Irish indie legend Róisín Murphy makes a soulful comeback with her seductive new album “Hairless Toys”.
Born in Ireland, Róisín Murphy found herself surrounded by a culture in love with musical expression and storytelling. Moving to Manchester as a teenager, Murphy found herself in the midst of a cultural explosion of emerging musical experimentation. In the 1990s she formed the cult art-pop group Moloko with her then boyfriend Mark Brydon, finding a platform to express her unique identity of idiosyncratic electro-poetry.
As a deeply visual person, she adores fashion, saying “It’s a great fantasy, and I love a bit of fantasy.” It’s fashion’s unique ability to connect to everything that Murphy loves to play with on stage and as a visual accompaniment to her music. “Fashion is a very universal mode of expression. It’s the next thing after your body. I think every woman creates within fashion. We all have our little fantasies and subtexts in the way we dress.” With every text there is a subtext, and while Murphy can’t hide her enthusiasm about the moment we’re living in, it might be because of a certain nostalgia for the 50s and 60s.
There are some big ideas and notions about beauty and the way people should behave that are all being torn down at the moment. Everything is changing. We’re in the sixties again!
Speaking of nostalgia, in 2014 Murphy released ‘Mi Senti’, a perfectly retro cover album of classic Italian pop songs from the 1950s. Produced by her current partner, Sebastiano Properzi, Roisin says she found the task of singing in Italian to be daunting, but that she was seduced by her research into the era, which revealed to her the sublime nature of midcentury Italian aesthetics. Her Irish voice applied to tracks like Lucio Battisti’s “Ancora Tu” are sensual with a twist of the sublime. Like an Italian caffé lungo.
Footage & Images: Jody Mattioli
