![]() ![]() ![]() The first time I heard Alan Watts was better than drugs. “He was a very philosophical fella and that made me somebody who is happiest when I have a big thought, a new thought. “That would basically be down to my father,” she says. Songs about love and sex jostle with lyrics that ponder the size of the universe, the meaning of existence and free will. It’s like betting on a horse that might take you closer to the sublime.” But I have to have that hope when I’m making music. I’m barely holding on to it I don’t know what it’s coming out of and if I believe it any more. “It’s a place that still has a little bit of hope, of the future, of some sort of utopia,” she says. If you’re in a band for 30 years, you’d be hard pressed to continually generate new ideas. Murphy doesn’t go clubbing as much as she used to, but she says it’s important that her music keeps the connection to the dancefloor that it has had since she emerged in the mid-90s as one half of Moloko, the duo she formed with then-boyfriend, Mark Brydon. The songs are uniformly fantastic, the music a skewed trawl through disco, cosmic funk, breakbeats and soul. The results are spectacular – the best of her 30-year career, better even than 2020’s acclaimed Róisín Machine. It will now be my vision and they have to go with that, which on their part takes an awful lot of trust.” I’ll make the artwork, the visuals, the video I’ll put the shows together. They pour themselves into it as a 50/50 collaborator and then they let me take it into the world. “It’s incredible when you think about it. “There’s not many that’ll put up with it, I can tell you,” she says, laughing. Hit makers … with her Moloko collaborator Mark Brydon. It’s clearly the work of an idiosyncratic imagination, or rather two: Murphy and her latest collaborator, the German producer DJ Koze, whom she describes as “an enigma” with “the most sensitive ears on the planet” who “seems to bleed when he makes music” – and who could deal with Murphy’s approach to collaboration. It also features Murphy, well, cooing in lieu of a chorus it’s punctuated by apparently unrelated muttered asides – “I’ve lost it”, “I’m sorry” – and accompanied by an image of her face half-covered by a kind of psychedelic latex gimp mask. Or you could listen to CooCool, the single from her forthcoming sixth solo album (name to be announced), which builds from a gentle synth and drum machine intro into a glorious, euphoric pop song, driven by a lovely old soul sample. ![]() There is Murphy performing an acoustic set in her back garden, arriving on the back of a tractor, carrying a pitchfork Murphy nodding along to her own music, while smoking what looks suspiciously like a large joint Murphy warping her face and voice into a variety of characters, including Karol, a clueless US PR, and Jason, a cockney ex-raver blathering on about the early days of acid house. Should you need it underlined, you could look at the Irish pop star’s social media feeds, particularly TikTok, where a phantasmagoria of oddness plays out amid the usual album announcements. If you want evidence that Murphy is not like other pop stars, see above. Euphoric … listen to CooCool, the first single from Murphy’s new album. ![]()
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