ROISIN MURPHY
“I didn’t discover music,” insists Roisin Murphy. “It discovered me. It was there, waiting to jump on me. A part of my life for as long as I can remember.”
Murphy – formerly one half of Moloko, but successfully solo for the best part of 20 years now – grew up in Arklow, a smallish town just south of Dublin. It’s perhaps a cliché to imagine that every Irish house is full of music and song, but for the Murphy family, this seems to have been the case.
“Any reason for a drink and any reason for a song, that’s what the house was like. When I look back, it feels like the singing never stopped. It sort of blends in with the way we talked to each other. If we were sad or happy, music was communication.”
Her parents moved to Manchester when she was 12 – just as house music was beginning to take hold of the UK charts – but ended up moving back just three years later. Roisin, still only 15, decided to stay, living with schoolmates until she was old enough to sign on and get a place of her own.
There was plenty happening in Manchester – Murphy watched the Madchester scene unfold – but it was a move to Sheffield in 1993 that finally nudged her into a
