Róisín Murphy: ‘I commit to the point where it could be dangerous’

Róisín Murphy is sitting in an old-fashioned shabby-chic drinking club in Soho, central London, that she approvingly describes as “very literary”. She is telling me about lockdown in Ibiza, where she lives with her partner and two children. “It was lovely to have the island so clean and quiet, driving along the salt flats, nobody around. Except they sent the Guardia Civil [Spain’s national gendarmerie] to Ibiza – they really clamped down. You couldn’t walk your dogs, you couldn’t smoke on the street. There were policemen with machine guns. So you were between this magical place with no people in it and this background feedback, like white noise, of authoritarianism.”

The experience was, she says, “like living in a JG Ballard book”. Then again, she quite enjoyed that: “That gave it a bit of an edge. Come on! Let’s have it!”

Besides, it got her thinking about Ballard, which inspired a song on her new album. “The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, the story about psychotropic houses,” she nods. “Which is basically AI, or an idea of it. JG Ballard’s like a Nosferatu or something, isn’t he?” She frowns. “Not Nosferatu. What’s he called?”

Nostradamus?

“Nostradamus! He predicted what’s happening now, absolutely.”

If you want evidence that Murphy is not like other pop stars, see above. Should you need it underlined, you could look at the Irish pop star’s social media feeds, particularly TikTok, where a phantasmagoria of oddness plays out amid the usual album announcements. There is Murphy performing an acoustic set in her back garden, arriving on the back of a tractor, carrying a pitchfork; Murphy nodding along to her own music, while smoking what looks suspiciously like a large joint; Murphy warping her face and voice into a variety of characters, including Karol, a clueless US PR, and Jason, a cockney ex-raver blathering on about the early days of acid house.

Or you could listen to CooCool, the single from her forthcoming sixth solo album (name to be announced), which builds from a gentle synth and drum machine intro into a glorious, euphoric pop song, driven by a lovely old soul sample. It also features Murphy, well, cooing in lieu of a chorus; it’s punctuated by apparently unrelated muttered asides – “I’ve lost it”, “I’m sorry” – and accompanied by an image of her face half-covered by a kind of psychedelic latex gimp mask.

It’s clearly the work of an idiosyncratic imagination, or rather two: Murphy and her latest collaborator, the German producer DJ Koze, whom she describes as “an enigma” with “the most sensitive ears on the planet” who “seems to bleed when he makes music” – and who could deal with Murphy’s approach to collaboration.

“There’s not many that’ll put up with it, I can tell you,” she says, laughing. “It’s incredible when you think about it. They pour themselves into it as a 50/50 collaborator and then they let me take it into the world. I’ll make the artwork, the visuals, the video; I’ll put the shows together. It will now be my vision and they have to go with that, which on their part takes an awful lot of trust.”

The results are spectacular – the best of her 30-year career, better even than 2020’s acclaimed Róisín Machine. The songs are uniformly fantastic, the music a skewed trawl through disco, cosmic funk, breakbeats and soul. Murphy doesn’t go clubbing as much as she used to, but she says it’s important that her music keeps the connection to the dancefloor that it has had since she emerged in the mid-90s as one half of Moloko, the duo she formed with then-boyfriend, Mark Brydon.

“It’s a place that still has a little bit of hope, of the future, of some sort of utopia,” she says. “I like optimism. I’m barely holding on to it; I don’t know what it’s coming out of and if I believe it any more. But I have to have that hope when I’m making music. It’s like betting on a horse that might take you closer to the sublime.”

Songs about love and sex jostle with lyrics that ponder the size of the universe, the meaning of existence and free will. “That would basically be down to my father,” she says. “He was a very philosophical fella and that made me somebody who is happiest when I have a big thought, a new thought. So I actively search that out. The first time I heard [the self-styled “philosophical entertainer”] Alan Watts was better than drugs. Oh, mate, it put me in such a good mood. It literally gives me a buzz, the history of philosophy.”

Her father, a businessman who “fitted bar furniture in a quarter of Ireland’s pubs”, hangs over the album in other ways. He died of Parkinson’s after the album’s completion, which Murphy thinks accounts for its lyrical preoccupation with mortality. Certainly, she says, his illness and death got her thinking about her childhood in Arklow, County Wicklow. She turns 50 this summer and describes herself as being “in a moment that a lot of people my age will be in as well, I’m sure, where a whole world is dying. Not just my dad, but the world he existed in has gone. That poetic way of living, singing all the fucking time, not ringing before you come round.

“Pubs were his natural environment and I was one of those children that loved that world, sitting while they were having their pints and earwigging to what the adults were saying. I liked nothing more than when they were having a party and they were drinking and singing. I kept finding more in it to sustain me. Young people were boring to me compared with my dad’s friends. They were funny, they were aspirational, in the best sense of the word. They were the most interesting people I ever met. You start to worry about losing the last shreds of the ideas that are left, like individualism. That can be very anxiety-producing in someone like me.”

The family moved to Manchester when Murphy was 12, but she refused to follow them back when her parents split and returned to Ireland three years later. Instead, she immersed herself in experimental music and clubbing. She moved to Sheffield, where she met Brydon. Her individualism was immediately evident: Moloko followed 1999’s smash Sing It Back and 2000’s fellow disco-house hit The Time Is Now with a single called Indigo, which featured a bellowed chorus of: “Rameses! Colossus!” and was reviewed by one music paper with the plaintive inquiry: “Did you not like being a pop star, then?” The videos for their hits were glamorous, but the subsequent album, Statues, had Murphy on the cover, waist-deep in water, sloshing around two pints of beer and snarling at the camera.

After Moloko split in 2004, Murphy embarked on an equally abstruse solo career, with critically lauded and Mercury-nominated records rubbing shoulders with a collection of songs in Italian – a language she doesn’t speak – and the sprawling and strange Take Her Up to Monto, the sleeve of which featured Murphy on a building site in a hard hat and a hi-vis jacket.

She says she turns down “gazillions of tracks where people have thought: ‘Oh, she’ll sing on me dance track, it’ll be good,’” preferring to seek out leftfield collaborators, among them the electronic musician and sound artist Matthew Herbert, the eccentric US house auteur Maurice Fulton and the Sheffield-based dance producer Parrot, AKA Crooked Man. “It just means I can make a different record every time,” she says. “If you’re in a band with four guys for 30 years, you’d be hard-pressed to continually generate new ideas. That’s the flaw in that whole setup.”

There is something cheering about the fact that Murphy has done all this while piloting a profoundly distinctive course through pop, thumbing her nose at what she calls “the status quo that says ‘Don’t do that’ and ‘Keep it simple, stupid’, when you know you can be better than that”. This is the strange thing about her: on one level, she is like other pop stars. She has huge, deathless hit singles to her name: on Radio 2, you are never far from hearing Sing It Back. She has gone viral: a couple of years back, her 2005 track Ramalama (Bang Bang) provoked a TikTok challenge involving running to the nearest mirror and miming along to the chorus.

She has diversified into acting, playing a witch in Netflix’s supernatural drama The Bastard Son & the Devil Himself. She is feted by fashion houses: at this year’s Paris fashion week, Chanel models walked the runway to the strains of Can’t Replicate, from her new album. And she has a rabid following – so rabid that, during an argument, she was confronted by her teenage daughter, who protested: “How would you know? Your life’s perfect! Even your fanbase is perfect!” She notes with a smile that this “is kind of true”.

A few weeks after our meeting, Murphy is due to headline the Royal Albert Hall, before a summer of high festival billings. Her live shows are elaborate affairs, involving extravagant costumes, a testimony to what she calls “a pretty intense attention to detail”. But part of the appeal is the sense that they are always a step away from collapsing into chaos, which might have something to do with her twin inspirations: Grace Jones (“obviously”) and Iggy Pop.

“I go out on stage like him – like a bullet from a gun, straight out – and I commit to the point where it could be dangerous for me,” she says. “Nothing else is more important than I do this show and you really fucking feel what I have to express to you right now. I have had accidents. I’ve smashed my face, right here” – she points to a small scar – “in Moscow, many years ago, because I was head-banging, like really head-banging, and there was a wooden chair and I just … head‑banged into it. The guy in the hospital looked at it and went: ‘We can’t possibly do that, you should go home and see your plastic surgeon!’ Like I had a plastic surgeon on speed dial!” She laughs. “There you go, that’s Moscow.”

It’s the kind of career that I assumed involved a lot of butting heads with record companies, but Murphy insists not. “I’ve had the odd clash, but, honestly, I’ve always got my own way. Why would I think that [a record company] could make decisions for me in that way? I’m quite rock’n’roll; I’m not from a stage school. Even in Moloko, I didn’t have that much to stand up to. I came into it saying stupid shite on a record with me boyfriend. We lived in Sheffield for eight years, making music in our own studio. There were nice middle-class English men at the record label; they weren’t going to come up to Sheffield and tell us what to do. They were petrified of us! Mark was quite gruff; he could be intimidating. That feeling on stage, that it might all collapse – maybe it was something like that that frightened the shit out of them. Nice middle-class English men are terrified of that.”

Equally, she says she doesn’t always feel that she has been taken seriously “beyond my world, where I’m making the work”. Perhaps that is an inevitable result of having so many unusual ideas. She won’t be drawn on whether she thinks the situation would have been different for a male artist. “I’m not a man and there isn’t actually a man that does what I do, so I can’t separate. Pros and cons.”

Besides, she says, she is very happy where she is: successful but adjacent to the mainstream, free to do what she wants. Unlike a lot of artists in middle-age, she isn’t terribly nostalgic for the past. “Culture is fragmented in millions of places, but that’s what makes this the best moment musically that I’ve ever lived in. There’s so much really fucking amazing music being made and I have all the tools available to find and access it.

“I used to hate going into the record shop in Sheffield, trying to sing a track I’d heard in a club to them and them going [snooty voice]: ‘I think you mean this.’ Now, I can just get in there and invigorate myself with music every day, dance to it, work out to it, find out about things. The division between genres and places and times is melting in music and that’s my happy place.”

Róisín Murphy’s sixth solo album is released this autumn on Ninja Tune. She headlines Bluedot festival, Cheshire, on 21 July