When Hot Press meets the scruffily attired Stefan Murphy – mainstay frontman of cult Irish alt-rock act The Mighty Stef – in the lobby of The Marker Hotel, the 38-year-old Dubliner is sipping a frothy cappuccino. Given his band’s reputation for hard partying, it’s not quite what you’d expect.
“Well, I’m on the dry at the moment,” he shrugs, with a wry smile. “It won’t be forever...”
In a confessional email he’d sent me prior to this interview, he’d explained that he and his bandmates often stagger off their regular US and European tours in various addled states.
“Yeah, there have been times where we would be coming back off a tour where free drink is available to you pretty much 24/7, if you want it,” he explains. “And you get home, and literally after two days you find yourself actually involuntarily going through detox, because you often develop these little stages of full-on alcoholism, and then have to come down from it.”
With much promo and touring to be done on behalf of their Year Of The Horse album, now is obviously a very good time for Stefan to keep
it together. Especially given that the band has waited so long to put their new long-player out there. They recorded it in LA with uber-producer Alain Johannes (Arctic Monkeys, QOTSA, Them Crooked Vultures) all the way back in 2013.
“It’s taken almost two years to actually get it out,” he admits. “We really liked Alain Johannes’ work. We’d been listening to the last few albums by Mark Lanegan, who I’m a big fan of, and he was responsible for those. So we sent Alain a few demos: to our surprise he got back and said he really loved it and had a bit of time. And then we had to go about trying to fund the operation and that kind of stuff.”
How was he to work with?
“Brilliant!” enthuses Murphy. “He’s a really positive guy, and I thought that our first time working with a posh producer, he was going to be, ‘You do this, you do that’, and I was ready for that. As soon as we met we realised it was going to be
a case of, ‘You guys are the band, I’m the producer, you have to do everything your way, just play and I’ll try to steer you in whatever direction’. He gave us great confidence.”
With echoes of Nick Cave, Primal Scream and Arcade Fire, there’s much self-doubt and darkness to be found in Year Of The Horse. Stefan admits to suffering bouts of serious depression.
“It happens on and off, yeah,” he nods. “I have a pretty good relationship with the lads in the band. Whenever I’m feeling down, they take over everything – from answering emails and taking phone calls, when I’m just not really able to. It’s an ongoing thing. Since my teens, but especially in the last 10-15 years.”
Does depression help the songwriting process?
“Probably in the past. I’m never productive when depressed. It would be hard to say that it helps. It actually hinders pretty much everything. I don’t think there’s anybody that would say it’s a blessing. As an artist I suppose, it does help you to know what the darker side of life feels like in relation to the brighter side. I’m always writing about the correlation between the two.”
He indirectly addresses the black dog on anthemic album opener ‘Everybody Needs A Grave’. “It’s not really about death. It’s more about solitude, which is what I crave pretty much all the time. I probably picked the wrong job for that. I can get it when I need. I’m lucky to have the people around me, my wife especially.”
Year Of The Horse has been released on the group’s own Burning Sands label in Ireland, and is available through Rough Trade elsewhere in Europe.
“I had a record label for many years called The Firstborn Is Dead Recordings, through which I put out all of my own stuff and some other Irish bands,” he explains. “I decided to hang up that name and start a new thing, so I called up the guy from Rough Trade distribution personally, because we had met him a couple times in various places. He’d come to see us, he liked us, and he suggested the idea of, if we set up our own label, they’d sign us as a label.
“So he said, ‘Do a label deal with us and we’ll distribute you all over Europe’. And so that took a while for that to come together. Now that it has, we’re looking at fulfilling our end of the bargain and making our Burning Sands thing a really steadfast company. There’s a lot of work, and most of the work won’t be done by the band. We’ve got another guy, Mark Whelan, coming in who’s going to be the label boss, and we’re going to pretty much sign to our own label and hopefully concentrate on just making music, and not always be going around putting up posters.”
He laughs and kicks the battered rucksack at his feet. “I’ve got a bag full of posters here to put up around town later.”
So he's still very hands-on?
Stefan Murphy throws his hands expressively in the air. “We’re everything, man!” he declares. “I’m the guy who hands out fliers, I’m the guy who sweeps the floor, and I’m the guy who sings. It’s a struggle, but I like the work.”