spectre in the gardens of good and evil.

Lights, camera, action at her shows channels such as Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the jagged edges of David Bowie, Shane MacGowan, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, all seamy side up.

Yet for all of Wait's 'Carney World' inspiration, Cave's lurching Stagger Lee, the Berthold Brecht, night and threat, lazy cigarettes and darkness of the others, theirs is not the cabaret of the literal.

For all the talk of songs such as Mack of the Knife which, for instance, is a portrayal of murder, arson, rape and burglary in black, white and vivid red, how close have these singers been to any of these deeds?

It's an art for art's sake twist, desolation and nightmare alleys viewed through voices distinctive whether contralto or crooner, sotto or grand.

Few of Waits, Cave, Bowie etc, however, can claim the close touch of real evil, felt the blaze of sulphur, run a live wire through black and white and such backroom daughters as Marelene Dietrich who fled the Nazis, Ella Fitzgerald and black consciousness and longtime Dublin resident Agnes Bernelle fleeing Weimar Germany in 1936, subsequently working for British Intelligence.

O'Sullivan is a chanteuse channelling MacGowan and Sinead O'Connor, the boulevards of nighttown, wiseguys and dolls and speakeasies and smoky backrooms with rinky-dink pianos and tight, constrictive jazz...

But also the modern singer who more than all those mentioned atop has been closest to evil - O'Sullivan worked for a number of years as an architect in an office alongside Graham Dwyer.

Dwyer is currently serving life for the horrific 2012 murder of Elaine O'Hara.

There is no calling six degrees of separation here from an association that would make outsiders blood run cold - channel that, up front, alone, on stage, under the arclight, whydontcha.