Roisin Murphy has been slumming it in mid-sized venues for so long now, you’ve got to wonder if she’s ever going to make the step up to proper stardom. Her latest album, Overpowered, was supposed to sweep the former Moloko singer triumphantly into the mainstream. Recorded in collaboration with a global-tag team of electro boffins (Richard X, Groove Armada’s Andy Cato etc), the LP was an assured suite of floor-fillers and disco bangers. It stiffed at 51 in the charts.
Perhaps Murphy is simply too quirky for the mass market. At the Village, she’s a picture of sparkly excess. She wafts from the wings in an over-sized aluminium puffa jacket, looking like something the cat-walk dragged in.
Noticeably omitting any of Moloko’s signature hits (her sole foray into the band’s catalogue is ‘Forever More’) , Murphy floats about the stage, executing jerky karate-chop dance moves, as if daring you to break into giggles. Under twinkling lights, she’s a natural at booty-shaking floor-fillers (‘You Know Better’, ‘Overpowered’) though her disco diva powers pale when she flirts with rapping and, on ‘Dear Miami’, retro-funk.
Having recently posed in a battery-powered Helmut Lang dress, Murphy is becoming as well known for her duds as for her tunes. Tonight, she sports an eye-popping array of sartorial oddities: leather gloves that stretch to her elbows, feather masks that cover her eyes and lycra leggings so clinging they’d make a brick-layer blush.
As diverting as the fashion show is, the costume changes can’t mask an unpalatable truth: Murphy’s discoid shtick is the stuff of cult adoration, not populist adulation. You wouldn’t want to be the one breaking the news to her.