Born Alison Bools in Dublin to an English mother and Irish father, raised in Dalkey and educated at Holy Child Killiney.

At the age of 11 she co-founded the progressive folk rock band Mellow Candle with school friends Clodagh Simonds and Maria White.

[1] The untimely and unhappy demise of Mellow Candle[4][5][6][2] and the tough economic climate of the Three-Day Week in 1973/74 London sent O'Donnell and Williams to Johannesburg, South Africa.

In the year before their departure they played Belgian bars as a folk duo and formed a short-lived band with guitarist Jimmy Faulkner, who died in 2008.

The band recorded their vinyl album, Whistling Jigs to the Moon in 1978 in South Africa for a slim, niche market, and made several appearances on SATV.

After the break-up of Flibbertigibbet in 1979 O'Donnell worked as a session singer for singer-songwriters and advertising agency recordings, toured in the musical I'm Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road produced by Des and Dawn Lindberg, and performed in a series of satirical revues in 1980/81 with South African actors and musicians: Tortue Revues I and II in Rockey Street's famed 80s clubs, and Fool Marks and Commit No Nuisance at the Chelsea Hotel Hillbrow with music by David Marks (songwriter, producer and archivist), who had earlier given Flibbertigibbet their first run at The Market Theatre in Johannesburg.

She recorded an album with writer/producer Terry Dempsey's band, Plastik Mak, which included his hit song Daydreamer and performed in after-show cabaret with musician/actress Michelle Maxwell and on the folk club stage with blues/folk guitarist Mike Dickman.

In the year before she departed Johannesburg for London in early 1986, O'Donnell co-wrote the repertoire and performed with contemporary jazz group Earthlings at night.

[12] In 1997 after leaving an administrative post with the London School of Economics, O'Donnell moved to Brussels, working with jazz and folk musicians, in pantomime, and giving voice coaching lessons and workshops.

In 2008 O'Donnell featured on a vinyl double A-Side single of Nick Drake's Day is Done and Nico's Frozen Warnings with Graeme Lockett of Head South By Weaving[14] and an EP, The Fabric of Folk, with The Owl Service.

[15][16][17] Other contributors and collaborators on this project are Michael Tyack of the psychedelic folk rock band Circulus, Kevin Scott of Mr. Pine, Head South By Weaving and Gavin Prior and Dave Colohan of United Bible Studies.

In 2008 O'Donnell became a member of United Bible Studies, an experimental psych folk collective which draws on students from a number of countries[18] and has contributed to a prolific output of albums and recording projects since that time.

Recent work includes Bajik, a live band playing new and recent O'Donnell material formed in 2010, headlining at their maiden concert in Spain at the Datura Folk Festival, a contribution to the album Towards Abstraction by Big Dwarf, a contemporary electronic psychedelic band and a joint album with Head South By Weaving, The Execution of Frederick Baker, both in 2013.

O'Donnell and his two brothers Rudolph Peter and Bertram Walton, military musicians with distinguished careers with the Royal Marines Band Service during the first half of the twentieth century.