When Manson met Murphy...

John the Revelator author Peter Murphy (well known to you and I as a journalist with this particular publication) first met Shirley Manson - Garbage singer, solo artist incumbent, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles actress - in the Spring of 1998.

Back then Manson and her bandmates were promoting Garbage’s second album Version 2.0. Murphy had just turned pro as a music and arts writer. The five bonded in a mutual melding of spiky Edinburgh wit, sardonic Mid-western drollery and southeastern Irish gallows humour.

Murphy interviewed Garbage several times over the next decade and contributed liner notes to their 2007 'Best Of' collection, Absolute Garbage. Manson, a voracious reader, furnished him with copies of Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia.

His first novel, John the Revelator hit shelves across Ireland, the UK, Australia and elsewhere back in February. In The Guardian, Cathi Unsworth wrote, "Murphy casts his debut novel like a blues noir, steeped in the music that has clearly inspired him. From the title, Blind Willie Johnson's 1930 gospel call and response, he follows the path of Nick Cave's 1985 Delta descent The Firstborn is Dead, with its shades of William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Harry Crews. But this spook-filled Irish landscape, rendered with gouts of blood-red humor, is entirely his own."

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt released the book in the US this August, coinciding with Faber's paperback publication and also Suhrkamp's German edition.

To mark the occasion, the tables were turned and on a warm evening in late summer, Murphy was interviewed by his former interviewee. No blood was shed. Well, not much anyway.

The full text is available here.

It's not the first time the pair's roles have interchanged. Manson cut her journalistic teeth interviewing U2 several months ago, while Murphy has just completed an album-length spoken word/music adaptation of his novel entitled 'The Sounds of John the Revelator'