Ice Work If You Can Get It

With gigs drawing increasing numbers of devoted fans, a well-received recent single called 'Great Motivator' and a support slot to Portishead in Cork, Igloo's 'big break' could be just around the corner. Even so Kevin Murphy, the band's warbling bassist, is too experienced a musician to loose his grip on the harsh realities of being a band trying to make it in Ireland.

Like Cian Roche and Barnes Goulding, the other members of Igloo, Kevin Murphy's been round the block more than once. He winces in embarrassment recalling the stage posturing of his first band, a heavy metal act he sang with when he was only fifteen. Since then, this gifted Cork musician has played bass and cello with a string of highly acclaimed artists, passing through a particularly fruitful phase with experimentalists Interference.

He's also a favourite touring musician of Gavin Friday's, spending six months touring the US and Europe with him a couple of years ago. Gavin asked Kevin along on the last big tour, but this time Murphy turned it down: he'd begun writing Igloo's "indie-esque" fusion of melody-driven pop with a technological edge, and couldn't put aside his own creative endeavour no matter how tempting the cash was.

"I'd like to think that I could just do session music," says Kevin, describing a dilemma faced by many musicians, "but I'm not sure that I could. If I didn't get it together doing my own music, I think I'd prefer to do something other than music."

Like what?

"This shit, actually." Kevin waves in the direction of my tape-recorder. "Mind you, not so much music journalism, but some other kind of writing. Even if I did incredibly well (at music), I'd probably still get into it. I'd still love to do guest spots with people, or go on the odd tour, but for some reason I feel that I'd find it very bleak and dark if I knew that for the rest of my life I was going to be going around doing session music, no matter how plush the tour bus was! Some people would never see it like that, but for some reason, I would."

At what point would Kevin decide that Igloo was to be an ongoing business?

"When I started making a living out of it, I suppose. I mean the way it is now, we've got a really good original sound, and we've got a good few hit singles, so we can do no more. It's up to the industry after that to recognise that we're geniuses! But what I'm saying is that there's no way I'm absolutely backing on depending on it; I'm just too cynical, I suppose."

Politics is another of Kevin's abiding interests. He follows it like a spectator sport, though he finds it incredibly tedious at the same time.

"We just have the same kind of government that anybody else has in Europe," he analyses. "The Labour Party are supposed to offer something different, but they're only a stone's throw away from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. I'm a Green Party voter - I always back the losers!"

Is politics something he brings into his lyrics?

"There's touches - there's one token vitriolic anti-British song all right, everybody has to have one, like - but most of the songs would be about losing the plot, and trying to put a sense of humour around it. That's what 'Great Motivator' is about - somebody who might be a teenager who is so unbelievably optimistic about what's going to happen, the way he's going to change absolutely everything, and all the sex he's going to get as a result, that ten years on it's just too good to get out of bed and ruin the dream. It's basically about the inability to deal with reality. And I suppose a lot of the songs are like that."

Igloo are pretty sure of the direction they want to go in.

"When it comes to melodies I like people like Ian Brown, or The Cocteau Twins. I think Elizabeth Fraser's melodies are outrageous - that 'Teardrop' song with Massive Attack - the vocal lines in that are just amazing. The chords that they would've put behind it are pretty basic, but what she's done is incredible."

As myself and Kevin finish our chat, The Beatles warble out across the hotel lobby. We don't want to get too carried away here, but like the well-known Liverpudlian beat combo, Igloo have originality, melody, and a collection of great songs. I don't think we'll be meeting Kevin Murphy on this side of the word processor just yet. n