Five x Slo-mo Ro, solo

RóISÍN MURPHY, the absolute Queen of Everything, first came to the attention of the more discerning music lovers of the UK in the early 90s, working with Mark Brydon in a strange electronic-soul duo from Sheffield.

They were named after the Russian word for milk – Moloko – cribbed from the wholesome drug-in-a-drink in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

For me, Moloko’s music was notable for its top-quality tunes, its genre-bending, hugely likeable and unrelenting oddness, and Róisín Murphy’s engaging, acrobatic and occasionally breath-taking vocals  – and her willingness to mangle these often achingly beautiful vocal performances into new and strange shapes.

She’d go from Karen Carpenter to Pinky & Perky to the girl from the Exorcist in the space of a few seconds. Moloko’s songs were bewildering and beguiling in equal measure.

And the lyrics – funny, daft/clever wordplay and tall tales of ego-maniac pharaohs, party weirdos and dirty monkeys, cheeky monkeys, all solemnly delivered by the Queen of Sass like this was the most serious shit in the world – were a cut above the contemporary club dreck of the era.

Overpowered by Róisín Murphy (EMI)

MY WORK is done. Ever since I was introduced to Moloko’s debut album by a girlfriend in Leeds in the mid 90s, I’ve been diligent in returning the favour to womankind by turning a succession of lucky, lucky ladies onto the unparalleled genius of Róisín Murphy.

No, not at all, you are very welcome.

Despite her undoubted star quality, and since this is all about me, I think this perhaps has more to do with Róisín being the vocal-led stuff that I play at home the most that isn’t offensive, abrasive or otherwise objectionable. These perhaps-not-quite-so-lucky ladies were essentially clutching at musical straws.

I’m joking. Who wouldn’t like Róisín’s stuff, once you’ve actually heard it?

Róisín Murphy

“MY WHOLE career has been a happy accident,” says Róisín Murphy. “Even the fact that I’m a singer at all is a total accident. I walked into a party, fancied a fella and just walked up to him and said, do you like my tight sweater? He took me to his studio in the middle of the night and recorded me saying it, and it was the start of a relationship, not the start of a career.”

The Irish-born singer’s drunken chat up line became the title of the album she went onto record with the man she met that night in Sheffield, Mark Brydon. And an obligatory element of every interview Murphy has done since then.

Moloko made quirky, avant-garde electronic funk experimentalism topped by the sound of Murphy’s beautiful, jazz-influenced vocals being chopped up, mangled and stretched beyond all recognition. Their music ended up being remixed into the kind of enormous house anthems that soundtrack the never-ending summers of Ibiza. But there was nothing accidental about their success.