It's said we should never meet our heroes... they can only disappoint.

So when Camille O’Sullivan, 21st century chanteuse and purveyor of super-cool, cabaret-inflected covers, met her idol Nick Cave through a mutual friend, she fell back on the time-honoured cure for nerves – a spot of Dutch courage.

"I was so star-struck. I don’t get very drunk, but I did get a little drunk then," she says, adding that her encounter with the subject of her self-confessed hero worship could not have been better.

"He’s such a gentleman – if it hadn’t gone well I don’t think I could’ve sung his songs again."

Mr Cave’s affable nature, then, has been the salvation of some of the most arresting songs in an emotional high-wire of a show that also includes the work of Tom Waits, David Bowie and Jacques Brel, rearranged and recentred around the purity of Camille’s voice and her astonishing command of the stage.

Now embarking on her biggest tour yet, Camille has long transcended her beginnings at The Famous Spiegeltent, where she gave her first solo performance at the 2004 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

When the ornate mirrored tent travelled to the Brighton Fringe Festival the following year, Camille won a loyal city fan base while appearing in explosive late-night cabaret show La Clique.

Appearing alongside identical twin brothers who swam in a giant fish bowl, a striptease artist who pulled a red hankie from startling places and an eccentric female sword swallower, Camille seduced sell-out crowds with her intense emotional delivery.

From her killer red heels and postwar chic to her deceptively drunken, languid movements, the singer inhabited a character straight out of Tom Waits’ smoke-stained lyrical world.

She says: "La Clique was such a magical world. Meeting sword-swallowers and trapeze artists really opened my eyes to a whole new kind of performance, and I was visiting Australia and the US, places I’d never been before."

Her performance in the award-winning La Clique led to her being cast as one of the Windmill Theatre's singers in Stephen Frears' 2005 film, Mrs Henderson Presents.

Since those early performances, the venues and audiences have grown ever larger, but she seems determined to hold on to the sexually charged intimacy that made her smaller shows such a critical success.

"When you go into a bigger venue it should still be about the intimacy and having a conversation with the audience," she says.

"And there are little tricks, like I place some people on stage with tables, or I'll climb down to the audience. It’s breaking down that wall."

Prowling through the audience in search of someone to drape herself over as she sings is all part of the cabaret, but Camille's performance – an intriguing balance of referential stagecraft and emotional honesty – is as much about beating her own nervousness.

"I'm as nervous as they are when I climb down from the stage – I'm riddled with anxiety – but it helps me when I can have contact with them."

She also admits to a habit of picking on the most uncomfortable in her audience.

"We were in Manchester on Sunday and there was a woman there who just wouldn't smile," she says.

"So I went and sat on her lap. Eventually she started laughing and I couldn't help but giggle too.

"But I can understand people being uncomfortable with it. If I knew somebody was going to climb down I would hide behind my chair!"

Camille’s compelling live performances, which have seen her rise up to theatre balconies suspended playfully on a swing, have earned her the fevered admiration of reviewers.

The words may not be her own, but few could doubt her passion when she delivers the songs in a voice that roars out the rock belters as well as it runs over the gentler moments of Cave and Jacques Brel. She admits the intensity of her live performances is often exhausting.

"When I do something emotive, I'm not running around the stage, I stay still. I focus in on my own life and remember something that's happened. I have to step away for a moment and go into myself."

As her name might suggest, Camille O'Sullivan is the daughter of an Irish father and a French mother, and attributes her mercurial delivery to her heritage.

"I'm a very emotional person, and live performance is where I sort my head out, really," she says, laughing.

"But in our house when I was growing up, we'd cry at the drop of a hat!"

The young boy of cliché who runs away to join the circus is usually escaping poverty or a sorry home life, but Camille's flight to the cabaret big top was preceded by a nascent, highly successful career as an architect that saw her win the Architectural Association of Ireland Award in 2000.

Between this and separate career strands in painting (she also studied fine art), stage acting and film work, she seems the very definition of the polymath.

"There was a stage when I suppose I was a very creative person with all these different things, but to be honest, the singing has taken over completely now.

"It’s funny, because singing actually made me the most nervous, and I wasn’t desperate to get up on stage and do it, but that’s what took off."

There aren't many performers who can claim a career as an award-winning architect as their "plan B", and Camille agrees she is fortunate to have such a well-regarded professional background.

"In a lot of my images I look like a bit of a diva, but architecture's a real discipline; you work long hours, and that discipline has stayed with me," she says.

"It's nice to think the singing and acting is not the be all and end all of what I am – the band always say, 'you could always go back to architecture'."

For the immediate future, however, a slightly more glamorous vocation awaits our chanteuse, who will bring the songs of her (mostly male) heroes to the stage at the Dome. But how does she go about putting a show together and selecting the songs?

"This show is not my most recent, but I'll be putting songs from my new show Dark Angel in there too," she said.

"I choose the songs based on the writing – I like those serious songs that are almost like stepping into another character."

She said she has recently been delving into Radiohead's post-OK Computer output, including the booming National Anthem from Kid A, but she adds that fans of the Oxford quintet can be just as protective of their work as those who idolise Messrs Cave, Cohen and Waits.

"I sung a version of No Surprises recently and this girl said after the show, 'You can't do that, it's not good what you’re doing'.

"I asked her if she was a big Radiohead fan, which she was, then I asked if she would like anybody's version of a Radiohead song and she said 'No'." Despite her exploration of all things post-rock, it seems there is a special place in her heart for a certain Hove resident. "When I hear Nick Cave's music, I can always hear the way I would sing it through the music. There's so much humour in his work and so much theatricality in his live performance. I try to take some of that with me." She admits she "doesn't have the guts" to invite the man himself to the show, but such is her enthusiasm for his work she is considering recording an entire album of his songs. "I would probably have to ask his permission, though, which I'd be very nervous about," she says. "Maybe I could do it now, through The Argus?"

  • Read our review of Camille in The Argus on September 8 and tell us what you thought of the show by visiting theargus.co.uk/whatson
  • Starts 8pm. Tickets £20. Call 01273 709709