Róisín Murphy made her name as one half of the band Moloko. But since her personal relationship with the other half - Mark Brydon - ended two years ago, she has learnt to be her own woman, she tells Tony Clayton-Lea
Be the hokey, but it's a long way from Arklow to a big-city life of glitz, glamour, hit singles and, er, introspection. We've just finished our interview, and, now that the tape machine is off, Róisín Murphy, the Co Wicklow-born singer who made her name as half of the Sheffield pop duo Moloko, is really opening up. She talks about children, about parents' constant concerns for their evolvement, about faith - however nebulous or tenuous it might be - and about some people's need for validation. This is all off the record, of course, but the implications are clear. Murphy seeks more in life than the instant gratification of stardom. Here is one pop cookie that declines to crumble.
After almost a decade of partnership, both musical and personal, with Mark Brydon, Murphy could be forgiven for needing time to find her feet as a solo artist. But Ruby Blue, her debut CD, is a triumph. Produced by the former Moloko collaborator Matthew Herbert (who now leads an avant-garde big band), it tumbles from lullabies, as in The Closing of the Doors, to the heady rock of the title track.
"I love the album," Murphy says soon after we sit down in the bar of a funky London hotel, where she sips a glass of champagne. "I think it's a really successful piece of work. It's unique, and it retains a lot of sincerity and emotion, yet it's song-based and experimental." Its quality is even more impressive given that Murphy's solo career was not so much a choice as a necessity. Once the pair's personal partnership had run its course, their working union also ran out of steam.
She also had to deal with a new city, having moved from Yorkshire to London around the time of Statues, Moloko's last, although possibly not final, album, in 2003. Murphy quickly discovered that she had nothing to do in London; she had neither made friends nor established herself there. "I had to work my way through that. I couldn't get depressed about it. In Sheffield I'd always been surrounded by people obsessed with music. There was always something to do, somewhere to go. I had a sense of purpose - and I was in a very deep relationship with Mark, had been for eight years, so I was blindly leading my life. I didn't have to think, in a way, about making my own life.
"So when I started Ruby Blue, in London, I had to draw upon various strengths I had years ago as a teenager: reading good books, watching good movies, no rubbish television, don't eat rubbish - which I did, of course - and put in and put out while forgetting about everything else for a while."
It wasn't the first time Murphy had to deal with the upheaval of moving, of course. Arklow was home until Murphy was 12, when she and her family moved to Manchester. She retains a strong Co Wicklow accent, however - and describing her as more English than Irish will get you more than a frown. "I'm Irish and that's it," she says. "I have a much stronger Irish accent living in London than I did in either Manchester or Sheffield. When I went to school in Manchester I was picked on, and I'm a really good mimic anyway, so I naturally tend to copy what's around me. When you're in London there are so many other nationalities around you that there is no prevailing accent, especially in the world that I move in, so I've gone back a bit to my Irish background."
She returns to Co Wicklow quite a lot - and, having bought a house close to Arklow, seems intent on using it as a base - but tends not to spend time in Dublin. "I fly in there, but I go straight to Arklow and into the bosom of my family, straight to my mum's table, surrounded by familiar people. Nothing much has changed there, to be honest. I go to the same pub that my family has been going to for years. It's nice that I don't have to try when I go home. I have a life there."
She puts her sense of confidence down to her parents, who she says were unique. "It would be misleading for anyone to think that they were hippies - they most definitely were not; they're quite straight - but they were open-minded and progressive, without being very aware of that. They were different to their peers, more like people are in Ireland now than they were then."
Her family has been surprised by her reserves of strength and stubbornness. Back in Manchester, when she was 15, there was something of a split in the ranks, but she refused to return to Arklow. "I hung around with loads of weirdos who wore black," she says. "I'm sure people thought we were on heroin, which we weren't - we were naive and lovely, really. In the past 10 years, though, there has been a shift in my family towards them thinking I'm really strong. They might think I'm stronger than I am sometimes. I suffer from that across the board, actually. The perception is that 'Róisín will be okay', no matter what happens."
For the past year or so Murphy has been trying to redress this perception by telling people that she, too, gets hurt, worried and scared. In her 20s, she says, she overcompensated for her vulnerability by being bolshie. "The music now reflects that vulnerability a little bit more. I'm opening up into the real Róisín now. It might be a sensible thing at the age of 19 not to pour your heart out - for one thing it's not formed emotionally, anyway. And for everything I've been through, I'm not sure I had as much to say as I do now about relationships, loss, love, isolation and the universal feelings. So to be naval gazing at 19 would have been bullshitting a bit. I very much felt that, and was reacting against that 'important artist' thing.
"As the years go by, when you're talking about emotions, you're coming from a real place where you actually have experienced things and recognise things in yourself and other people."
And where is this Arklow woman now, then? She sets down her empty champagne glass to reach into her bag for a pack of cigarettes. "I'm quite happy. I smoke 30 a day," she says, grimacing. "There are a few holes here and there, though. I'd be loath to go and talk about them. I don't think there's a therapist that would be bright enough to deal with me. It would annoy me if they were thick. I think I would know immediately, so I probably wouldn't bother trying."
She lights up, inhales, exhales. "Sometimes, though, you wonder where the faith is, that's all." Which is, I think, where we came in.
Ruby Blue is on Echo. Róisín Murphy performs at the Electric Picnic music festival, Stradbally Estate, Co Laois, on September 3rd and 4th