Hot Press Interview: Róisín Murphy

You know that phrase "talking nineteen to the dozen"? Well, in time honoured Spinal Tap tradition, Róisín Murphy has managed to add an extra word and make it twenty to the dozen.

"Sorry, I'm bending your ear," she laughs throatily. "Once I get into my flow there's no stopping me!"

She can bend away all she wants. Funny, self-deprecating and, at times, disarmingly honest, the 42-year-old Arklow songstress is as eloquent and literate a pop star as this country has ever produced.

"I'm not sure about the 'pop star' part but you're dealing with somebody who's doing exactly as she wants," Róisín reflects. "I'm being completely true to myself and the work. For me to throw something out into the world, it has to really matter."

Róisín Murphy is also one of the most stylish pop stars this country has ever produced, as you'll discover for yourself when she takes to the All Together Now main stage on the Saturday.

"There will be costume changes!" she confirms. "I keep hearing how fabulous the location is, but of course that counts for nothing if the sound and staging aren't perfect. I'm sure they're extremely professional down there, but I'm marking yer' cards, lads! Am I sounding fierce?"

Er, yes...

"I'm not that bad, really," she chuckles again. "Whether playing live, making a record or shooting a video, I'm a demon for wanting it all to be perfect. You owe that to the people who come to your gigs and buy your records. It's always great coming home to play, and I've eight new songs, which I'm releasing this summer as four 12" vinyl singles in beautiful sleeves, with an A and a B side, to hit you over the head with."

These extremely funky floor fillers were cooked up with Maurice Fulton, the Baltimore techno pioneer who for some peculiar reason has ended up living in Sheffield. Did Róisín get him to regale her with tales of house-ian days past?

"Oh God, he's not really a chit-chatter," she says. "And when he does open his mouth...One of the first things I said to Maurice was, 'I've always wanted to make a disco record with you.' And he just looked at me witheringly and went, 'I don't do disco: it's RnB.' That shut me up. There wasn't much more talking about music after that, but we do have an amazing connection.

"The way it worked was that we'd finish a track and Maurice would take it to whatever gig he was doing and try it out on the crowd. They always reacted perfectly, which I know because on a couple of occasions I hid in the corner and watched them. Normally, I'd keep tweaking things in the studio but he was like, 'The dancefloor was packed, so it's finished.'

"As keen as I was to record with Maurice, if it hadn't have clicked I'd have walked away as I did when I met Giorgio Moroder in Paris to discuss working on his new project," Róisín stresses. "Those Donna Summer records he did in the '70s were pure genius, but he wanted to make a record that fitted in with the EDM explosion in America and that's not me at all."

Each of her new songs is accompanied by a self-directed video reflective of such titles as 'Plaything', 'The Rumble' and 'Jacuzzi Rollercoaster', which is the next Grace Jones meets Chic bass-rattler to hit the racks.

"I asked my wonderful, brilliant fans to come down to the two-day shoot and they did me proud," she enthuses. "I'm not spending a million quid on making a record anymore. I had a sixty-piece orchestra in front of me for Statues and EMI bankrolling Overpowered. The budget now is minute, but that doesn't mean you can't produce something really incredible."

Several journalists and DJs were subjected to a Murphy-ian Twitter lashing last month for not paying her new music the attention she thinks it deserves. Was this planned or a spur of the moment thing?

"Pure exhaustion sparked it," she explains. "I was exceptionally tired, getting up at 7am 'cause I've got kids and then sitting in bed at 11 o'clock scrolling through social media. I was kind of lashing out at the whole industry. There's a lot going on. I'm doing these four 12"s, the video project to go with them, the pre-production for the live stuff. Like I say, the budgets are minute to the point that it's a miracle I'm getting what I'm getting. I pay everybody really well, as is only right. I'm doing this, and I'm doing that. I haven't got international PR in place so promoters in Belgium, my biggest market historically, don't even know I'm putting records out. When I snapped on Twitter was when I found out that the first two records hadn't been serviced to the biggest gay station in the country. I sent a message to the DJ I know at Gaydio saying, 'Why aren't you playing 'Plaything' and he was like, 'It hasn't been serviced otherwise we'd be hammering it.' I've just got to get the right team around me. Not as a buffer 'cause I'm not a child. I need consistency of message and everyone to be able to hear what I'm saying because I'm not just a singer. I've never even taken singing seriously because I just open me gob and it comes out. Everything you see and hear is down to me. When I was at EMI, I controlled every last millisecond of that record. Me! I did it. I'm being completely true to myself and working with what I've got."

I hope Róisín realises that, although based in England, she's very much regarded as an Irish national treasure.

"Aw, thanks. I have come to realise that lately and want to spend more time in Dublin because I hear the scene there is absolutely cooking. You'll have to show me around!"

That can be arranged. Róisín's passion for club culture started in a '90s Manchester that was on the cusp of discovering ecstasy.

"I started going before I turned 16 and they had clubs for every type of music - blues, R&B, big reggae sound systems and early house, which flooded into Manchester. The first one I went to was a psychedelic club called Isadora's that played stuff like MC5, Sonic Youth, The Jesus & Mary Chain and Butthole Surfers. I used to stand on stage in my mother's black catsuit from the '60s with stuck-on eyelashes and dance all night. My new video's a sort of recreation of that. We were the make-up wearing weirdoes that football casuals loved to beat up. Things were very segregated back then in terms of tribes. Then one night a gang of lads came into Isadora's wearing long-sleeved t-shirts and football shirts and hats who instead of kicking our heads in started hugging us as the DJ played 'I Am The Resurrection'. We just couldn't figure it out at first but, yeah, ecstasy had arrived and jolly good fun it was too!"

Did she get to hang out with the likes of the Mondays and the Roses?

"No, I was never really mates with anyone in bands until I went to Sheffield and then I was part of this little group who were obsessed with making music. The first people who took me in and fed me in Sheffield were Rob Mitchell and his wife Michelle who co-founded Warp Records. Rob tragically died of cancer quite a while ago. Anyway, my first time appearing on a record sleeve was on the back of a Warp compilation. Ten of us were jumping around one night at a party in Rob's and somebody took a photo. I probably look really fucking out of it!

Having cut her teeth on these and previous music videos, R—is’n is set to go full blown fillmaker with two projects - one about her hellraising Madchester days and the other a semi-autobiographical reflection on rural Irish life in the '80s.

"I'm very inspired by one of my best friends, Elaine Constantine, who was a photographer and made a film called Northern Soul starring people like Steve Coogan and Ricky Tomlinson. She got her start directing the video for Moloko's 'Familiar Feeling', which was also set in a Northern Soul club and had Paddy Considine in it. To see Elaine get the bit between her teeth when she went into film - the sheer dogged determination - was very inspiring. Anything I do has to be personal: I'm never going to be a gun for hire. It's going to have to be very cinematic and beautiful with big, big dance scenes that don't look like a bunch of drunken actors on a night out. It's such a big deal to get it right. I want to set a year aside and write that in committee with people who lived through that scene with me. My shit's all about love and transcendence, so that's film number one. Number two - and it drives them mad when I talk about it - is the sheer magnetism of my parents."

Asked to paint a picture of growing up in Arklow, Róisín smiles beatifically and says: "It was so special and beautiful. There was humour, stories and lots and lots of music. Whenever there was drink taken, and that was very often, the records would come out. They weren't religious - no Pope next to JFK in the hallway - but they had a strong moral compass. My mum was an antiques dealer - to this day I'm amazed that people don't know the difference between Georgian and Victorian - so we had beautiful furniture and paintings on the wall, but no central heating or video player or telephone. We used to go two doors down to the neighbours to make calls. We had times when we had lots of money - 'Buy whatever you like from Brown Thomas, Róisín' and others when me Ma sent me over to me Auntie Linda's to get money for the coal."

Having chanced upon Mrs. Murphy a few years ago at the Choice Music Awards in Vicar St., I know where her daughter gets her style and wicked sense of humour from.

"Ah, she's fabulous and very intelligent: devours books. Every Saturday and Sunday we'd watch old black and white MGM musicals. That's what my life felt like: an MGM musical. As you can tell, it's going to be a very nostalgic film but also one that addresses the darkness that crept in from time to time."

Róisín was delighted but not surprised when first same-sex marriage and then repealing the 8th got the nod from the Irish electorate.

"There's always been that mad liberal streak in us," she proffers. "We think our own thoughts and go our own way in Ireland. The amount of change that's gone on there since I left: massive shift after shift after shift. Now there's a debate about trans rights. It's brilliant. We've changed, but we haven't let go of the soul of the country. It's still there and I'm very proud of it!"