To Brel and back

CAMILLE makes her entrance quietly from the back of the hall, hushing the audience as she goes.

A demure figure in black velvet, she looks almost spectral, a candle in her cupped hands. At the mic, she launches straight into a stark, restrained version of David Bowie's take on Brel's My Death.

One song later, she's transformed. The velvet skirt and jacket are cast off, in favour of a short black cocktail dress and fishnets. The band is cranking up the volume while she's uncorking a bottle of red wine with her teeth.

The remarkable Irish-French chant-euse is back in Edinburgh this year with a new show, The Dark Angel, wilder and less inhibited than ever. That she has a fabulous voice goes without saying, but she doesn't so much sing as inhabit the songs of Jacques Brel, Nick Cave and Tom Waits with a fierce, visceral energy. A gig is a kind of emotional journey, from demure through sexy and angry to a kind of brokenness, leaving her mascara streaked with real tears.

Camille, 34, has been a regular in Edinburgh since she wowed audiences here in 2005, but this year she's raising the bar higher than ever. She's in a bigger venue – the Queen's Hall – away from the comfort of the Spiegeltent which so suited her cabaret style. And it's nerve-wracking. "About 20 minutes before the set, my hands went numb," she says. "I used to get that when I first started. I know Edinburgh gives me that feeling.

"I do get nervous, there's a horrible side to it, but you know you need it. You always need to care about the gig, you need to feel it's live and that you're in it. That fear drives the need to connect."

When I meet her after the show, she's still in her costume (by now a striking red corset and black kimono). Her long black hair is tousled, her make-up streaked. Yet she's taking time to blether to fans, sign CDs, and greet all the band and stage crew with hugs and thanks.

That done, she limps back to her dressing room in her sparkly red, perilously high stilettos saying she's worried she might have pulled a muscle in "a little Michael Jackson move I did in that last song". She is also a bit of a motormouth. "You need to ask me questions. I could talk for Ireland. You're probably getting a very surreal Camille," she chuckles, still in post-gig euphoria. "Probably a very real one too."

There is a sense of risk-taking about the new show. Most of the material is fresh: as well as Waits and Cave there is Bowie and maybe a touch of Radiohead. It's darker and more dangerous; it feels closer to the edge. Camille might be draped over a man in the audience, or hopping like a kangaroo, or pounding the piano with the flat of her hand (while the pianist, unconcerned, goes on playing).

"I always come off stage and think 'What did I do? Why did I lie down on the stage like that? Did I expose myself?' I get highly embarrassed," she giggles. "But I do think you need to be liberated. I need to feel that I've given it everything. It is an emotional and physical journey, that whole thing of beginning the show quite contained, and ending it looking like a crazed animal.

"Sometimes people say, 'Would you take your clothes off?' I'd never do that, I know where to stop, but I might not know that my bra is falling out of the corset, sometimes I'm so in the madness. It's like a child really. You are coquettish and there is sexual edge to you expressing yourself, but it's also like a kid just happy to roll in the mud.

"If I'm nervous, I go to an audience, I'll be sitting on them, standing beside them, it's kind of like a child wanting to stand near somebody so it's not so scary. You should embrace the fact that you're not this perfect machine that gets everything right."

She looks vulnerable on stage, as well as coquettish, surely a dangerous combination for attracting the wrong sort of attention. "A lot of men are like 'Rrrr!' and I'm like, 'No, no, that is not real.' You do get a lot of people who feel connected in that way, because you are putting yourself out there. I think that's the fault of my mother, she is a very gorgeous lady, very French, very dramatic. Sometimes, when I do stuff on stage I think I'm doing her."

In fact, she says, gigs are about balancing the dangerous sense of intimacy and vulnerability with a sense of distance. "You like the audience but you become defensive with them too. Sometimes you want to be close to them, other times you want a distance. Sometimes you do feel you're going to be beaten or you're going to do the beating. In the first few songs, you're checking out what they're like.

"I think I might live my life on stage. The connections I make with people are extreme and intense. I love the old German tradition of cabaret which is about provoking and connecting and making people think, and intimacy."

It's a far cry from being an architect in Dublin, which is what Camille might have been. She completed her training despite "bunking off" to do theatre and to sing in a local café. She fell in love with German cabaret on a visit to Berlin. "I didn't understand it, but I was really moved by it, just this very strange, hard-edged, difficult sound."

Inspired by this, and by legendary cabaret artist Agnes Bernelle who was a kind of mentor, she gradually changed her repertoire from classic Piaf and Dietrich to the dark narrative songs of Brel and Weill, later Waits, Cave and Bowie.

It was only when she had a terrible car accident, after which she had to learn to walk and use her hands again, that she decided to pack in the day job. "That was the turning point. It was big enough that I said, 'Just do it'. Even now, when I'm saying I don't want to go on, the band say, 'Do you want to be an architect then?' and I'm like, 'F***, no, I'll go on.'"

Her career took off when David Bates, producer of La Clique, asked her to join as one of the acts. "He really believed in me. I'd get a lot of people in Ireland saying, 'We don't really like that French or German stuff, we don't understand it.' Whereas he said, 'Look, be yourself, go to that place. Stop pleasing people. You can be a nothing band and please people or you can alienate people and know you're doing something right.'"

"Doing La Clique, I didn't know what was going on. I was in this show with acrobats and sword swallowers and striptease. I felt like I was running away to the circus. I was quite green. I used to sit with the Irish Times and knit in the caravan by myself. They drew me out."

In La Clique she was spotted by Trainspotting actor Ewen Bremner, which led to a part in Stephen Frears' film Mrs Henderson Presents, starring with Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins. It also led to her own show in the Spiegeltent, and tours all over the world. In 2006, she played five nights at Sydney Opera House in the studio space.

"I don't think I would have a career in Britain or Australia or anywhere if it wasn't for the Fringe. It made me think it was possible.

"I'm shyer as a person than I am on stage. I'd never sing at a party. I'd certainly never show somebody my feelings or tell anybody my internal thoughts, but I feel I can do all that on a stage. I can connect with all these people."

• Camille: The Dark Angel is at Assembly@ the Queen's Hall, 10pm, until 13 August.