Róisín Murphy: 'I come from that classic Irish upbringing where song is really elemental'
Róisín Murphy.
Róisín Murphy, 47, spent most of her childhood living in Arklow, Co Wicklow, before moving to Manchester when she was 12 years old. After a decade performing with Moloko, she released the first of several critically acclaimed solo albums in 2005. Her latest album Róisín Machine is out on Skint Records.
Throughout my childhood, my family and their friends would burst out into song whenever they got together. That would be without musical accompaniment. It was like being brought up in an MGM musical.
I guess I come from that classic Irish upbringing where song is really elemental to the way you’re brought up. It's like part of the language. Everybody had a song. 'Mine was Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' when I was about nine or 10.
They would always crucify me to make me sing it again. I wasn’t a shy and retiring kid, and I knew I could sing and perform, but as soon as I was put under pressure I didn’t respond well. I crumbled, but just doing it a few times and you get over it.
My uncle Jim was a great musician. He was in showbands and jazz bands. He did a daytime jazz session in the summertime in different venues, one of them was at Coolgreany [Wexford]. We used to go every Sunday.
I can remember dancing on the dance floor, losing myself in the music. The sessions would go on for hours and hours. It would be children, adults and aul ones all mixed up. It was a buoyant atmosphere among all our crowd. Everybody was in full employment. The country was modernising.
It was a fair old drive to get to these venues. Ireland was a different place before they cracked down on the drink driving. People were coming from all over, all the time. Me and my brother would always say: we couldn’t possibly compete with how rock’n’roll our parents were.
Culture wasn’t shoved down my throat. I wasn’t brought to ballet classes or music classes. We didn’t have loads of money, but I was brought up with a lot of culture around me.
I was steeped in it without having to study it. There was books all about. Antiques all over the house. Music everywhere. My mum was an antique dealer so I grew up knowing the difference between a Victorian door and an Edwardian one. I absorbed culture naturally – by osmosis.
My mum is passionate about things, and about my music as well. She's always gone out of her way to listen to it. Whatever kind of weird album I make, she always understood it.
I remember when I made my first solo album, which is kind of a jazz album in a way, I went and played it to my uncle Jim. She was sitting there. Jim did not get this thing at all. She gave out stink to him: “Anyway, it takes balls to do what she’s done!” She’s rooting for me all the time.
My father’s two sisters lived in Manchester. They had boutiques and both loved clothes and make-up. They’d come over to Ireland twice a year with huge boxes of clothes. So that was a bonanza twice a year.
I’d get stuff nobody would have ever seen before in Arklow. Nowadays you can’t get that buzz. I remember at the height of the New Romantic fashions, they brought over little velvet, knee-length knickerbockers and frilly blouses.
I had a little Louis XIV vibe going on whenever I went into school at Templerainey. I remember my teacher telling me to go down to the staff room to show all the other teachers. I had to go down and give a twirl.
I began hanging around weirdos in Stockport, Manchester, when I was a teenager. We were into the Jesus and Mary Chain.
I remember we went to see Sonic Youth when I was 14. It was frightening inside in the pit. It was really full on. They kept throwing band members, including Kim Gordon, into the audience. They must have known I was very young so they let me sit on the side of the stage.
When I left the gig, I never was the same again. It consolidated my weirdo-ness. From there, I just went with it. I find other people have the same story. When you get into music, and it’s different to what other people are into, you get a little crew.
You all understand each other. What you're into is your thing. You allow yourself to be who you are – differences and all – and embrace it. The fact that I got into music saved my life in some way.
I remember seeing [American photo artist] Cindy Sherman’s show featured on the late-night TV arts show on BBC when I was 14. I felt like that’s exactly what I feel like when I'm being an exhibitionist.
When I'm making an exhibition, it’s such a joy putting it together, playing with archetypes, accentuating, sculpting a little story. In art and intellectual circles, those feminine archetypes were – for good reason – becoming so cliched or seen as negative stereotypes.
There's been a lot of work done, obviously, to breakdown stereotypes, but you don’t want to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is all this available joy and fantasy in the whole breath of feminine archetypes.
Cindy Sherman set me free by allowing me to play with all those archetypes. I’m still inspired by her.
We had Terence Conran's The House Book at home when I was a kid. It’s a bible of interior design from the '70s. It's photographs of houses from all over the place, mostly probably in London. Lots of Victorian houses with the insides gutted.
They have conversation pits, Hi-Fi rooms, amazing furniture, incredible kids rooms with mezzanine levels and slides off the beds. I used to dive into that book. I still have it, held together by tape. I can still gaze at it for an hour. Ways of living. Similar to what my mother and father aspired to.
The first house I was in growing up, me da built it. I don't know if it was an “Up yours!”, but he planted this modernist house right in the middle of Enniscorthy town on a corner. It had two glass walls that met at the corner, which was extremely hard to do.
We had orange curtains that opened with remote controls and a spiral staircase. All the kinds of things in Terence Conran's book.
