She's always had the music in her, but Wicklow singer Róisín Murphy needed to go solo in order to fulfil her big ambition. She talks sequins with Jim Carroll.
SHE always wanted to be a disco queen. Even when she was the accidental pop star who fronted Moloko and had hits like Sing It Back, she thought about disco. When she hooked up with Matthew Herbert for Ruby Blue, her first solo album, she told him she wanted to make a disco album. But it never happened.
This time, Róisín Murphy, late of Arklow, Manchester and Sheffield, wasn't taking no for an answer. It was time for the girl who hated singing as a child - "if you were a child and every time your relatives had a few drinks, they'd be running after you with scary faces and big hands to pull you back to sing Don't Cry for Me Argentina, you wouldn't like singing either" - to make the album she was born to make.
The result is Overpowered, one of 2007's most invigorating dance-pop affairs. A bevy of producers, mixers and writers helped out in the galleys, but Murphy has captained this ship. The songs are lush, the arrangements outlandishly strung out, the sounds soulful and the moods as lonesome and heartbreaking as the very best disco anthems usually are.
Murphy credits New York's clubland for strengthening her resolve to make a disco record this time out.
"Body & Soul in New York was my favourite club ever," she says, "because it had the best music, the best dancers, the best atmosphere. They now operate as the 718 Sessions and I was invited over to sing Moloko's Forevermore, which had become an anthem at the club years after we'd released it. To experience this huge welcome and all those open arms was really special. It spurred me into wanting to see this new album through."
Previous attempts at following the lure of the glitterball had been thwarted for a variety of reasons.
"I was never in the position to demand one before. When you work with one other person, you kind of get what you're given. For Ruby Blue, I went to Matthew (Herbert) and said I wanted to make a disco record, but it went off on a different tangent. The same with Moloko. We tended to start in one place and let the record go wherever it wanted to go. With Overpowered, because of those experiences, I really wanted to make a disco record."
What appealed to her about disco was how the genre balanced contradictions. It reminded Murphy of herself.
"As a performer, I can go wildly from being glamorous and graceful to being messy and clumsy. Those extremes are in my performance and in me, and you find those extremes in disco. Of course, those contradictions are in all forms of art, but those tensions are really obvious in disco and disco works really well with my performance and attitude.
"The functionality in disco means it has to be very down to earth, but it becomes very special when you layer that with emotional complexity. You get these fabulous tensions."
Murphy started with a bunch of mixes which New York DJ Danny Krivit gave her for inspiration. "Some of the tracks I knew really well because I would have heard them when I was out dancing, and some I didn't know at all." From there she proceeded on a whirlwind world tour. She worked with producers in London (Seiji and Richard X), Barcelona (Andy Cato), Miami (Jimmy Douglass and Ill Factor) and Philadelphia (veteran arranger and MFSB luminary Larry Gold).
"I was going all over the world, meeting all these different people and working on different elements of songs with different producers, so I had to be very certain from the outset what I wanted. You'd arrive somewhere and know you had only two days in the studio with someone great. If you wanted to get two songs out of that, you didn't have the option to sit around and think about it too much.
"It was afterwards that I had the luxury of time. I could write something in Miami, produce it in Sheffield, get backing vocals in London and get it mixed in New York. I didn't have to stop until it was right but, of course, you have to know with that responsibility when to stop."
Murphy had a blast. "I was a little scared at first because I've only made records and written with people I know quite well. With this, I was writing and being creative in front of people I had never met before, which was quite a change from the very private way I operated before. Once I got on the horse, it was fine."
The Wicklow woman's confidence in her ability to make great records is growing. "Confidence does tend to creep up on you, especially in the light of how I came into making music. Every single record I've made has been about me learning something new.
"I came to music with an arty attitude. Moloko was all about Mark (Bryden) and me sitting in a room and sniggering about putting elements together which shouldn't be together, sampling pieces and taking a very experimental approach.
"I still love my first solo record and am very proud of it. And I think the new record is brilliant. I'm still trying to figure out a place for myself. I wasn't trained to do this, so every step I take is massive."
