Singer Róisín Murphy: ‘It’s mind-blowingly, world-changingly the best record ever’

When she was 15 and could get away with it, Róisín Murphy started going out to clubs in Manchester. These were the heady days of “Madchester”, the city’s late-1980s indie dance wave at clubs such as The Haçienda and Dry Bar, but also of inner-city Manchester’s street soul scene, The PSV and Precinct 13 venues, where she learnt to dance. “There was so much going on at that time,” the singer says. “People in Manchester have always been very proud of their grassroots music and arts scene.” 

Having moved there from Ireland three years before, she was immediately enamoured of the city’s vibrant musical scene. “It was a very strong black culture, West Indian, so in Manchester there was a lot of reggae, a lot of dub systems. There was a lot of cross-pollination going on. We were all together and it wasn’t as laboured, let’s say, intellectually.”

Cross-pollination has been a hallmark of Murphy’s career of more than 25 years and nine albums, starting with the band Moloko (“Sing It Back”) and latterly as a solo artist. In 2020, she released the critically lauded and commercially successful album Róisín Machine, which sleekly blended countless dance floor genres, Studio 54 disco melting into UK bass, punctuated with swelling orchestral strings, and on June 25 she will be performing at the Glastonbury Festival.

The sun is blistering outside as we sit in her backstage dressing room at the Columbiahalle venue in Berlin, where she has a concert that night, which is as much performance art as gig. From arms full of long-stemmed red roses, she throws them one by one into the audience, then smashes the remainder across the stage. A repudiation of patriarchal chivalry? An anti-romantic statement? It’s hard to say which, but Murphy has the audience enraptured. Brooding Moloko classics such as “Familiar Feelings” and “The Time Is Now” meld disco and pop.

The atmosphere at her gigs “is a bit like The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, she says: just as at screenings of the 1975 cult classic, her audiences dress up to mirror Murphy’s own spectacular fashions. In the music video for her 2007 song “Overpowered”, for example, she injected high fashion into everyday banality, in one scene sitting on a London night bus nonchalantly wearing an architectural chequered cape-dress, a black slanted hat resembling a spacecraft perched on her head. These clothes amplify her personality: exhibitionist, playful, eclectic, larger than life.

“I go out on the stage and I forget to look after myself . . . The other night I played in Hamburg and my friend DJ Koze was there and he was saying to my assistant every five minutes, ‘You gotta get her some air! Get her a fan on stage, she’s gonna pass out!’ . . . The way I go on stage, it’s totally athletic.” That evening, her music is punctuated with dance moves, sometimes resembling Irish dancing, other times a sense of swing during her rambunctious numbers, even a melancholic indie-rock-star swagger for the quieter moments.

Murphy, 48, describes her dream of creativity as a “flow state”: “When I’m performing, when I’m writing, when I’m in the mode of creation, when an idea comes to me, whether it’s a visual one, or when I’m directing, when I’m styling, when I get into the flow of it, and it all starts to come together, it’s the most magical thing — I’m addicted to that flow state.” She protects it with a “maternal fierceness”.

That creative process is not a solo endeavour — her collaborators are conspirators: “They come like cats with a dead mouse in their jaws, and they drop the dead mouse there for me,” she says in her husky register. “‘There you go, that’s a lovely dead mouse! Would you like that?’ and I go, ‘Yeah, mmm, I’ll give it a whirl!’” She is regularly approached to collaborate, “and that just must be the best blessing I’ve ever been given”.

One of those collaborators is that concerned friend DJ Koze, the German producer Stefan Kozalla, who is working closely with Murphy on her upcoming “global-sounding” album. Having made an EP of contemporary covers of Italo-pop classics (2014’s Mi Senti) and collaborated with Lebanon’s best-known rock band, Mashrou’ Leila (2018’s “Salam”), nothing seems unlikely.

“How can I explain to you it’s absolutely mind-blowingly, world-changingly . . . it’s the best record ever . . . It’s a fucking planet on its own.” Surprisingly, this doesn’t sound narcissistic, but assured — a pledge to deliver the goods. “Róisín Machine is parochial compared to this. I don’t mean that in a negative way. Róisín Machine is from Sheffield, this is from the world.”

Undoubtedly in a fertile creative period, she is set to make her acting debut as a witch in the new Netflix fantasy series Half Bad, about the 16-year-old son of the world’s most feared witch. Murphy plays a witch called Mercury: “She’s devious and mean but she’s very stylish, thank God!”

On Róisín Machine, the opening track — eight-minute string epic “Simulation” — has subterranean frequencies bubbling under an echoing loop of her voice. Its first words sound like Murphy’s manifesto: “I feel my story’s still untold. But I’ll make my own happy ending.”

She likens her career to carrying a baby in her arms for 27 years, protecting “something beautiful, and a space to be creative and free”. So why does she think she has succeeded across a quarter of a century in an industry where disposability is the rule? “I don’t know if I have succeeded,” she says. “It’s proved itself to be not really about success. Actually, my career was more about stamina.”

Róisín Murphy headlines this weekend’s Body & Soul Festival at Ballinlough Castle, Ireland; roisinmurphyofficial.com