CMAT Opens Up About 'Deep Sadness' Over Radio 1 Big Weekend Body-Shaming 'Abuse'

The singer-songwriter CMAT has addressed the “abuse” and body-shaming she’s been subjected to since her appearance at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event earlier this month.

Fresh from her Best Album win at the prestigious Ivor Novello awards, the Stay For Something singer performed at Radio 1’s annual festival in Sunderland on Sunday.

However, days later, the Irish star shared a candid Instagram post opening up about the “horrible treatment” she’d been receiving on social media based on her appearance in the wake of her performance.

She wrote: “I have had Insta/TikTok/Twitter deleted from my phone for some time now for the preservation of my mental health, but the discourse this week appears to be so large that it has still gotten back to me. As such, I felt compelled to wade in and speak for myself!!!”

“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,” CMAT continued. “I would love to stop but I cannot because it keeps happening, at an accelerating and worsening pace as I become more famous.

“There is no relief from this – nobody can protect me or save me from this, and all that is demanded of me is more and more work as every environment I am placed in becomes more hostile.”

She then wrote: “I also want 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. I don’t get a say in whether or not I want to be brave, I simply have to sit here and take it.

“With all that being said, I am at the same time very very happy and grateful every day to have the job that I have. The feeling of seeing all your dreams come true after so many years of constant grinding towards them… chefs kiss.

“But the success is increasingly becoming tarnished by the fact that I would be allowed to enjoy it so much more if I was thin.”

In her post, CMAT also explained that she’d found it “very hard to try and describe how difficult the last few days” had been since Big Weekend, but said she’d found “an essay on Substack by a blog called Front Row Feels which really has summed up a lot of what is causing my deep sadness”, which she included in her post.

Read the full post for yourself below:

Back in 2024, after CMAT made her Big Weekend debut in Luton, she shared that the comments had been disabled on a BBC post including footage of her performance “because so many people were calling me fat”.

“I didn’t realise it was illegal to have a huge ass!” she joked at the time. “I am guilty as charged. It is time to lock me up and throw away the key.

“By the way, I am an award-winning songwriter that has released two albums which were received to ‘universal acclaim’.”

This experience was part of the inspiration for what has become CMAT’s signature song Take A Sexy Picture Of Me, which became a viral hit upon its release last year.

“Everyone is constantly being judged on whether or not they’re commercially attractive and where they fall within these really weird goal posts,” she told Radio 1 last year.

“I just was annoyed, and I wanted to write a song about being annoyed about it.”

CMAT explained: “The thing with this song was, I wanted it to sound joyous and uplifting to sing but also to be a bit of a rallying cry. If we’re dealing with a song that’s as dark as this, and as grim as this, we have to make it a bit funny.”

Watch the Take A Sexy Picture Of Me music video below: