Róisín Murphy: ‘The Irish culture I grew up in is the main thing that made me who I am’

In May last year Róisín Murphy walked through her beloved Arklow, in Co Wicklow, feeling the sun on her face and the warm breeze of home through her hair. She’d just recorded her first album for her new label, the electronica powerhouse Ninja Tune. The chatter among fans and critics was that the LP, Hit Parade, was the finest of her career. Now she was back in the town where she lived until she was 12, to film the video for her single Fader. Walking down the gently sloping main street, flanked by smiling kids from the Arklow Baton Twirlers and the Arklow Silver Band, she felt as if she was in a dream.

“It was beautiful. Arklow is beautiful. The soul of where I’m from somehow got captured. It was one of the best days of my life. Maybe the best. Up there with the best,” Murphy says. “It was a weird full-circle moment where I was bringing back something. For all my talk about the time in Manchester, the time in Sheffield, my time on the dance floor, my time loving music as a punter ... the culture that I grew up in is the main thing that made me who I am. I had a very cultured upbringing, just by the nature of it. Everybody knew 100 songs; everybody read books; people knew history and poetry. They were interesting people in such interesting times in Ireland.”

Life couldn’t get any better, as she says. But it was about to get a lot worse.

Just a few months after walking through Arklow on top of the world, the former Moloko frontwoman became entangled in a debate about trans rights, cancel culture and the fury women are subjected to on the internet. That August a Twitter user shared screenshots of comments she had made on her private Facebook account about the use of puberty blockers by transgender children.

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The leaked remarks spread like a bushfire on social media. The singer has a lot of LGTBQ+ fans; many were taken aback and wondered if it was a hoax. It was not. Several days later Murphy commented publicly for the first time.

“I’ve spent my whole life celebrating diversity and different views ... I am so sorry my comments have been directly hurtful to many of you ... I understand fixed views are not helpful but I really hope people can understand my concern was out of love for all of us.” She said that she would “now completely bow out of this conversation within the public domain ... My true calling is music and music will never exclude any of us.”

If she hoped to put the matter to rest, she had miscalculated. A review of Hit Parade in the Guardian was headlined “A masterful album with an ugly stain”. On August 31st Fader Magazine reported that Ninja Tune would cease promoting Hit Parade. The BBC seemed to have stopped playing her music. (The Spectator magazine defended Murphy, calling the Guardian’s review shameful.)

[ Róisín Murphy: Hit Parade - Joyful songs about not taking life for granted ]

It was a challenging time. But then Hit Parade became her highest-charting LP in the UK, peaking at number five. (In Ireland it reached number 11.) That momentum has carried through to 2024. “The ticket sales have been the best they’ve ever been for me on this tour,” says Murphy, who is playing two sold-out nights at 3Olympia in Dublin this weekend. “That’s including Moloko and everything. That’s a good sign.”

Looking back, how does she feel about the controversy? “It was a bit of a weird one.” She is still sensitive about the subject and keen to move on – even when politely pressed. “Here I am. Months later, going off on tour. And I’m pretty good. I’m in a good place.”

She acknowledges that becoming caught up in an internet controversy is a strange experience. “It’s like you’re looking at a big board. Nodes lighting up in that corner. And then a few nodes lighting in up that corner. And suddenly it’s spreading and you can’t control [it]. But that’s the nature of the internet. You have to take the good with the bad. And the good for me has been good. I’m happy to take the bad, I think, in a way, with the good.”

Did she worry that, after the dust settled, she might not have a career?

“Mate, are you really going to ask endless questions about this?” she says. (We had said that we would need to ask about the controversy but didn’t intend to dwell on it.) “I have a whole career to talk about – not just five minutes last year. I 100 per cent don’t want to talk about it.”

[ Róisín Murphy: If I want to be famous I can just go to a gay club ]

Murphy’s career goes back to the 1990s and Moloko, the duo that she formed with Mark Brydon, her boyfriend at the time; they kicked down the doors of the UK top five in 1999 with the luminescent Sing It Back. The track was a slice of pop genius. For the video, Murphy dressed in a power suit of reflective metal – a disco ball made human yet somehow otherworldly. The song was a huge hit: it put Moloko on the map and, even though she says she doesn’t feel famous and does not consider herself a celebrity, made Murphy a bit of a star.

“It was an accident. It all happened to me without me knowing it was happening, in a way,” she says of Moloko’s early years, first in her adopted home of Sheffield and, later, in London. “The night we met, me and Mark Brydon, I think we fell in love. It’s safe to assume we were madly in love from the minute we clocked eyes on each other.”

Moloko and their romance blossomed in tandem. “We carried on having a relationship. We got on with the falling-in-love bit.” They also started making demos – which Brydon’s manager quietly forwarded to music-industry contacts in London. “He said, ‘Two labels are interested in that stuff. We want to go down and meet them.’ We went for the laugh. And then one of them actually signed us.”

She was 19 – 13 years Brydon’s junior – and had been in the UK for seven years. She had moved to Manchester with her parents when she was 12. Northern England in 1989 was quite a change from Arklow, then a sleepy seaside town of fewer than 10,000 people. But while she embraced her new life and its new possibilities, she never stopped thinking of home and her upbringing as the daughter of artistic, outgoing parents – memories that continue to inspire her.

It was quite a childhood. Her father ran a business fitting furniture in pubs. On one occasion he returned home with the cockpit of a second World War bomber, which he stored in the spare room. Her mother was an antique dealer; she once found two Dutch masters, which she sold at Christie’s. (Her uncle Matt Kavanagh worked for The Irish Times; after he was named press photographer of the year for 2005, Arklow held a civic reception for him, alongside the golfer Ann Hosey.)

“Nobody had any money in the 1980s in Ireland,” Murphy recalls of her childhood. “That forced people closer to each other. You had to borrow the money off somebody else to get the coal. And then they’d borrow it off you.”

Arklow was different back then – unrecognisable, really, compared with today. “All the shops were run by people who had been there for generations,” Murphy says. “My mother’s family had been on the main street for generations too – a big canteen, a fish-and-chip shop place. They had a snooker hall above that. And a tea shop in front of that. They were very much old Arklow. My mother’s father’s family, the Kavanaghs, were really established in Arklow. My father was a total blow-in. He had a completely different family down in Wexford. So I had that as well. I had the Wexicans.”

Manchester could not have been more of a contrast. Murphy was ready for the big city, she says. For the bustle, the music, the fashion. She went to a Catholic school, which “wasn’t so madly different” from in Ireland. But the first time she walked into a big shopping centre it blew her mind.

“I couldn’t get over what you could buy. I’d spend hours trying dresses on in Debenhams, salivating over stuff I couldn’t have – but it was fascinating to me. I took it with both arms. I embraced that move as much as anything else I’ve ever done in my life.”

Three years later, when she was 15, her parents separated. Her mother moved home. Murphy, full of self-belief, decided to stay, living on her own in accommodation provided by the council.

“The family imploded in Manchester, unfortunately. It was a nuclear break-up. Of course, it would have been nuclear with the Murphys. It couldn’t have been anything but. I decided to stay,” she says. “I’d already found myself on some kind of path, just with the people I’d surrounded myself with – the friends I had made. I knew I wasn’t going to do much good to my ma going back to Arklow, that she needed to mend herself after this big blow-up.

“I decided to stay. I was lucky enough in that the government at the time were willing to give kids like me housing benefit and a few quid to live on. And so they trusted kids like me in a way they don’t now. They only give housing benefit when, I think, you’re 21 now.”

Murphy discovered music; she singles out a gig in Manchester by the New York art-rock group Sonic Youth as particularly formative. She remembers Brydon’s pals – including the producer Richard “Parrot” Barratt, with whom she would collaborate on her 2020 LP, Róisín Machine – warning him off her.

“His friends were all worried about him when he started working with me. Including Parrot, his best friend. He was very worried. ‘This skinhead 19-year-old? She’s going to fleece you. What’s going on? You’re 13 years older – you should have a proper girlfriend. And now what are you doing – you’re making music with her?’ Bear in mind we didn’t play anything to anyone. Never did. We were very secretive like that.”

When Moloko finished their first demo tape, “Jesus, they all changed their tune. They were, like, ‘Oh, this is making sense to us now – this is good!’”

She and Brydon ended their relationship in the early 2000s but were contractually obliged to make one final album together, which they released as Statues in 2003. When they had started the band, Murphy had never had any ambitions for a career in music. Now here she was, with a huge fan base and a fascinating background – British club culture meets small-town Ireland – that she had only started to explore.

Her solo debut, Ruby Blue, in 2005, set the trajectory for the rest of her career. Recorded with the experimental jazz musician Matthew Herbert, it was gorgeously elusive, filtering her enigmatic voice through samples of alarm clocks, a water cooler and hairspray. “The ultimate combination of human warmth and technological know-how,” Pitchfork said. The Observer compared her to Björk. A new chapter had opened – she was avant-garde pop’s once and future electro queen.

“There is a strength and a command that Róisín generates as a solo artist, particularly as a woman within the dance world,” the singer Jessie Ware said last year. “She has been able to create international bangers yet still remains totally original and never follows a trend. She is a pioneer and always has been.”

The music industry is notoriously patriarchal. In Ireland, male artists claim the bulk of daytime radio play. They also dominate festival bills. Behind the scenes, key industry-gatekeeper positions continue to be largely filled by men.

Murphy never let such matters detain her. “Men are men. There was never any awful casting couches for me. I can’t complain about that. I guess if I went through it with a fine-tooth comb I’ll find misogyny. But I don’t do that – because I’m not a victim.”

She spends most of her year in Ibiza with her partner, the Milanese producer and DJ Sebastiano Properzi, with whom she has an 11-year-old son, Tadhg. She also has a 14-year-old daughter, Clodagh, from a relationship with the British artist Simon Henwood. Last year she turned 50 – a tumultuous event. “Don’t like that,” she says. “I enjoyed my 40s, that’s why. I can’t imagine I’m going to enjoy my 50s as much. Then again, at the beginning of my 40s I thought it was all over too – so who knows? The 40s were the best years of my life.”

She has been always impossible to pin down because she never settled for a definitive sound. Róisín Machine, which she released at the height of the pandemic, was a gorgeous disco odyssey. Then came Hit Parade, an even more ambitious affair, on which she worked with the German producer Stefan Kozalla, aka Koze. Reviewers who focused on the music were unanimous in their praise: NME said it was “a playful record imbued with a sense of mystery”; Clash heralded Murphy for “capturing the essence of the ups and downs of life”.

Murphy doesn’t return to the controversy that overshadowed that project’s release – at least not directly. But she says that, since the death of her father, in December 2021, she has often thought about the advice he used to give – and the counsel he might have offered in the years since.

“I miss him every day. I was mad about my da. Absolutely mad about both of [my parents]. He used to call me every day. I’d talk to him about everything. He would have found so many things I’ve done since so fascinating and interesting. He would have advised me. I’ve heard his advice in my head so many times over the last couple of years,” she says.

“He’d have been so proud of me, I know. I don’t know about the stuffing being knocked out of me. He lived to a good, ripe old age. He had Parkinson’s. It hadn’t got so extremely bad. It was getting there. And then he had an accident. So in some ways it was great – the idea of [my father] falling asunder like that wasn’t something that was probably ever going to be on the cards.”

With the Hit Parade tour on course to be a stone-cold sell-out, any fears for her career have receded. She thanks her fans for staying with her, not only through recent difficulties but all the way back to Moloko.

“I do know my megafans quite well. You ask them and they’ll all tell you: I’m very approachable. I want to know what’s going on with them. Especially if they’ve been around many years following me. I stay in touch with people. I genuinely have lovely fans. It must be awful if you look out at your fan base and you don’t like them – that would be terrible. I’m not sure if it even happens, if anyone would cognitively allow themselves that. I’ve no problem with mine; they’re just great. Very diverse, even in age groups. I’ve had a grandma, a mammy and a daughter all together at one gig. It’s pretty amazing.”

Hit Parade is released by Ninja Tune. Róisín Murphy plays 3Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on Saturday February 3rd and Sunday February 4th