CMAT owns Halifax: an honorary Brontë sister brings the house down
CMAT walked into the crowd last night, and 6,000 people parted for her like water.
That is the image that will follow this show around. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson — sequinned, six-foot-something in heels, entirely in command — asked the courtyard to split down the middle, stepped off the stage into the gap and danced with the audience. Not a photo opportunity. Not a stunt. A pop star who genuinely wanted to be down there with everyone else.
It was the emotional peak of a set that confirmed what the festival circuit has been saying about her for two years: CMAT is currently one of the best live performers working anywhere.
The voice under the jokes
What people underestimate until they see her is the voice. The wit is well documented — the between-song monologues, the deadpan self-mythologising, the gleeful oversharing that turns 6,000 strangers into a group chat. But underneath the comedy sits a genuinely enormous country voice, the kind that doesn't need much help from a PA to reach the back of a room. In a stone quadrangle with three tiers of colonnades acting as a natural amplifier, it was extraordinary.
The Travelling Telegraph's Yorkshire Regional Ambassador, Shannon Palmer, was in the courtyard.
“Her voice was extraordinary. I've seen a lot of shows in that courtyard and I've never heard anything hold the building the way she did.”
She has earned the right to that stage. Her last appearance in Halifax, in 2022, was as support for Swedish alt-folk duo First Aid Kit. Four years on she is headlining in her own name — a return to the venue itself billed as triumphant when the date was announced, and one she repaid with interest.
Wuthering Heights, in the right postcode
The moment of the night arrived without warning. Announcing that she was in Brontë country and that as a lifelong devotee she considered herself an honorary Brontë sister, CMAT delivered a haunting reading of Wuthering Heights — Kate Bush's shivering, impossible 1978 debut, sung a few miles down the road from the moors that inspired the novel behind it.
It could have been a gimmick. It wasn't. Stripped of the original's helium theatrics and pushed down into her lower register, it became something closer to a lament. A courtyard that had spent the previous hour bellowing along went almost completely silent for it, then erupted.
“The whole night was magical. When she sang Wuthering Heights you could hear people crying. Nobody moved.”
Katy J Pearson opened the evening, and the pairing made complete sense — her woozy, pastoral folk-pop drifting up the balconies as the light softened, a gentle loosening of the crowd before the headliner detonated it.
The woman who put Halifax on the world stage
Iconic nights like this are becoming routine at The Piece Hall, which is a remarkable story in itself — and it very nearly never happened at all.
The building opened in 1779 and is the only surviving Georgian cloth hall in the world: Grade I-listed, with a 66,000 sq ft open-air courtyard originally built for merchants selling 30-yard lengths of woollen cloth. By the early 1970s it had fallen into disuse, and in 1972 Calderdale councillors debated flattening it for a car park. The motion to demolish was defeated by a single vote.
That one vote now underwrites one of the most sought-after outdoor stages in Europe — and the person who has driven it there is Nicky Chance-Thompson MBE DL FRSA, chief executive of The Piece Hall Trust. She has spent a decade turning a rescued heritage asset into a working cultural engine, and she makes no apology for filling a Georgian cloth hall with global headline acts. She has brought Halifax to the world stage, and she is not finished.
The numbers say the rest. Co-promoters The Piece Hall Trust and Cuffe and Taylor confirmed 215,000 tickets sold in advance of the 2026 series — beating the record set in 2025 by more than 30,000 — across 42 dates, up from a 12-show, 60,000-attendance launch season in 2022. Last year's audience travelled in from 53 countries. Research puts the venue's economic impact at £680 million between 2015 and 2025, with projections of roughly £90m a year going forward. It was named Inspirational Venue of the Year at the 2025 Northern Music Awards and took the Backstage Brilliance Award at that year's Live Awards.
Her explanation for why artists now ask to play a Northern mill town rather than an arena is disarmingly simple. “Our job is to make people feel good,” she told Music Week this week, describing an operation built as much on how performers are looked after backstage as on ticket revenue.
On the evidence of last night, it works — for the artist and for everyone stood in front of her. CMAT left the stage to a courtyard that plainly did not want to go home, in a building that was one vote away from being a car park.
And none of it happens without the people you never see on the bill. The sound and lighting crews who spend a full day rigging so that a voice carries cleanly across 300 years of stonework. The bar staff working flat out through a sold-out courtyard. And the security team at Peace Hall, in particular legend Jade Miller, who spent the night watching the crowd rather than the stage so that 6,000 people could dance, sing, cry at a Kate Bush cover and get home safely. A magical evening is built by a lot of unglamorous work, and it deserves saying out loud.
Live at The Piece Hall continues through the summer with The Flaming Lips, Tom Jones, Tom Grennan, Gary Numan, Turnstile and Scissor Sisters among the remaining headliners.
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