róisín murphy appreciation post

arklow's avant-pop misfit has long been underappreciated and undervalued

Earlier this year, a comically underprepared Tommy Tiernan interviewed Irish pop misfit Róisín Murphy on the comedian’s eponymous RTÉ talk show. Feigning cluelessness throughout, as if Murphy was some inexplicable alien lifeform, what resulted was a weirdly metaphysical exchange, devoid of structure and pretence, just like Murphy’s best music. Who is Róisín Murphy—and why?

Tommy Tiernan: So you’re a musician? 

Róisín Murphy: I’m a musician, yeah...well I don’t know. I don’t feel like a musician actually; I feel more like an eejit. I feel more like a concept or something. 

Tommy Tiernan: What does that mean? 

Róisín Murphy: I’m a singer, and somebody said to me today, ‘I don’t see you as an electronic [act], I see you as a singer-songwriter’. And I don’t see myself as a singer-songwriter because I fell into it...I feel in love with a producer. The night that I met him, I gave him a chat-up line. I said, ‘Do you like my tight sweater? See how it fits by body’. And he wanted to record it that night. 

Tommy Tiernan: He recorded that line? 

Róisín Murphy: That line, that night. I had no intention of being a singer or anything like that. We fell in love that night, and it was really a way of him showing me his huge studio equipment. Because he had a big fancy studio and there was nobody there. 

Tommy Tiernan: And were ye high?

Róisín Murphy: Yeah. High on love, high on music, high on life. 

Tommy Tiernan: Were ye wild high that night? 

Róisín Murphy: Completely out of me shitbox. 

Tommy Tiernan: On what? 

Róisín Murphy: On love, and music, and connectiveness. 

It comes as a surprise to absolutely nobody that ideas like conceptualism and pop artifice don’t translate particularly well to late-night TV, especially Irish chat shows, where nuance often goes to die. In the pantheon of truly great Irish artists, though, only one stands out in recent memory for living inside the skin and bones of a persona, and that’s Róisín Murphy—art-pop extraterrestrial, ecstasy-breathing disco-queen, high-fashion diva. 

Murphy remains something of an anomaly in relation to Irish pop culture consciousness, floating in the Lost Children of Ireland space somewhere between Michael Fassbender and Graham Norton. In this instance, Tommy Tiernan is a stand-in for so many across Ireland. It could be for people only vaguely aware of her output in club music circles; the wider “indie” ecosystem largely ignorant to her work beyond name recognition; or ordinary music listeners who listen to daytime radio and Spotify playlists and never encounter her.

Instead of celebrating Murphy open-heartedly, as Irish people are wont to do, she is sometimes treated as an exotic treat, a hermetic foreigner speaking our language, in our accent. Like many rule-breaking women in music, she's understood and packaged in simplistic terms: singer-songwriter, musician, weirdo, alternative, the oddly-dressed woman who makes Guitarless Computer Music for people far away. In other words, a collective Irish sigh of “we don’t know what to do with her”. 

Born in Arklow, Wicklow in 1973, Róisín Murphy relocated to Manchester with her family at the age of 12; three years later, her parents moved back home while she remained in the UK. Moving to the north of England when she was an impressionable young teenager, Murphy fell headlong into a punk scenes and later rave culture, intrigued by the egalitarian utopianism these sub-cultures offered.

From 1994 to 2003, she made up one half of trip-hop duo Moloko with her then-partner, Mark Brydon, releasing their debut album Do You Like My Tight Sweater? in 1995. Since her debut Ruby Blue, in 2005, she’s put together an impressive oeuvre, despite it looking at one point like she might be destined for the pop scrapheap. Lurching from avant-jazz crooning to unabashed disco bliss to mangled art-pop, she has bucked trends throughout a two-decade-long solo career. Prescient as ever, the late Mark Fisher, in 2007, placed Murphy in a glam lineage that includes Roxy Music, Grace Jones, and the New Romantics.

“Róisín Murphy is pop's exiled princess of glam. She represents a confection—of disco and art, of sensuousness and intelligence, of sumptuous superficiality and existential anxiety—that once seemed inevitable, but which has now become all but impossible.”

Murphy’s tactile songs swing with funk, sex, sweat, and psychedelia, loyal to the tenets of four-on-the-floor ‘70s disco, ‘80s glam, and ‘90s electronica. Often, they’ll have a wayward trip-hop pulse, rooted in Murphy’s early career exploits. The opening track on her debut solo album is glitchy, out-of-tune, magnetically shifty, landing somewhere between Autechre and Anita Ward. Her lyrics, too, are goofy and philosophically rich. Another track on her debut, “Primitive,” saw Murphy sing melodramatically like she was performing pantomime: “From the primordial soup / Out of the dim and the gloom we came / We are animals”. 

When Murphy sings, you listen. Her voice is at once full-bodied and brittle, animalistic and timid, capable of turning even the most boilerplate of disco beats into a gyrating, blindingly glittery eruption of rhythm and feeling. The animating idea behind her music, though, has always been human connectedness, as she inferred to Tommy Tiernan.

She has rocked the Berghain, played to thousands at open-air summer festivals across the globe, and sold worldwide tours out. But it’s not just music that has given her career—and her unmistakably Irish name—oxygen. In one wonderfully eventful month in 2009, she sat front-row next to Kanye West at fashion shows, walked the runway in two different looks at a debut couture show, and showed up to a Dior show in a dress that had debuted on the runway just 24 hours earlier. Urban legend has it that she’s the reason Lady Gaga began wearing gravity-defying shoulder pads; her sartorial tentacles are everywhere. Pop stars in 2020 can only dream of having her sway in the gilded halls of fashion.

Despite having a loyal global fanbase, she’s yet to fully ingratiate herself to the Irish public. In the 2000s, she was nominated for Meteor Music Prizes, failing each time to win an individual award. Fast forward to 2008, and Jape’s Ritual Cooperative took home the Choice Music Prize for Best Irish Album ahead of Overpowered, which holds up mightily well in 2020.

Entertainment.ie’s Lauren Murphy called the album “disappointingly conventional” at the time, and it didn’t even crack the Irish Top 50 Albums chart. (Top 50! Only 2015’s genre-hopping Hairless Toys broke her Top 20 Irish Albums hoodoo). If Ruby Blue was her stunningly deranged masterpiece, Overpowered remains her quintessential pop album.

The depressing memory-holing of Murphy is symptomatic of a country that, in the same breath, complains of gender imbalances and male staleness, yet fails abysmally to trumpet someone like Murphy, who has made an art of shapeshifting and re-invention, of questing albums and peerlessly glamorous 21st-century pop. (As Eve Belle told me last year, “Styles that diverge from this norm are automatically considered alternative or a little more challenging, thus it’s quite difficult for women, who diverge by nature from the rugged-white-man tradition, to access the same levels of success”).

Later in the Tommy Tiernan interview, the Navan native asks Murphy whether she’s enjoyed a good career, a question which she responds to with typically deadpan and bullshit-cutting brio: 

“No, it’s been a good story, an unfolding thing over the years. I made plenty of money, but I’m not famous. I’m sort of proud of that; well, I’m definitely glad of it in a certain way. When my kids say to me, ‘Are you famous?’, then I’m able to say, ‘No, I’m just very well thought of’.”

When I consider Murphy, and her legacy, I often find myself thinking about the critical consensus surrounding Robyn, and how something analogous hasn’t happened for Murphy, particularly in an Irish context. All of the lavish praise Robyn has attracted over the past few years could quite as easily be left at the feet of Murphy, who exhibits all of the same qualities: emotional range and messily realist writing, musical adventurism and visual auteurism. They’re both LGBT+ poster-girls and disco-as-communal-experience sorcerers; they have dedicated followings and discographies teeming with slinky club hits; they defied patriarchal convention by growing more assertive and potent with age, and by refusing to conform to major-label pop machine expectations.

Aside from her more explicit chart-pop inclinations, Robyn also boasts a fairytale origin story: the biopic-friendly journey from 16-year-old wunderkind to jaded pop star to something of an irresistible icon. Murphy’s narrative is somewhat less Hollywood in its progression, starting off with a relatively successful ‘90s alternative band before venturing solo to little commercial success, residing in a vacuum pop historians might describe as pop purgatory. To label executives and digital music publications, this trajectory—or lack thereof—pales in comparison with Robyn’s struggle, even in spite of Murphy’s own obstinacy.

In a 2018 profile of Robyn, The Guardian’s Laura Snapes wrote insightfully of “one of the paradoxes of pop: so much of the business is built on selling the kind of self-belief that only truly comes with age, yet few artists are allowed to mature on their own terms”. The same flawed logic can be applied to Murphy.

There is, I’d suggest, an alternate timeline in which Róisín Murphy is simply Róisín, a chart-topping, stadium tour-selling pop supernova in the prime of her career, still working with Swedish producers and voguish rappers. But this timeline—one in which she might’ve, commercially speaking, eclipsed Westlife and The Cranberries as an Irish pop standard-bearer overseas—obscures how deeply fascinating her present-timeline career is. She never achieved superstardom, but she didn’t need to. It's not that she ought to be a household name—the issue is that she's barely talked about by critics, tastemakers, and industry insiders as Irish pop's most talented and fully-formed export this side of the turn of the millennium. Just as she deserves. She has not only maintained a singularly focused and quality-laden career through two destabilising decades, but also helped pave the way for artists like Jessie Ware and Dua Lipa today; even Charli XCX, whose fan base is in many ways is a younger, larger carbon copy of Murphy’s.

Róisín, on the other hand, might never have randomly dropped 10-minute-long disco reveries at the age of 46, or played rapturous shows at the Berghain, or released albums splashed in garish colour, full of contradiction and hair-tingling experimentations. Torn between the dancefloor, the runway, and art-house cinema, she found the sweet spot: making music she loves, beholden to the ghosts of house, disco, glam, and punk. There is no Irish musician working today as consistently thrilling.