ALL TOGETHER NOW PREVIEW: Roisin Murphy comes out fighting

Seriously, everything stems from me aged 14 buying a Sonic Youth ticket off a tout outside for £10, which was a fortune back then. I sat on the stage watching in awe as members of Mudhoney, who were supporting, kept throwing Kim Gordon into the crowd. Every time it happened, she clambered her way back looking effortlessly cool in her KISS t-shirt and glam rock platform shoes. I just wanted to be her!”

That’s the All Together Now-bound Róisín Murphy telling us how catching Sonic Youth in the University of Manchester Students Union on their 1989 Daydream Nation Tour saved her from a life of nine to five orthodoxy.

The following morning, she went into the Stockport branch of Record Exchange and swapped all of her U2 records for the Sonic Youth back catalogue.

“I wasn’t one of those girls at school who sat around talking nonsense about each other,” she explains. “Music stopped me having to deal with all that, it was my saviour. It wasn’t a particularly easy time for me. I’m dyslexic and was academically rubbish at school. You could not read my writing if you tried. I was too verbally on the ball to be considered thick, but a lot of people thought I was naughty and I probably became even naughtier because of that. Y’know, give a kid a label… I always got As for drawing and what-not in art, and was good at saying poems, which didn’t go down well with this other girl in the class who was perfect at everything. We used to read our poems at this festival in Arklow where I’d win the prize one year and she’d get it the next. She was my first arch-enemy! Being cheeky, I asked this really lovely, creative teacher we had, Mr. Heisey, ‘What have you put on my report card?’ In front of the whole class, he says, ‘Well, Róisín Murphy, I didn’t give you very good marks for Art and Music but she…’ and he pointed at my rival… ‘did brilliantly.’ I was like, ‘Whaaaaat?!?’ and he goes, ‘Only joking!’ That’s my most vivid memory of school, thinking I’d been bettered in the only two subjects I was good at.”

One of the most eloquent and literate pop stars Ireland has ever produced, Murphy is currently greatly enhancing our summer with the eight monster floor-fillers she’s cooked up with Baltimore house pioneer, Maurice Fulton.

“I’m releasing them as four 12” vinyl singles in beautiful sleeves, with an A and a B side,” she enthuses. “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.’”

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 beams. “I’m not spending a million quid on making a record anymore. I had a 60-piece orchestra in front of me for Statues and EMI bankrolling Overpowered. The budget now is minute (pronounced My Newt – Sub-Ed), but that doesn’t mean you can’t produce something really incredible.”

SPOILER ALERT! The Divine Ms. M’s European festival sets have mixed new tunes with previous solo gems like ‘You Know Me Better’, ‘Overpowered’, ‘House Of Glass’ and ‘Ten Miles High’ and those two massive Moloko anthems, ‘Forever More’ and ‘Sing It Back’.

All of those songs are the product of the underage Murphy sneaking her way into Manchester’s legendary dance clubs.

“It’s a very Irish city, so I settled in straight away,” she reflects. “The reason why we went is that we already had family connections there. My father’s mother is from Manchester although I’m not really supposed to tell people we’re part English! Lots of our family had relocated there before we arrived. I’d spent whole summers in Manchester, so it was really a home away from home. Musically, of course, it was an amazing time to be there with all the Factory stuff going on and Britpop brewing. I stuck my biggest high-heels on and sneaked my way into the Hacienda, which actually wasn’t my favourite club because the sound was so bad. From Manchester where it was: ‘We all love music!’ I went to Sheffield where it was: ‘We all love music and we’re in a band!’ Everybody I met was in a group or working for a label or a venue, which was my cue for going, ‘I can do this too!’”

Having cut her teeth with music videos, Róisín is set to go full-blown filmmaker with two projects – one about her hellraising Manchester days and the other a reflection on her rather more innocent Arklow childhood.

“Anything I do has to be personal, I’m not a gun for hire,” she states. “I want to set a year aside and write the Manchester film with people who lived through that scene with me. 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.”

That’s Róisín Murphy for you: always thinking in widescreen!