CAMILLE O'Sullivan, the irrepressible, instinctive Irish-French interpreter of song, has found the perfect place to perform her new show on Sunday night.

The 42-year-old singer, actress and chameleon cabaret turn will present The Carny Dream at Leeds City Varieties Music Hall in a night of Nick Cave, Jacques Brel, Tom Waits, David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Radiohead songs and more besides.

"I heard the term 'Carny' three times, used in different way," she says. "The first time, the word was from a Nick Cave song; then I heard it through Tom Waits, where the song was about left-of-centre people who lead a nomadic life. And the third time was when I was in La Clique, where all the cabaret performers called themselves 'carnies', and I just loved the word.

"It mostly came from the American tradition of people working at carnivals, and when you think of the circus now, and the circus back then, it was full of misfits, like bearded ladies and the Tallest Man. When I hear Tom Waits' songs, I think of characters lurking around corner. I've always been fascinated by these characters, like you find in Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire and Fellini's films."

So, that takes care of the "Carny" part of the title, but what of the "Dream"? "I'm not interested in the Camille O'Sullivan reality of me; I like the fantasy that I can express myself in," she says. "When I started working on this show, I investigated 'the fanciful dream' and the connection between circus and dreams and otherness."

Last year, Camille found herself challenged by the deaths of artists whose work she had always sung. "We were doing the show in this beautiful spiegeltent at the Edinburgh Fringe last summer, and I was doing Bowie songs and Prince's Purple Rain, and I was doing a Leonard Cohen song too; lovely Leonard was still well and I was saying I hope nothing happens to him as we can't deal with any more deaths this year, and we all know what happened later," she says.

"What you have to do when singing their songs is do it with integrity. It almost feels like I'm using the artist because of their passing, but that's not the reason for doing their songs. A lot of people want to hear them again because they miss the artist, and I feel sad singing a song knowing they're now dead; you do feel different.

"What's different between singing now and when I was younger is that I've gone through things, but when someone dies and they've guided you through your adolescent life, it's very poignant and so you sing it differently. There's a great love in the room and those songs mean so much to people in different ways."

Camille O'Sullivan: The Carny Dream, Leeds City Varieties Music Hall, Sunday, 7.30pm. Box office: 0113 243 0808 or at cityvarieties.co.uk