RÓISÍN MURPHY
“IT OLD THIS RECORD MY SECRETS"
RÓISÍN MURPHY HAS SPENT THREE DECADES LEAPING INTO THE UNKNOWN. THIS TIME SHE’S LANDED ON HIT PARADE, A CAREER-HIGH ALBUM PRODUCED BY DJ KOZE, AND IT’S FURTHER PROOF THAT SHE’LL NEVER PLAY IT SAFE.
JORDAN BASSETT
Described by Vogue as “Pop’s most inventive style star”, Róisín Murphy’s image is inspired by her mother as well as US artist Cindy Sherman
All photos © Nik Pate
Back in June, Róisín Murphy took a tumble. The alt-pop polymath – singer, songwriter, producer, filmmaker and flamboyant style icon – was storming down the stage in Veszprém, Hungary, like it was a catwalk. Naturally, she was rocking a silver space-dress with a matching skullcap. Naturally, too, she stacked it just as Madonna famously did at the Brit Awards in 2015 – and, like Madge, she totally owned the moment.
“SHIT HAPPENS!” Murphy posted on social media the next day, adding: “As the wonderful audience will testify... I got right back up and finished the show. I’m glad to be alive!”
Well, the 50-year-old is always in charge, as she reveals throughout her riotous interview with Classic Pop. After 2007’s Overpowered, her second solo LP and arguably her most conventional, Murphy took an eight-year break from releasing albums, only to return with the dazzling one-two punch that was 2015’s Hairless Toys and 2016’s Take Her Up To Monto. “All the way through those [two records],” she explains in her warm, knowing Irish brogue, “I was creatively directing everything, I was directing all the videos. And then over the last few years, I’ve been managing meself and... it’s been a journey.”
Yet Murphy has always been a great collaborator. She found success in her twenties with dance-pop titans Moloko, the duo that consisted of herself and Sheffield producer Mark Brydon. Since that creative (and romantic) partnership dissolved with their fourth album, 2003’s divisive Statues, Murphy’s worked with a series of producers who’ve helped to take her idiosyncratic brand of pop music into different – but always compelling – directions. Her last LP, 2020’s acclaimed Róisín Machine, saw her team up with cult sonic experimentalist DJ Parrot; the pair turned in a disco-infused joy bomb that seemed all the more liberating for having arrived in the midst of the pandemic. While that project was still underway, she joined forces with German techno producer DJ Koze (it’s pronounced ‘cosy’) for Hit Parade, a winkingly titled psychedelic pop confetti canon that The Guardian has already described as “the best album of her career”.