She’d eventually spend eight months intensively writing, recording, mixing and remixing in London, Barcelona, Madrid, Miami, Las Vegas and, perhaps inevitably, Sheffield. Murphy consistently works with brilliant, inventive producers – Mark Brydon, Matthew Herbert, Parrot, Anu Pillai, Dan the Automator, Maurice Fulton, her partner Sebastian Properzi, and Eddie Stevens is no slouch either – with a variety of contrasting approaches but, generally speaking, they are at their most effective when la Murphy gets a little space to do her thing.Īlthough much of the initial writing/production legwork for Overpowered was done by a core team of Seiji and Paul Catto (of jazz house stalwarts Reel People) in London, rather than work with a single producer, arranger, mixer or co-writer, Murphy opted to work with loads of different people all over the shop. I was just joking – my irony often goes awry.”Įither way, EMI wanted a pop record. “I lied,” Murphy told Gary Ryan at the NME. It’s a great story that seems to sum up perfectly the deficit of imagination, depth of ignorance and lack of foresight that ultimately brought about the music industry’s thoroughly well-deserved self destruction. Anyway lads, I’m off to Miami, when do I get the advance?’ You can just imagine her, sat in the meeting, going, ‘yeah, totally, the new Robbie Williams, only a woman – me. Let’s take a moment to appreciate this impressively bananas clusterfuck of collective delusion. In what deranged parallel universe could that ever be an actual reality? “I got signed to EMI because I reminded them of Robbie Williams,” she says in the booklet for the original CD release. A deal was, as they say, swiftly inked.Īfter Murphy’s slightly cottage-industry collaboration with Herbert on Ruby Blue, I was excited to hear how the resources of a major label would affect her sound, although the involvement of Seiji from broken beats innovators Bugz in the Attic, and her own inate affinity with weird, promised something a little more leftfield than the norm.ĭespite this, incredibly, the story goes that a number of adult humans at EMI – presumably not including Eddie Stevens – saw Murphy live and thought the charismatic, motormouth singer could be their new homegrown Robbie Williams-style superstar. As it turned out, Stevens, who was an A&R for EMI at the time, could do much better than that. She met up with Moloko’s former musical director Eddie Stevens for a pint and a bit of career advice.
#ROISIN MURPHY RUBY BLUE RAR HOW TO#
She went back to Ireland to lick her wounds, give birth to her daughter with Henwood, and learn how to be a mother.Ī couple of years later, Murphy was back in London again and somewhat adrift. The label were looking for hit singles to sell the album but there was no obvious The Time is Now or Sing It Back to push.Īnd that is the simple, harsh reality behind the decision to drop Murphy from the label that she’d been signed to since she was a teenager. You could say that she literally put her heart and soul into Ruby Blue.Įcho initially released the album as three separate 12-inch singles, each with great artwork by Murphy’s then partner Simon Henwood and each limited to just 500 copies. It’s much less gimmicky than it sounds and, gently encouraged by the producer, her confidence returned. Herbert asked Murphy to select important objects from her everyday life and constructed the music from samples of her shaking, rattling and rolling them around the studio.
#ROISIN MURPHY RUBY BLUE RAR PROFESSIONAL#
Her first solo album, the intensely personal Ruby Blue, found producer Matthew Herbert coaxing a series of delicate, soulful, funny little songs from a fragile young woman emerging from the hurt and uncertainty that accompanies the end of a love affair and also, in this case, her only professional partnership. There was a time when that phrase seemed destined to be inscribed on Murphy’s gravestone. Who wouldn’t like Róisín’s stuff, once you’ve actually heard it? These perhaps-not-quite-so-lucky ladies were essentially clutching at musical straws. 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.ĭespite 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.
0 kommentar(er)
