Róisín Murphy: surging, sensuous and inspired by gynaecology | Electric Picnic

At first, it looks like our star would rather not shine, shrouded in a headscarf and recognition-denying sunglasses. For the next hour, though, Róisín Murphy will assume and discard countless identities throughout a knockout performance, somewhere between glassy disco and a busy costume drama. Over the pinched guitar line of Golden Era, the slow burn of Gone Fishing and the elastic snap of Checkin on Me, there’s something disarming about the high ambition of her performance and it’s fetchingly modest make-and-do effects.

It sums up Murphy’s extraordinary appeal, which is to be mysterious, sexual, powerful, yet not unapproachable. Jealousy, performed partly as a ménage à trois between bad-trip hallucinations, is somehow more freaky for not being self-serious. And if her exhortation towards following the pleasure principle seems excessive, you’d hesitate to contradict anyone who can pull off an outfit apparently inspired by a gynaecology illustration. For a surging and sensuous The Time Is Now, Murphy is revealed finally as an unapologetic hedonist. She wears it divinely.

In Three Words: Don’t go changing.