Prescribed Listening

"I think we've done just about every kind of gig you can imagine, from little pubs to big festivals. But we've never really done a major support slot so it's a bit of a new one for us. It's very hard to know whether the natives will be friendly, cos they're Garbage fans," says Moloko's Mark Brydon, who has been described as "an electronic/acoustic rhythm computer in a human body". He's talking prior to Moloko's gig at The Point, supporting Garbage.

So how did the association with Shirley Manson & Co. come about then?

"I met her [Shirley] in an airport when we were coming back from doing the album cover in Switzerland," recalls Róisín Murphy. "Our photographer, who's a friend of mine, went up to her with a video camera going 'I know you. You're er from Garbage. We've got Róisín Murphy from Moloko in there. Do you want to meet her?' And she did."

It transpires that Garbage is not the first support slot Moloko have ever encountered.

Their first gig ever was supporting Pulp at Brixton Academy.

"It was ridiculous," says Mark. "You've got all these young Jarvis-mad girls slavering to see their hero. But we survived."

Mark also recalls another support gig which Moloko have under their belts—The Sex Pistols on their Filthy Lucre tour.

"We did get bottled off," he laughs, "but they were only plastic bottles. It was in Italy, and punk rockers have got really deep suntans in Italy. Suntanned punk rockers throwing plastic bottles at ya is pretty mild really."

And what of the music itself? Where does the inspiration come from, to fuse so many musical genres and serve up the result with lyrics about dominatrixes and plastic surgeons?

"It's kind of been our downfall," confesses Mark. "It's like musical Tourette's syndrome: we just can't stop ourselves. We could have a perfectly good pop tune in many respects and then go and mess it up by putting difficult drums on it."

How have their audience reacted to their experimental edge?

"I think it upsets people," confesses Róisín. "It's not doing us any favours in the selling records stakes anyway."

"You're either able for it or not," says Mark. "There are people who can shift with the changes. The last tour we did, we were very surprised with the turnout we got in places, if nothing else. I think we're always trying to represent the confusion that is now. That sounds really pretentious, but I think there's a lot of people who can identify with that.

"I think that what we're doing seems really mad and ridiculously all over the shop. But I think in retrospect, when we've got four or five albums under our belt, the whole thing will look like the journey it was and it will make sense."

Indeed, Moloko's journey to date has been more than interesting. A Dublin native, Róisín moved to Manchester with her family in her teens, and she eventually met Mark, a veteran of the house scene, at a party where she was chanting "Do you like my tight sweater?". "That could be a tune," commented Mark. That phrase went on to be the title track of their debut album.

Since then, their writing has taken on less of a haphazard nature, but it's still a case of creative conflict as much as collaboration.

"We've been very critical of each other. Up to now we've locked ourselves in a room and bashed away, knocking chunks off each other. I think that comes through on the last album," laughs Mark.

"But we now decided that he's going to do his backing tracks and I'm going to do the songs and neither of us are going to fucking talk to each other about it: we're just going to do it," adds Róisín. "That will make it a much faster process and make the music more immediate."

Mark still has fun, though, with the technology at his disposal. "We have this little box which turns Róisín's voice into what sounds like a seven-foot gay transvestite from the Village in New York," laughs Mark. "We've used it a couple of times on mixes we've done and he's almost become a spiritual person. He's called Maurice and he exists in his own right and mixes are now credited to him."

However, they want the next album to be more immediate, in both its writing and recording, as Mark notes, "I'm just really sick of fiddling with little boxes with knobs on. It drives you mental."

"I'd quite like to make an uplifting record, to have that feeling that can bring more people into Moloko's world," Róisín muses. "We've not got all the weirdness out of our system: I'm sure it will still be weird. But I think to do that we'll have to keep away from each other and not drag each other down."

So can we take it that there won't be any more lyrics about dominatrixes, then?

"Oh no," laughs Róisín. "You can't take that."

"What could be more uplifting than a dominatrix," smiles Mark.

Moloko are writing while on tour, and hope to have their third album on the shelves in the autumn "so that it's out before the year 2000, in case anything happens," smiles Róisín. "I'd like to think the third record will be Moloko's classic, watershed record, the breakthrough."

"Still though," laughs Mark. "No pressure, eh?"

'Sing It Back' is out soon on Echo.