How to Win Friends and Influence a Popstar
CMAT in Yorkshire and the resurrection of Rodney on a 2026 setlist
There are several points in every fangirl’s life where you are forced to confront the consequences of your own actions. Mine came in Scarborough, wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with #JusticeForRodney, as CMAT began singing a song she had not performed live in four years.
What had started as a shared appreciation for a deep cut — only the second song CMAT ever released — had somehow escalated into an article, a fan-made music video and a group of people travelling from across the UK and the Netherlands to line the barrier in matching bootleg merchandise. CMAT die-hards have been begging for its return to the setlist for years and, last weekend, justice was finally served.
Upon reflection, from somewhere within my post-concert depression haze, it is clear that Rodney had also stopped being just a song we all really liked. The people standing beside me that night are people I now speak to every day, most of whom I would never have known without CMAT’s music in the first place. The song had become tangled up in those friendships, just as so many others in her discography have become tangled up in different parts of my own life.
I have never been particularly interested in writing your average gig review, and this weekend was never going to be an exception. Across two nights in Halifax and Scarborough, I heard songs that have carried me through some of the worst moments of my twenties, songs that mean something entirely different to me now than when I first heard them, and songs that have somehow given me some of my favourite people. Hearing them live, surrounded by those people, felt like being confronted with just how much life can accumulate around a few minutes of music.
But before Rodney finally got his day in court, there was Halifax.
The Piece Hall is an extraordinary place to watch a gig, architecturally wonderful to stand and take in, feeling much like an amphitheatre designed for high drama. It was the ideal backdrop for CMAT, whose particular brand of high-camp catharsis thrives on a grand scale.
Before she took to the stage, Katy J Pearson set the bar dangerously high. Having previously seen her perform solo while supporting the EURO-COUNTRY tour, watching her with the full force of a band behind her brought a glorious, muscular weight to songs I had already come to love live. Her voice is unmistakably her own and, after seeing her open for CMAT in various forms, she has started to feel almost like part of the furniture at this point - a very welcome constant in the increasingly elaborate world of a CMAT gig. She is top class, plain and simple.
I have never been lucky enough to catch a CMAT show where she covered Kate Bush, so hearing the opening notes of Wuthering Heights ring out across the Piece Hall in the year 2026 felt like a genuine blessing. I had accepted that particular era of CMAT history had passed me by, yet there I was watching her fully commit to one of the most famously difficult songs you could possibly choose to sing in front of thousands of people. Of course, she absolutely nailed it, as she has done many times before. There is something in the theatricality of CMAT’s voice that feels particularly at home in a Kate Bush song, able to move between the strange, the whimsical and the completely beautiful without ever feeling like an imitation. I would now personally like to campaign for this to become a permanent fixture of the setlist, although given my recent track record with setlist campaigning, perhaps I should get back in my box.
Take A Sexy Picture Of Me arrived, as always, with its remarkable ability to get thousands of people doing the butcher and the baker in unison. It has become a proper crowd favourite following its viral summer last year, but I have found my own relationship with the song shifting over time. I have spent a lot of time writing and thinking about the very things that inspired it, particularly after watching another round of the same conversations unfold around CMAT’s appearance at Radio 1’s Big Weekend. There is something particularly bleak about hearing someone turn the impossible standards placed upon women into something so funny and euphoric, only to watch those same standards continue to follow her as her audience grows. I still do the butcher and the baker, obviously, but I hear the anger underneath it much more loudly now. Live, surrounded by thousands of people screaming every word, at least that anger has somewhere to go.
And now we have arrived at the sharpest emotional whiplash of the night. The band filed off stage, leaving CMAT alone with an acoustic guitar to answer a request from the crowd and, as soon as I clocked it was Nashville, I knew I was not going to have any lash extensions left by the end of the song.
Nashville is, in my opinion, one of the most phenomenally written songs in her entire discography. The story was partly inspired by a study in suicidology, about a man who planned to take his own life and told everyone he loved that he was simply moving away. But I also remember hearing her talk about the more personal place the song came from at a show years ago, describing it as a snapshot of a time when she was “not a well woman” and reminding the crowd that, however bad things can get inside your own head, you do always get out the other side. That has always stuck with me.
The song has carried me through some of the darkest, most suffocating corners of my twenties, so hearing it stripped back to just her voice and a guitar completely finished me off. I sobbed through almost the entire thing and, looking around the barrier, I was far from the only one. There is something very powerful about hearing a song you have needed so much in private while surrounded by other people who clearly have their own reasons for needing it too. I will never know theirs and they will never know all of mine, but I think that is part of what makes songs like Nashville special. I owe it more than I could ever properly explain here, but the words CMAT used all those years ago have stayed with me for a reason: you do always get out the other side.
By the time the band returned during Rent (not even going there, I was also a mess), I was emotionally hanging by a thread, which naturally meant it was time for EURO-COUNTRY. Few songs can turn a barrier into complete chaos quite as effectively, and by the time Stay For Something brought the night to its usual euphoric close, Halifax had already put me through approximately every emotion available to the human body.
There was, however, very little time to process Halifax before doing it all over again. Less than 24 hours later, we had made it to Scarbados, collected our Dutch representative from the airport and assembled a frankly unreasonable number of people in the name of a song about a Mr Dangerfield.
By this point, the #JusticeForRodney campaign had developed its own uniform. I had a large number of bootleg T-shirts to distribute, while others arrived armed with stickers, badges and friendship bracelets. People had travelled from Scotland, the Netherlands, the South and the North East, and seeing everyone actually together in one place was perhaps the first time I realised quite how far the bit had gone. More importantly, though, these were people who had become genuine friends somewhere along the way.
Before the gig, I met CMAT and was able to thank her properly for reading and sharing my work. It is slightly surreal writing that sentence in the very publication I was thanking her for sharing, but the support she showed Front Row Feels genuinely meant an enormous amount to me. A lot of you reading this probably found your way here because of it, and having someone whose song writing I admire so much say such lovely things about my own writing did, admittedly, alter my brain chemistry a little. It was very nice to finally be able to tell her that in person. She is an angel.
By the time CMAT actually took to the stage, I was operating on approximately three minutes of sleep, an airport run and very little beyond Diet Coke, meaning 2 Wrecked 2 Care has perhaps never felt more personally targeted. Thankfully, exhaustion does not appear to exist once the opening notes of a CMAT set kick in, and any remaining signs of life were quickly extracted from me during Running/Planning. There are few things more cathartic than screaming that bridge in a crowd full of people who appear to need it just as badly as you do.
There was, of course, one question hanging over our particular section of the barrier. We had arrived in uniform, made our demands abundantly clear and spent an entirely unreasonable amount of time campaigning for the return of a song that had not appeared on a setlist in four years. Despite all of that, I don’t think any of us genuinely believed it was going to happen.
And then, somehow, it did. Which brings us back to where we started.
CMAT introduced Rodney with the reasonable disclaimer that she might not remember all of the words. Thankfully, this was never going to be an issue on our end. We had recently spent an alarming amount of time recreating its music video frame by frame and could probably have stepped in as emergency backing vocalists if required. As soon as those opening notes kicked in, our entire section of the barrier completely lost its mind. Watching videos back now genuinely makes me laugh because we all sound like overexcited little goats. If you find footage filmed from the back of the venue, you can hear us screaming with alarming clarity.
The band sounded incredible, CMAT absolutely smashed it and every single word was being hurled back at the stage by a barrier full of feral CMAT Babies who had somehow made Rodney part of their personalities. It was ridiculous, chaotic and probably one of the most fun few minutes I have ever experienced at a gig. I also don’t think it was lost on any of us how lucky we were that the request was humoured at a show of that size. Rodney is a pretty deep cut to pull out in front of thousands of people who may not receive it with quite the same enthusiasm as a room full of die-hards. Thankfully, I do believe we provided enough enthusiasm for the entire venue.
Underneath all of the #JusticeForRodney silliness, though, there was something that caught me a little off guard. I remember being genuinely anxious about even suggesting we recreate the Rodney video in the first place because social anxiety has never exactly made me the poster child for organising group projects. And yet, I simply cannot stop doing it. What can I say? I’m just a gal who loves a community.
At the time, we simply thought it would be nice to make something fun after the quite frankly ridiculous Radio 1 saga — something that, if CMAT happened to see it, might cheer her up and serve as a reminder that the community she has built is both deeply unhinged and very much in her corner. I certainly never imagined it would lead here. Between the group chats, filming ourselves rolling off tables and scrambling eggs, and an increasingly committed campaign for justice, Rodney had become tied to a group of people I now speak to every day. The project brought our little subsection of the CMAT Babies much closer together, so getting to stand at that barrier and finally hear the song with so many of them beside me felt like the most absurdly perfect outcome we could have asked for.
There was, of course, absolutely no time to process any of this in the moment. Going from the complete chaos of Rodney to me basically sobbing through Coronation St is a testament to the pacing of a CMAT setlist: you are rarely given enough time to recover from one emotional extreme before being hit somewhere completely different. It is one of the things she does best live, somehow making the ridiculous and the devastating feel completely at home beside each other.
Coronation St appeals directly to the part of my brain that is permanently having some form of existential crisis, and hearing it live will never not get me. There is something painfully accurate in the picture that it paints around feeling unfulfilled. The image of being a background character in your own life, watching time and everybody else move around you has always hit me fairly hard. There is something almost funny, about near sobbing my way through it at the barrier while surrounded by people I absolutely adore, after spending the previous few minutes bopping along to Rodney together. Ironically I realised in that moment that I am not quite the barmaid with no lines living on Coronation St that I often feel I am.
Later came Such A Miranda, another song that remains, in my opinion, criminally under-appreciated on record but, live, reveals the sharp and often brutal edge of CMAT’s songwriting like almost nothing else. Its title alone is a perfect reference point: Sex and the City fans will remember Miranda discovering that being a successful lawyer was apparently a romantic disadvantage, only to receive considerably more interest when she pretended to be a flight attendant instead. CMAT takes that same tension between female success and desirability and makes it quietly devastating. The narrator can shrink herself into something more palatable, less threatening, easier to love, but none of it actually guarantees that she will be loved properly.
It is the kind of song CMAT writes frighteningly well: incredibly funny until you think about it for two seconds too long. Hearing it live gives those lyrics even more bite, particularly in a set that juggles female rage, deep absurdism, and quiet existential panic all at once Somewhere between screaming about Rodney and crying through Coronation St, it struck me that this is probably why these songs have accumulated so much life around them in the first place.
I think that is the strange thing about attaching so much of yourself to music. The songs stay largely the same, but life keeps happening around them. Nashville can still take me back somewhere I would rather not be, while simultaneously reminding me that I am no longer there. Coronation St can still articulate the fear that everybody else is living while I remain stuck in the background, even when I am standing at a barrier surrounded by fairly compelling evidence to the contrary. And a song named after Rodney Dangerfield can somehow become tied to a group of friendships that did not exist when any of us first heard it.
Across both gigs, all of that life seemed to exist around the songs at once. There were the versions I had listened to alone, the ones that had carried me through parts of my twenties I genuinely did not know how to get through, and all of the completely ridiculous things that had happened because a group of people happened to love the same music.
And I think that is as much a testament to the community CMAT has built as it is to the songs themselves. I spent the weekend with people I now speak to every day and met so many new faces along the way, all within crowds that remain some of the warmest and most welcoming I have ever found myself in. For all the attention paid to the viral songs, the theatrical performances and everything else that makes a CMAT show so much fun, I still think this is the part people are missing when they have never been to one. The music is obviously out of this world, as are her band and the team around her, but everything that has grown around it feels increasingly inseparable from the reason I love being there.
In Halifax, CMAT briefly spoke about how she had never anticipated any of this happening, and I remember one thing she said in particular: “this really wasn’t supposed to happen to a girl like me.” I have thought about that line a lot since, especially while writing this. Because the irony is that, from where I was standing that weekend, it is difficult to imagine anyone this was more supposed to happen to.
I suppose the evidence was around me all weekend. Thousands of people were singing back songs that have carried them through things nobody else in those crowds will ever know about, while some of the people standing beside me are people I would never have met without those same songs. Others had travelled across countries to be there, and I lost count of the number of new faces I met who made it very easy to understand why CMAT crowds have become some of my favourite places to be.
Maybe CMAT will never quite believe this was supposed to happen to a girl like her. I think there are an awful lot of us who will always disagree. It feels like a genuine privilege to be around at the same time as an artist whose work means this much to so many people, and to watch her receive more and more of the recognition that those of us standing in these crowds already know she deserves.
After years of hard graft, I hope she enjoys every second of the very well-earned rest ahead of her in 2027. And whatever comes after that, I feel very lucky to be around to watch it happen.
Gorgeous pictures! Love ur writing so much. We always knew CMAT was destined to be a big shiny star! But she also deserves her rest. We ain’t going anywhere!
Gorgeous piece ❤️