Róisín Murphy: ‘Basically, I’m JG Ballard sex-pop’

The Irish disco queen is back with her best album yet and is as straight-talking as ever. She talks to Roisin O'Connor about glamour, grit and why people still get her wrong

(Roisin Murphy)

Do I think about my legacy?” Róisín Murphy ponders. She gestures to a giant portrait of herself, hung on the living room wall behind her. It was painted by Simon Henwood, the Irish singer’s ex-boyfriend and father to her 10-year-old daughter, Clodagh. “What do you think?” she says with a cackle.

Murphy’s legacy has spanned over 26 years in music. She’s known for her avant-garde style and shimmering, danceable hits, though she is far from your run-of-the-mill megawatt pop star, constantly evolving into something new with each album, and usually with a directional, sculptural outfit. First with Moloko, the trip-hop duo she formed with Mark Brydon in the Nineties, then her five solo albums of squelchy, glamorous dance music and alt-electronic pop. She's experiencing a particularly prolific phase, helped by the fact that she has everything she needs to record new music at home. “There's a bad side to it – it can draw the life out of you sometimes,” she says, noting that it also means the onus is on her if people don't like what she comes up with. “But it’s usually got some kind of charm. And it suits me down to the ground.”

Murphy, now 47, is speaking from her London home, where she lives with her partner (Italian producer Sebastiano Properzi), their son Tadhg, and Clodagh. The family splits their time between here, Ireland and Ibiza, although the pandemic has obviously made regular travel more difficult. But Murphy has become used to turning her living room into another stage, calling it “central HQ”, where she has been hosting regular streaming parties in the build-up to the release of her new solo record. In a year that’s seen the triumphant return of maximalist pop, from Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa, Murphy – never one to follow the crowd – is releasing her own album of subtle and subversive disco anthems. It’s called Róisín Machine, because she is an indefatigable creative force.

The album partly comprises singles Murphy has been releasing since 2012, including the near-nine-minute proto-house epic “Simulation”, which builds and builds in a sweaty, shuffling sprawl of delayed gratification. Other tracks, such as 2015’s “Jealousy”, were scattered between other solo releases, including the Mercury Prize-shortlisted album Hairless Toys. Murphy grins. “Then I fell in love with this Italian fella.” Inspired, she recorded the Mi Senti EP, composed entirely of classic Italian pop covers, before reuniting with her long-time friend DJ Parrot (Richard Barratt, AKA Crooked Man) to produce what would become Róisín Machine.

She met Parrot in Sheffield, where she arrived as a teenager studying at art school. Before that, aged 15, she’d elected to stay behind in Manchester when the rest of her family relocated back to Ireland, submerging herself in the local rave scene. In Sheffield, she found herself surrounded by fellow music-lovers excited by developing technology. Among them was the musician Brydon, whom she chatted up at a party and with whom she eventually released the early Noughties hits “Sing It Back” and “The Time is Now”.

Dance music still in her DNA, she and Parrot focused on elements of house, dubbed-out disco and “clashes of other music”. Underneath it all, there’s this “Sheffield throb, a rigorous minimalism – a dark throbbing grit to everything. It’s a euphoria that comes out of the dark.” When I say the throaty spoken-word intros on “Simulation” and “Murphy’s Law” remind me of Tim Curry’s Dr Frank-N-Furter from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she beams. “I went to see a showing of that in the cinema, when I was 13, all dressed up.”

That explains the unmistakable element of Seventies glam-rock bubbling beneath the house and disco. “I got fascinated with these lads from the Human League and Cabaret Voltaire, watching them on Top of the Pops” – she shakes her fist triumphantly – “f***ing come on then!” She admired the men from that scene who would “put their make-up on, dress up in heels and blouses they’d ‘borrowed’ from their sisters, and run the gauntlet through a very working-class town in the Seventies and Eighties, on the way down to the one or two pubs that’d be for weirdos like that”. She marvels at their bravery: “It fascinates me – the balls of it.”

Her song “Kingdom of Ends” is a tribute to the late critic and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who died by suicide in 2017. He once described Murphy as pop’s “exiled princess of glam”, who “represents a confection – of disco and art, of sensuousness and intelligence, of sumptuous superficiality and existential anxiety – that once seemed inevitable, but which has now become all but impossible”. He saw the importance of the glamour in the music world, at a time when Noughties indie was at its height. The superficiality of Murphy’s take on glamour, art and music, Fisher realised, was precisely what made it so great.

“Basically, I’m JG Ballard sex-pop,” Murphy says, referring to the post-apocalyptic novelist who has inspired many a pop artist, among them Gary Numan and Madonna. “When things are difficult, that’s where I’ve always gone.” She’s been shot down and told she was ridiculous many times, “and I am ridiculous”. She feels sorry for men, she says. “They don’t have the dressing-up box that we’ve got. I’d rather be me any day of the week than a DJ who walks out on to a festival stage dressed like a f***ing estate agent.” She remembers the “sense of relief” she felt upon discovering the work of US artist Cindy Sherman when she was 14, of observing “the dressing up and the exhibitionism”.

She talks about the songs on Róisín Machine as though they’re characters, but you’ll always find Murphy in there, too. Unrequited love is a theme she comes back to often: “I always punch above my weight, in every aspect,” she says. Including with men? “That happened a few times,” she admits. She’s good at the moment (“I managed to get a good’un”). But she doesn’t want to get married, “never – not if he was dipped in gold”. The idea of her dad, Micky Murphy, giving her away makes her scream with laughter. She’s a self-confessed “daddy’s girl” – “I have an Electra complex,” she quips. “I love men. I just love ’em.”  

She wrote “Incapable” when she split from Henwood, nine months after Clodagh was born. It’s about the idea of getting out of a relationship without your heart being broken (“Girls don’t sing about that in pop songs”). “[At the time], everything came into sharp relief.” She wondered if she might never have her own version of the wayward family she grew up in. “But I was still intact, completely and utterly. Ready to roll.” It prompted her question in the lyric: “Am I incapable of love?” Maybe, maybe not, she says now. “But at least have the bravery to ask it.”

Murphy credits her father, a wheeler-dealer who used to fill their home with things he’d bought at the local pub, for her unwavering optimism. “God knows where all this is going, but I’m sure it’s going somewhere,” she says of the pandemic. She’s confident that the music industry will bounce back eventually, because “we’ve got to be able to let people have a f***ing do – that’s what’s human”. She’s enjoyed her live-streams where she danced around her living room with none of the make-up she’d usually wear on stage. “There was something liberating about that, to get close up to people in an actress-y sense, rather than a pop star one.” The optimism slips for just a second. “It’ll get right boring if it goes on though.”

We’re interrupted briefly by Clodagh, back from school. She shuffles over to her mum, looking at the screen. “Hello everybody!” she waves. “You’re famous now – look, it’s finally happened,” Murphy tells her. Her comment prompts me to mention the numerous reviews that ask, in that most backhanded of ways, why Murphy's not more famous than she is. “Even when I get good reviews, they’re not good in the right way,” she sniffs, as her daughter shuffles out of the room again. “Someone will make a compliment and it’s the wrong compliment.” 

There’s a dissonance, she thinks, that comes from her constant shape-shifting. People struggle to keep up. But at the end of it, she says, no one can look at her back-catalogue and not say she didn’t put her heart and soul into all of it. “And that’s enough for me.”

Roisin Machine is out on 2 October