CMAT fires back at body-shamers after BBC performance

Irish singer Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, known by her stage name CMAT, has experienced a meteoric rise—deservedly so—over the past year, thanks to the phenomenal EURO-COUNTRY, which we named the 4th-best album of 2025. But CMAT’s growing profile has also attracted some unsavory commentary from the U.K.’s most prolific armchair warriors. Last weekend, she performed at BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend music festival, and the network posted a video of her singing the viral hit “Take a Sexy Picture of Me” while clad in a turquoise outfit covered in ruffles. But it was her body shape—not the performance itself—that caught the ire of internet trolls, who flooded the post with vile comments about the singer’s appearance until the BBC was forced to disable comments.

CMAT frustratingly addressed the online abuse on her Instagram yesterday. “It’s been very hard to try and describe how difficult the last few days since the bbcr1 big weekend have been,” she wrote, in a caption accompanying screenshots from a Substack essay she said helped her put her emotion into words. “It is literally so boring for me, a gorgeous genius, to keep having to yap on about how horribly i am treated because of my body. There is no relief,” CMAT said, adding that she wished “to point out, to some very well-meaning people, that i am not being defiant. i am not choosing to look like this or weigh this much as some kind of punk rock act of liberty. i simply have a body, one that i would of course like to change in order to fit in and avoid all of this abuse, but i have had extreme difficulty in doing so.” Some of her peers, including Brandi Carlile and MUNA’s Katie Gavin, flocked to the comments to offer love and support.

The essay CMAT was referring to, by the blogger Front Row Feels, argues that the scrutiny she faces exemplifies how “we live in a music culture that worships emotional vulnerability from women on the track, yet completely denies basic physical humanity to the women creating it.” The author also notes how smaller-bodied women who performed at the same BBC festival, like Zara Larsson and Olivia Dean, were afforded a modicum of “grace” not given to CMAT: “The issue is not that some women are treated well. It’s that our culture subconsciously grants certain women an invisible pass to simply exist as artists without their physical form becoming the primary discourse.” CMAT, who once clapped back at body-shaming trolls with the excellent “I didn’t realise it was illegal to have a huge ass” retort, ended her recent post on a more somber note, admitting that “the success is increasingly becoming tarnished by the fact that I would be allowed to enjoy it so much more if I was thin.”

Read Elise Soutar’s excellent Paste Profile on CMAT here.

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