Roisin Murphy is a character. Poised to appear in Australia at the V Festival, she’s been tipped off that the Reid brothers, Jim and William, better known as the songwriting partnership that drives feedback and sustain dark rock merchants, The Jesus And Mary Chain, are on the bill. This titillates her no end. “I don’t know what they are going to do,” she laughs. “They’ll end up with a suntan. Maybe they’ll send on somebody out on stage with umbrellas. I mean, all that light and sun.”

This is the third time round the musical rink with Murphy in the past six years and it’s always a pleasure, simply because she never really holds anything back. The former lead singer of Moloko became an instant celebrity when the band released its debut album, Do You Like My Tight Sweater?, and thousands of fans answered in the affirmative. Sexy, with a voice to die before, drawn to the cutting edge yet with an ear for sweet melody, Murphy and her then boyfriend, Mark Brydon, made four albums over nine years all of which proved that electronica really could be both intelligent and passionate. Their music dripped class. In 2003, after the release of Statues, Brydon backed out of doing any PR and Moloko hasn’t been seen since. Murphy has refused to say it’s over for good but she hasn’t said much else about the band either. Instead she’s continued on where Moloko left off producing two excellent solo albums, Ruby Blue, and last year’s Overpowered. Splendid, slightly eccentric, brimming with ideas they underscore her place on the top rung of 21st century songwriters. Remarkably, with Overpowered, she created a modern disco album that doesn’t suck.


Not bad for an Irish woman brought up in Arklow, County Wicklow, Republic Of Ireland, who at the age of nine announced the emergence of her inner non-conformist by using her savings to get her long blonde hair cut for a flat top. Bullied at school, she developed a taste for Sonic Youth and, ironically, the afore-mentioned The Jesus And Mary Chain, and was inspired by Vivienne Westwood’s designs at Trash. In 1994 she met Brydon at a party and used the pick-up line “Do you like my tight sweater? See how it fits my body.” It worked.
More recently, on October 27, while performing in Moscow she wore a stage prop and nearly lost her eye. “It’s all better thanks,” she says. “I’ve got a little scar I didn’t plan to have but a few millimetres further and I wouldn’t have an eye at all.” As it turns out Murphy is accident prone.” Oh yeah, I’ve had lots of stage accidents ,” she says. “Of course, I broke my arm in Melbourne and then another time when I was crowd surfing my crew were supposedly catching me but they dropped me hard and I got a big bruised arse. And then at the beginning of touring this record I fell and sprained and ankle. Then my bass player broke his thumb. Then I did my eye. Then my tour manager had to be sent home with kidney complications. Then my bus driver broke his back …” Pardon. “He broke his back.” How? “I don’t know. He just did.”

So if Roisin Murphy asks you to be part of her tour party … get top level private health insurance.

This fashionista - she admits to having started collecting clothes when she was about 13 - found she had other problems when she recorded Overpowered - most notably, the famous producer Jimmy Douglass, one of several top flight collaborators she worked with including Seiji in West London, Andy Cato in Barcelona, Richard X in Hoxton and then Douglass and his associate, Ill Factor, in Miami. Roisin says that at 24 manipulates the studio gear and computer plug-ins like a kid on a Nintendo; fast and with precision.

Douglass is well-known for his work with hip-hop producer Timbaland in the recent years, but the work of the man they call Senator Jimmy D stretches back to the 1970s, when he worked with Otis Redding, Bette Midler, Hall & Oates, The Rolling Stones and others
“He was horrible to me,” Murphy says. “He got great vocals out of me by being disgusting to me. He’s a cranky old guy and he wasn’t having any of it from me. The younger producers tend to be happy to go to a specific place in a song and replace a bit at a time but Jimmy likes to get vocals down from the top to the bottom of the song. No fiddling around. He’s used to working with great vocalists and he expected the same from me. I don’t anybody else could have got em to the point he did, could have got those vocal performances out of me.”

She reckons Ill Factor and Douglass ran a good cop/bad cop routine. Douglass was the “miserable git” and his young prodigy was “the nicest guy in the world”. It worked.

Working with Douglass in the US also allowed Murphy to see the black and white, chalk and cheese, that is production in the US and UK. “They definitely work harder in the US,” she says. “Even Jimmy at 50 doesn’t leave the studio until at least 4am and some days he stayed to 8am. In the UK they tend to start and finish a lot earlier. There’s an expectation in the US to work hard, partially because they don’t have social security. Mark Herbert [who produced Ruby Blue] would stop at 6.30pm and that was that. Then he’d start early the next morning. These people were scared of losing their income because there’s no health system. You even need money to go to hospital.”
And for an accident prone woman that thought cold be overpowering.