The Dublin-born singer-songwriter tells Joanna Moorhead how she learnt to transform sadness and pain into a positive, creative force

It was a monk – her mother’s cousin, whom the family visited often in his monastery – who put Imelda May on the road to stardom. “I was about 13 years old, and crazy into music,” she explains.  “Everywhere I went I’d be glued to my headphones – and then he said something that stayed with me. He said: ‘Imelda, if you’re always listening to other people’s ideas, when do you give yourself the time to have your own?’”

Soon after that, May started to write her own songs. “It was one of those light bulb moments. It was exactly the right thing in my ear, at exactly the right time,” she says.

May, 42, has been writing and singing her heart out ever since. A warm, forthright, effusive Dubliner, she has just released a new album, Life. Love. Flesh. Blood, that delivers some of her most soulful, intimate, exposing tracks yet. Her life recently has not been easy, and she has always followed her mother’s advice, which was to tell her own story honestly. She never forgot what her dad said to her either, on a car journey years ago, as he was driving her to one of her early gigs. “I was crying because I’d broken up with some boyfriend, and he said: ‘Channel it into your music – you’ll sing the blues better tonight.’”

May was raised in the Liberties area of the Irish capital, the youngest child of six in a devout Catholic family. Her dad had been a dance teacher – old-style dance, she says, the kind that was killed off in the 1960s – so he became a painter and decorator but his love of dance filtered through her childhood.