Top 60 Roisin Murphy Quotes

When I was 16 and on a tour of Europe, I fell in love with Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France. I’d quite like to live in it.

I respect Lady Gaga’s work as an artist and as a fellow fashion icon. She is a very talented performer, playing the piano, singing live, and dancing, too.

I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I’m always up for a bit of experimentation.

Ambition can get you freedom.

My music’s like waiting for a bus. You wait a long time for one, then a whole heap of them come along.

I’m proud that I’ve even had a career, but ‘proud’ isn’t the first word I’d use. I feel lucky that I moved to Manchester when I was 12 because I don’t think I could have done this in Ireland. And I feel lucky that the government took care of me from the age of 16 to when I signed my first record deal at 19.

I use maps in my phone a great deal because I can’t tell left from right. Having easy access to maps has given me a completely different life. When I first moved to London, I couldn’t get anywhere and spent so much money on cabs because I couldn’t figure it out.

At 16, I got housing benefit, and I had my own flat in an old woman’s house. I was the only 16-year-old I knew living alone.

‘Take Her Up to Monto’ is a very satirical song. I don’t really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn’t. It’s a bit cheeky calling it ‘Take Her Up to Monto,’ but the whole idea was to be very irreverent.

That idea of not always being in control of the primitive parts of yourself – the bits that fall in love or the bits that dance or lose the plot or drink too much – and putting that across… that’s pop for me. It’s playing with all the different colours of the rainbow of life.

My fashion icons change regularly.

I won’t let anything destroy me.

I never said, ‘Lady Gaga is a poor imitation of me.’ That was a completely made-up quote.

Once I was embraced by gay culture, I finally started to feel I was fitting in. I was understood by those people in a way I had never predicted or courted.

My father ruined me for men. Not many can live up to him.

I went to bed on the night of Brexit, of that vote for leaving the E.U., and I said to everyone it will be a 70/30: nobody wants to leave the E.U. I woke up on the bus in Glastonbury, and everybody had their heads in their hands. They could not believe it. I could not believe it.

One of my favourite books of all time is ‘The Borstal Boy.’

Lyricism was placed into my head in Ireland.

My family are all mad. But I got a lot of strength from them.

I’ve not got any terrible stories of what I had to do to scrabble my way to the top, obviously, because I didn’t scrabble my way to the top. I just scrabbled my way to the middle!

I feel more like an artist than a pop star, and I accidentally fell into what I do. Everything was just an experiment.

I don’t have any problems on social media. I have the most wonderful fans. I’m the luckiest girl in the world in that way.

Timeless and unclassifiable – that’s the goal. My oddness is the pursuit of this above all else.

I didn’t spend my childhood trying to be a performer; it was a big surprise to me that this was what I was doing. But it has always felt quite natural to me. I wasn’t taught to do what I do; I found out bit by bit.

I like taking different elements – clothes, shoes, lighting – and creating a total transformation. But it’s never about hiding: it’s about drawing something out from deep inside of me that’s really true. I’m always trying really hard to tell you the truth. That’s what this is all about for me.

I found my style in my aunt’s attic. She hoarded all her ’60s clothes there, along with the tiaras she’d won as a beauty queen, and I’d steal her wedding dress to wear around town.

When I had my first child, I went back to Ireland to live with my mother. So, a typical day there was me being a mother, with my mum showing me how to do things.

It’s not nice to be called a nutter, because it dismisses the input I’ve had into my own destiny over the years.

I’ve seen massive changes in Ireland in my lifetime.

I really do prioritise humour in people. It’s a sign of intelligence. One of the most important things I heard that moulded me was Derek and Clive. That sense of release when I heard them for the first time, crying and laughing, was akin to seeing Sonic Youth for the first time.

When I started out, the idea of wearing interesting clothes seemed to contradict the idea of being a serious artist. The first Moloko record, ‘Do You Like My Tight Sweater?’ was kind of a reaction to all that.

I don’t think Ireland has really embraced me, but it is not really for me to say. Obviously, people shouldn’t embrace me just because I’m Irish, but it is where I’m from. I’m extremely proud to be Irish.

I’m quite drawn to women artists who use themselves in their work. There is a very feminine point of view, the use of female archetypes. I love artists who play with those kind of things genuinely.

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It’s not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

Designers become translators for me. That’s why I’ve gone to people like Gareth Pugh and Viktor and Rolf – they are speaking a nuanced language. Fashion says a lot for me.

I always try to lace my work with just a teensy-weensy bit of humour. It’s rather like putting a sprig of feathery stuff in a flower arrangement: I believe humour is a great balancer.

The most healthy way to be creative is to work with what you have and not sit around wishing you had something different.

The reason why I’m not a pop star is I would have hated it. I’ll stick to being an artist. I’m not trying not to be commercial; I am just doing what I do. I have finely tuned tastes, and that gets prioritized above everything else. That’s just how it is.

I wasn’t embraced as an Irish artist back in the Moloko days. Modern electronica isn’t what you think of when you think of Irish music.

There’ll always be a part of me that wants to remain mysterious.

If they were siblings, ‘Hairless Toys’ would be the nice child, and ‘Take Her Up to Monto’ is more of a problem child.

You can’t get a better education in what it is to write songs until you listen to American soul music.

The Church controlled so much in Ireland for so long. I’m not going to get into whether or not religion per se is a bad thing, but my point is the political aspect in Ireland was way out of kilter, and it wasn’t right.

I’m not someone to sit on her laurels.

I love Andrew Weatherall; he’s so real and uncompromising and a sweetheart.

I think my whole career has been marked – or marred – by what people presume about me. But even that’s fed back into the creativity. I’m saying that I’m about contradiction, that you can’t put me into a box.

The day I turned 16, I moved into my own flat. My parents had just broken up, and I didn’t want to go back to Ireland with my mother. I was doing my A-levels, and my friends would come over and watch ‘Twin Peaks.’

I have a little antennae, and even when I’m trying not to be, I’m connected with the bloody zeitgeist.

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

You’ve got to deal with the tools you have in hand. I’m a firm believer in that.

I was surrounded by music in my family, surrounded by people who sang songs – every single person I knew as a child growing up had one, two, three songs they knew from start to finish.

A year before I met Mark Brydon – he was the one I used to make all the music with in Moloko – I was living in Sheffield with a guy who was studying architecture. I used to go to his college and crash the lectures there. I had enrolled to do a fine art course, but then I met Mark, and we signed a record deal instead.

My uncle was a photographer for ‘The Irish Times.’

I think I have an instinct of, like, the right record comes knocking at my door and says, ‘Want to come out to play?’ and I go.

Originally, I thought of being a photographer and nearly went to art school, but I got a record deal instead.

I don’t like permanency. I just like to slip and slide, and in identity, I think that’s a very feminine artist’s point of view.

I never thought that was even possible, to have your friends working with you. In the music, yes, in the creative side, yes, but in the business side, I need people who take me fully seriously.

When I go home, I go to my house in the countryside. I don’t hang out in Dublin. I go home to be with my family and have a rest and so on. I don’t know anything about the Irish music scene, and I’ve never felt part of it.

I love performance, but I’m quite happy making videos as well, and I’m inordinately happy writing songs.

Ireland is a great place to be odd.