Róisín Murphy: 'I commit myself to the point where it could be dangerous' (2023)

Róisín Murphy sits in an old-fashioned shabby-chic club in Soho, central London, which he approvingly describes as "very literary". He tells me about his isolation in Ibiza, where he lives with his partner and two children. "It was nice to have an island so clean and peaceful, to drive on the salt plain, and no one around. Apart from sending the Guardia Civil [Spain's national gendarmerie] to Ibiza - they really tightened up. You couldn't walk your dogs, you couldn't smoke in the street. There were policemen with machine guns. So you were between this magical place without people and this background feedback, like white noise, authoritarianism.”

The experience was, she says, "like living in a JG Ballard book." On the other hand, she quite enjoyed it: “It gave a little edge. Come! Let's get him!"

Plus, it got her thinking about Ballard, who inspired a song on her new album. "A Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, a story about psychotropic houses," she nods. "What is artificial intelligence, or the idea of ​​it, basically. JG Ballard's like Nosferatu or something, right?" She frowned. "Not Nosferatu. What's his name?”

Nostradamus?

"Nostradamus! He absolutely predicted what was happening now.”

If you want proof that Murphy is not like other pop stars, look above. If you need an underline, you can check out the Irish pop star's social media feeds, particularly TikTok, where a phantasmagoria of weirdness unfolds amid the usual album announcements. There's Murphy performing an acoustic set in her back garden, arriving on the back of a tractor, carrying a pitchfork; Murphy nods along to his own music while smoking what looks suspiciously like a large joint; Murphy contorts his face and voice into various characters, including Karol, a clueless American PR woman, and Jason, an ex-Cockney raver who babbles about the early days of acid house.

Or you could listenCooCool, a single from her upcoming sixth solo album (title to be announced), which turns from a gentle synth and drum intro into a glorious, euphoric pop song, driven by a lovely old soul sample. It also features Murphy, well, cooing instead of singing; it's punctuated by apparently disjointed mumbled asides—"I lost him," "I'm sorry"—and accompanied by an image of her face half-covered in some sort of psychedelic latex mask.

It's clearly the work of an idiosyncratic imagination, two to be exact: Murphy and her latest collaborator, a German producerDJ Koze, whom he describes as an "enigma" with "the most sensitive ears on the planet" who "seems to bleed when he makes music" — and who could handle Murphy's approach to collaboration.

"There aren't many who would take it, I can tell you," she says, laughing. “It's amazing when you think about it. They pour themselves into it as collaborators 50/50 and then let me take it out into the world. I will create artwork, visuals, video; I'll put the shows together. Now it will be my vision and they have to accept it, which requires a lot of trust on their part."

The results are spectacular - the best in her 30-year career, better even than the acclaimed 2020.Rois's machine. The songs are uniformly fantastic, the music is skewed towards disco, cosmic funk, breakbeats and soul. Murphy doesn't go clubbing as much as she used to, but says it's important her music retains the dancefloor connection she's had since emerging in the mid-'90s as one half of Molok, the duo she formed with then-boyfriend Mark Brydon.

"It's a place that still has a bit of hope, a future, a kind of utopia," she says. "I like optimism. I can barely hold on; I don't know what it comes from and if I even believe anymore. But I have to have that hope when I make music. It's like betting on a horse that could take you closer to the sublime.”

Songs about love and sex are pushed together with lyrics that reflect on the size of the universe, the meaning of existence and free will. "It would actually be down to my dad," she says. "He was a very philosophical guy and that made me someone who is happiest when I have a big thought, a new thought. Well, I'm actively looking for that. I first heard [the self-proclaimed “philosophical entertainer”]Alan Wattswas better than drugs. Oh, my friend, that put me in such a good mood. It literally lifts me up, the history of philosophy.”

Her father, a businessman who "furnished bar furniture in a quarter of Irish pubs," hangs over the album in other ways. He died of Parkinson's disease after the album was finished, which Murphy attributes to his lyrical preoccupation with mortality. Certainly, she says, his illness and death made her think of her childhood in Arklow, County Wicklow. He turns 50 this summer and describes himself as "in a moment where many people my age will be, I'm sure, where the whole world is dying. Not only my dad, but also the world in which he existed has disappeared. That poetic way of life, singing the whole freaking time, not ringing before you're conscious.

"Pubs were his natural environment and I was one of those kids who loved that world, sitting around drinking a pint and listening to what the adults were saying. I liked nothing more than when they made a party and when they drank and sang. In that I found even more to sustain me. Young people were boring to me compared to my dad's friends. They were funny, they were ambitious, in the best sense of the word. They were the most interesting people I have ever met. You start to worry about losing the last bits of ideas that are left, like individualism. It can cause a lot of anxiety in someone like me.”

The family moved to Manchester when Murphy was 12, but she refused to follow them when her parents split up and returned to Ireland three years later. Instead, she immersed herself in experimental music and clubs. She moved to Sheffield, where she met Brydon. Her individualism was immediately apparent: Moloko followed the 1999 hitSing backand another disco-house hit from 2000Now is the timewith a single called Indigo, which featured the roaring refrain: “Rameses! Colossus!" and was reviewed by a music paper with the mournful query: "Didn't you like being a pop star then?" The videos for their hits were glamorous, but the follow-up album, Statues, had Murphy on the cover, waist-high in the water, he splashed around two pints of beer and growled at the camera.

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After Moloko broke up in 2004, Murphy embarked on an equally obscure solo career, with critically acclaimed and Mercury-nominated records including a collection of songs in Italian - a language she doesn't speak - and the sprawling and strange Take Her Up to Monto , whose cover featured Murphy on a construction site in a hard hat and high-vis jacket.

He says he rejects "a lot of songs where people were like, 'Oh, he's going to sing on my dance track, he's going to be good,'" preferring to look for left-field collaborators, including an electronic musician and sound artistMatthew Herbert, the eccentric American home authorMaurice Fultonand dance producer from SheffieldParrot, better known as Crooked Man. "It just means I can make a different record every time," she says. "If you're in a band with four people for 30 years, it's hard to constantly create new ideas. That's the downside of that whole setup."

There's something heartening about the fact that Murphy has done all this while piloting a very distinctive course through pop, thumbing her nose at what she calls "the status quo that says 'Don't do it' and 'Keep it simple, dumbass,' when you know you can be better than that.” This is the strange thing about her: on one level, sheislike other pop stars. He's got huge, immortal hit singles behind him: you're never far from hearing Sing It Back on Radio 2. She went viral: a few years ago, her 2005 songGatara (Bang Bang)sparked a TikTok challenge that involved running to the nearest mirror and miming along to the chorus.

She branched out into acting, playing a witch in the Netflix supernatural dramaSon of a bastard and the devil himself. Fashion houses are famous: Chanel models at this year's Paris fashion weekwalked the runwayalong with the songs Can't Replicate from her new album. And she has a furious following – so furious that she confronted her teenage daughter during an argument, who protested: “How do you know? Your life is perfect! Even your fan base is perfect!” He notes with a smile that this is "somewhat true".

A few weeks after our meeting, Murphy is due to headline the Royal Albert Hall, ahead of a summer of high festival spending. Her live performances are elaborate events that include extravagant costumes, a testament to what she calls "a pretty intense attention to detail." But part of the appeal is the sense that they're always one step away from collapsing into chaos, which might have something to do with her twin inspirations: Grace Jones ("obviously") and Iggy Pop.

"I go on stage like him — like a gunshot, straight — and I surrender to the point where it could be dangerous for me," she says. “Nothing else is more important than me on this show and you really fucking feel what I have to tell you right now. I had accidents. I crushed my face, right here" - she points to a small scar - "in Moscow, many years ago, because I hit my head, likereallyheadbutting, and there was a wooden chair and I just...butted my head on it. The guy at the hospital looked at it and said, 'There's no way we can do that, you should go home and see your plastic surgeon!' It was like I had a plastic surgeon on speed dial!" She laughs. "There, that's Moscow."

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It's the kind of career I assumed involved a lot of run-ins with record companies, but Murphy insists it didn't. “I've had the odd conflict but, honestly, I've always had my way. Why would I think that [the recording company] can make decisions for me in such a way? I'm pretty rock'n'roll; I'm not from a variety school. Even in Molok I didn't have that much to contend with. I went into it saying stupid shit on the board with my boyfriend. We lived in Sheffield for eight years, making music in our own studio. There were nice, middle-class Englishmen at the record company; they didn't want to come to Sheffield and tell us what to do. They were petrified of us! Mark was quite gruff; it could be scary. That feeling on stage, that everything could collapse - maybe that scared them. Nice middle-class Englishmen are horrified by it.”

Equally, she says she doesn't always feel taken seriously "outside of my world, where I work". Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of the existence of so many unusual ideas. She won't back down if she thinks the situation would be different for a male artist. “I'm not a man and there really isn't a man who does what I do, so I can't separate myself. Pro and con."

Other than that, she says, she is very happy where she is: successful but close to the mainstream, free to do what she wants. Unlike many artists in middle age, she is not terribly nostalgic for the past. “Culture is fragmented into a million places, but that's what makes this the best moment musically that I've ever lived. There is so much freaking amazing music being made and I have all the tools at my disposal to find and access it.

“I used to hate going into a record shop in Sheffield, trying to sing them a song I'd heard in a club, and they'd say [exasperated voice], 'Imeditateyou mean this.’ Now I can just go inside and invigorate myself with music every day, dance to it, work out to it, learn about things. The division between genres, places and times melts in music and that is my happy place.”

Róisín Murphy's sixth solo album is out this fall on Ninja Tune. She headlinesBluedot festival, Cheshire, 21 July