Róisín Murphy’s relationship to music is inextricable from place. As a kid growing up in the small town of Arklow, on Ireland’s east coast, the electropop luminary watched her family sing together at boozy get-togethers, became obsessed with the famously uncanny cover of Grace Jones’ 1985 album Island Life, and roamed arm-in-arm with her girlfriends, belting “Like a Virgin” at the top of their lungs. “When we were all virgins!” Murphy recalls, laughing raucously.
Sitting in a private members’ club in London’s Soho, Murphy is telling me the musical story of her life with bawdy flair. Her Irish accent is marked by the gravelliness of her teenage years spent in Manchester, where she found her fellow “weirdos” at psychedelic clubs, set to the sounds of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Stooges, and My Bloody Valentine. Then the clubs started playing dancier rock bands like the Stone Roses, “and out of nowhere came all these lads who were dressed like football hooligans,” she says. Ecstasy had arrived. “These were guys that would have normally beat us up, and they come in and they were hugging us!”
She threw herself into the seedier parts of the Manchester music scene, briefly fronting a noise band, And Turquoise Car Crash The, in which she pretended to scream down the phone to emergency services. “The first gig was legendary,” she recalls. “It was unbelievable how many people came! Then all the people in the audience got on the stage and all the people onstage got in the audience and there was a fight.” The second show didn’t have the same buzz, so the band split. “‘Scared’ is not a word that you would apply to me as a teenager,” she says. “Just very curious and open. I went all sorts of mad and wonderful places.”
Murphy followed a boyfriend to Sheffield, which had an equally fertile electronic scene, and soon met musician Mark Brydon. That first night, they went to his studio, where she “chatted shit” over his music—a recurring pattern as they became romantically involved. Brydon, who had done production work for Boy George, Cabaret Voltaire, and others, was offered a six-album record deal and asked if Murphy wanted to go in on it with him. She was shocked, thinking that they were just joking around. “But it was a way for us to be together,” she says. They made it through four albums as Moloko, their success peaking in 1998 with “Sing It Back” and then again in 2000 with “The Time Is Now,” which married the era’s fascination with the Balearic islands to classic ’70s pop craft. Brydon and Murphy eventually split up, slogging through a final album, 2003’s Statues.
She began her solo career with the sharp one-two punch of Ruby Blue (2005) and Overpowered (2007), idiosyncratic, major-label pop records made several years before major labels really had any idea what to do with left-field pop. After she had her first kid in 2009, she found herself frequently alone (“I needed me mum,” she says). So she went back to Ireland and didn’t make another album for eight years. She DJ’d a lot, taking her mum and baby with her. Then, in 2012, she had a second child with her current partner and collaborator, Italian producer Sebastiano Properzi.
After two more solo albums, Murphy got back to tending her collection of fantastic one-off singles last year. She tweeted at one point about feeling exhausted, “banging her head against the wall” of an indifferent music industry. That situation got sorted, she tells me now, staying vague about precisely what changed. “It’s just not feeling like you’re carrying all of it on your own shoulders,” she says. “It’s having people who love you around you.” While distressing to read, Murphy’s tweets underscore her willingness to ask for what she needs and demand credit for her work. She has a 24-year career under her belt and a catalog that keeps getting better: This summer, she released the impeccable diva-house cut “Incapable,” which she chased with the razor-sharp disco throwdown “Narcissus” last week.
“There have been times where I’m like, ‘I don’t like backing down, I wanna fucking do what I wanna do,’ and somebody will go, ‘You’re so arrogant.’” She sighs. “I wouldn’t have any juice to make it if I didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t do what I do without passion. I would’ve given up years ago. I wouldn’t even have started.”
Here, she talks about some of the songs that fueled her curiosity along the way, five years at a time.
Louis Prima and Phil Harris: “I Wan’na Be Like You”
Róisín Murphy: I was brought up around live music in Ireland. My uncle had loads of bands, he was a brilliant singer and multi-instrumentalist. In the summer he had an all-day Sunday session, and this was the song they did for the children to have a good old dance to. I think it was pretty obvious to people that I had music in me because I was clearly responding to it from a really early age. But that wasn’t unusual at that time—music was a real gelling agent between the generations in Ireland. Less so now, and it’s a sad thing, honestly. People don’t want to sing to each other anymore.
Julie Covington: “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina”
My mother and father bought and sold all kinds of stuff, from [paintings by the] Dutch masters to lorry-loads of scrap lead. We had crazy things coming in and out of the house all the time. After they sold two Dutch masters at Christie’s in London, they went to see Evita. They brought back the album, and it was their favorite thing for a while. My mother went on holiday to America with her friends, and I stayed home with my dad and brother. While she was away, I learned “Don't Cry for Me Argentina.” Everybody always had a song, and this was the first time I’d learned a song for me to sing.
When she got back, there were a few drinks taken in at me auntie Linda’s house; I sang “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” and my life changed. My family realized I could sing. From that point, they were so annoying for the rest of my life! It was awful for my uncle too, because they all started in on him like, “You have to show her! She’s really got talent!” I hated it. Every time they had a few drinks they’d be telling me my grandma was about to die and I needed to sing, and I’d be sorry if I didn’t do it. I made some money out of it, actually. There were a few times I got paid quite well for singing “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.”
Sonic Youth: “The Sprawl”
I had several waves of difficulty in school. I never felt it was like being bullied; I always felt I intimidated people, and that was why I got in trouble. At some point after we moved to Manchester, it happened to me again. But I had a strange connection with this lad Duncan around the corner, who was a weirdo. It was only me and him for a little while, and then gradually it was a few other boys who were into the Jesus and Mary Chain. I started to identify as a weirdo. We went to some gigs that didn’t really connect with me—like Sisters of Mercy—but when we saw Sonic Youth, I was like, This is what I want for my life. Me and Duncan were the youngest ones at the show. His mum dropped us off in her Škoda, with her curly perm. And he was like, [seething] “Please don’t drop us off right in front! Don’t pick us up outside!”
I sat on the side of the stage—they must have known that I was young because they never moved me. I was watching them picking Kim Gordon up and throwing her into the audience, and she’d come back and start playing bass again, then they’d chuck her back in. It was the beginning of taking all that amazing music basis that I had from Ireland and turning it into something that made me really independent. I started to live on my own pretty soon after that. That might have had quite a lot to do with music, because I could have gone back to Ireland with me mother [when my parents divorced], but they weren’t into the same kind of music as me in Arklow. They were into heavy metal. It was anathema to me, to go back.
Jhelisa: “Friendly Pressure”
I had followed a boyfriend, an architecture student, to Sheffield. This would have been a big record for the DJs that I knew in Sheffield, where there was this massive crossover between acid jazz and jazz funk, into house, hip-hop, soul, and R&B. Sheffield is where I really started to think about rare grooves. And this was a brilliant record that came out around that time. It’s a fantastic groove. And I love the lyrical content: “Don’t wanna make you uncomfortable/When every time you’re wrong/I’m not gonna get rough.” These unusual statements of truth had an influence.
All Seeing I: “The Beat Goes On”
That’s just a fucking brilliant record. I remember playing it in London at some party where there were loads of cool people. I was like, “Get out the way!” to the DJ. I put it on and everybody was like, [gasps] “What the fuck’s this!” It was a good moment! I was like, “It’s from Sheffield.” Every now and then, Parrot [DJ Richard Barratt of All Seeing I] just makes a tune that you know is a hit. And he does it almost in his sleep with this purity of vision that is second to none. This record was a big moment for him and for us in Sheffield too, to see him revived after such a long time of quietness.
Little Sister: “You’re the One”
I went to New York in the early days [of Moloko], like ’97, and I went to a club called Body and Soul every week. It changed everything for me. I really got into house music, the history of the dance music that I’d been into in Manchester, which I sort of reacted against at the beginning of Moloko. Danny Krivit was a DJ at Body and Soul, and he put out this compilation called Grass Roots. It became one of me favorite CDs, and a big part of what influenced Ruby Blue. I was really into this song from it—she’s the little sister of Sly Stone, and he was a big part of putting the whole thing together. It’s just a really wicked tune.
The Commodores: “Still”
I was the most out of the loop I’d ever been. I was in Ireland and I’d just had a baby, and all I had was some CDs that I could buy in the local shop. I might have even bought it in a fucking petrol station. And there were times where I’d be with me mum and have a couple of drinks, and I’d put that on and be singing at the top of me voice. Practicing my “let’s embarrass the children by dancing really badly” thing!
I got really interested in conversational delivery with singing. And this is a classic: “You said you never needed me/I wonder if you need me now.” It’s just brilliant. Even now it’s making me skin prickle up! There’s a mad joy to it that’s very melancholy. I love his voice too, that conversational voice. It’s the same with the Italian music I was getting into—sort of chatting. And then you go to Italy, and the songs are like football fucking anthems. Everybody knows them and everybody can sing along to every fucking word! But it’s the opposite of anthemic. I find that really interesting. The same with that Commodores track—I bet everyone in the audience sings every single word, and yet, it is like talking.
Mina: “Non Credere”
I don’t know why I have an affinity with Italian music. I did have an Italian boyfriend a few years ago, briefly, that played me Mina. But I met Sebastiano [Properzi] around that time and had my second child with him—still with him, we made a family together. It was the most beautiful time of my life, honestly, because it was the biggest surprise. I had thought I wasn’t going to have the normal family thing and then I had it with this person and it was incredible. He’s a musician, I met him in the studio and sang on one of his projects, a song called “Flash of Light.”
We were together for a little while when he played me this song, “Non Credere,” which his uncle wrote. I already was aware of Mina and totally mad about her. The video is just Mina’s face, so you can really see the mouth, the diction. When he went out, and I thought, I’ll give it a go. I wrote it down phonetically, studying her mouth and the sound, and bit by bit, I’d almost learned it by the time he came back. I was like, “Come on, let’s record it!” One thing led to another and we recorded an EP in Italian [2014’s Mi Senti]—mostly covers, one original. I memorized those songs phonetically. I know quite a lot of Italian now; then I knew a lot less.
Tolouse Low Trax: “Rushing Into Water”
That’s the one I think of when I think of last year. We played it on various holidays and it’s very resonant. This concept of “chug” in dance music—slowing it all down—he’s really at the forefront of that recurring seriously, and not just as a joke or a novelty. You’d be surprised at how slow “Incapable” is, as well.
Is club culture resurgent in my work? I don’t think it ever really disappeared for me, but I don’t wanna be trapped in it, either. I like making music where you don’t know what the fuck it’s gonna do to people. I like the freedom. There are things that happen in dance music that are really boring and formulaic and mind-numbing and would kill me if I had to do them all the time, but there are things in it that are really forward-thinking and complex emotionally that I will always be drawn to.
