Roisin Murphy
02 ABC, Glasgow
Four Stars
Did she change six times or only five? Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. Then there were the gloves and boas and hats. The masks too (my favourite might have been the one that looked like a crab shell, or maybe a pie crust, with eyes). Do they count?
What does add up is the rush and thrill of seeing Roisin Murphy, one-time Moloko frontwoman and Mercury Prize nominee, put on a show. That’s show with a capital S. She shimmied, she shook, she pulled shapes. In short, she was a dancehall Lionel Messi.
Backed by a top-notch band, Murphy cruised through her back catalogue and tracks from this year’s Hairless Toys album, encompassing as many musical changes as costume shifts (there was even a short burst of thrash metal near the start), albeit tied to a bedrock of disco noir.
She even channelled Grace Jones now and then (especially when she sang in Italian, curiously enough). That’s a lineage she more than lived up to here.
Roisin Murphy on the Mercury Prize
Reservations? Well maybe you wanted her to stand still now and then and just sing. Just use that astonishing voice. (She has always been just a retooled Dusty Springfield cover away from hugeness. But that might not be what she wants.) And maybe she could sustain a single mood more. The highlight of the night was the way she segued from Hairless Toy track Exploitation to Moloko hit Sing It Back, this time with the dark turned up; a clever, Hammer Horror recontextualisation of the original which finally morphed into something that can only be described as prog rave. As a sequence it felt of a piece whereas the rest of the night jumped pleasurably around.
But that’s a minor cavil. She left us with a version of Pure Pleasure Seeker that was a wild, huge gulp of mentalness. Outstanding.
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