Roisin Murphy: The queen of future pop

We chat to Moloko frontwoman turned solo pop purveyor Roisin Murphy in our latest issue about her new solo record, Hairless Toys, why ‘pop’ is not a dirty word and how iconic gay film Paris Is Burning inspired her latest music…

First off: the issue of whether or not Murphy considers herself a pop star. While she’s certainly flirted with chart-ready pop (much of it found on her stunning 2007 album Overpowered), Hairless Toys is a more subtle record, one that takes time to reveal its considerable charms to the listener.

“I don’t get this sense of ‘does she hate pop music?’ I absolutely love pop music. What I think pop is, if it’s to stay alive, is that it should always be something pushing outside of its limits. It’s a vitality, it doesn’t exist in a singular form. Record companies like to contain it and keep it in a box to market it and capitalize on it, but it doesn’t exist like that. It changes and develops,” she says.

“If I had one phrase to live by it’s adapt or die. Whatever it takes, however hard it feels, change. Because that’s what it is to be alive. Change so that you are able to shift your outlook and expand your horizons in this life is wonderful.”

As a collection of work, Hairless Toys is light at just eight tracks, but delivers abundantly in mood. She highlights Gone Fishing as a stand out moment and an example of one of the songs that delivers layered meaning. “It’s about [the legendary queer 90s documentary] Paris is Burning, but when I’m standing on stage I’m moved by my own sense of being an outsider, or being flamboyant, or finding a family inside a musical environment or the environment of the stage.” The album’s lead single is the epic Exploitation of which she relishes the “wide span” of its simple recurring lyric ‘whose exploiting who?’ that echoes over a slick, sinister beat. “It’s quite an anthem in a really sneaky fucking way,” she says, not so modestly. And she’s absolutely fucking right.

You can read our full interview with Roisin in the current Attitude Pride Awards issue of the magazine – our biggest yet at a whopping 214 pages. It’s in shops now and you can download it from Pocketmags.com/Attitude or order a print copy from newsstand.co.uk/Attitude.