Róisín Murphy is an Irish emigrant making waves on the global music scene. Now working on her third album, METRO ÉIREANN profiles the prolific singer/songwriter who departed Ireland as a teenager
Singers don’t come much hipper than Róisín Murphy. The pop-electronica artist rose to fame in the 1990s with Moloko – best known for their hit singles The Time is Now and Sing It Back. But it’s as a quirky solo artist with eclectic tunes that Murphy has come into her own.
Her 2007 album Overpowered was one of the most critically acclaimed electronic dance music albums ever, with singles Let Me Know, You Know Me Better, Movie Star and the title track capturing massive audiences for the Irish-born singer.
Variously described as a Madonna with talent, or an Amy Winehouse with her act together, 37-year-old Murphy is currently working on her third studio album, with a new single reportedly due by summer’s end.
In many ways, Murphy’s emigration from Ireland proved the catalyst to her future career. It seems to have shaped her into an avowed individualist, and someone unafraid to be different.
Although even in Arklow, Co Wicklow as a child, she remembers standing out from the crowd: “Even when I was a little girl in Wicklow I had an exhibitionist streak, like the time I went into town and got my hair shaved into a marine cut... It was so liberating.”
She relocated to Britain with her family as a youngster, and decided to stay when they moved back to Ireland. At just 16 years old, she was living on her own.
“I’ve moved around a bit since I was a kid,” the singer has said. “When I was 12, my family moved to Manchester from Arklow, a small town in southern Ireland. My family drifted back to Ireland when I was 15; I stayed in Manchester, [and] moved to Sheffield at the age of 17 thinking I would go to art college.”
Soon after Murphy met Mark Brydon at a party, going on to form Moloko and landing a six-album deal. Moloko toured the world, amounting a fanbase in a wide range of countries.
“I toured all six albums, mostly around Europe, though occasionally in further flung places like Australia, the US, much of eastern Europe and Russia. I’ve been around a bit,” she says.
After eight years together, Brydon and Murphy – who had been a couple – split up, but under their record deal were obliged to make one last album, Statues.
“I broke up with him before we made the album,” she recalls. “I suppose I got the seven-year itch. So he pulled out from a lot of the responsibility of promotion of the album, and I went around Europe alone, doing promo. He toured with us, but I’d go off after gigs alone and do interviews and stuff.”
Murphy’s individualism – no doubt cultivated as a teenager raising herself – is shown in the singer’s distinctive fashion styles, for which she is also lauded.
“I like clothes that have a lot of research and development in them, that when you pick them up you feel soul in them,” she says. “It’s not just about what it looks like, it’s about how it feels.”
As her star has grown, Murphy has been asked the inevitable ‘Irish’ question, as Ireland and the UK fight to claim her as their own. Home for Murphy is a complicated concept – a multitude of places. But her core identity is tied to her birthland.
“I wasn’t embraced as an Irish artist back in the Moloko days,” Murphy told an Irish newspaper. “Modern electronica isn’t what you think of when you think of Irish music. Now, they see the name Roísín Murphy and there isn’t much more I can be! I like people to use the fadas, but sure I can’t sue them if they don’t!
“People always say to me, ‘Do you feel Irish?’ Are you out of your mind? It’s like saying does this chair feel green! It’s not a question for me. It’s exactly what I am and I’m not anything else.”
She added: “When I come to Ireland, I go straight down to where I’m from. Arklow is very different now. It’s three times the size, and behind where I was brought up there is a huge shopping mall. I feel blessed as a child that I could go wherever I liked. It’s not like that anymore.”
That individualistic attitude, meanwhile, also owes much to her Irish lineage. “I am exactly like all my Irish aunties,” Murphy once told the Irish Voice. “We have never worked for anyone else, even in the worst of times. We had our independence. We’re Celtic tigresses.”
