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Photo: Carsten Windhorst
After the misfire of her solo debut ‘Ruby Blue’, it seems that people are finally warming to the idea of a post-Moloko Roisin Murphy going it alone. This is the first of two sold-out nights and inside, it’s hard to shake the feeling that East London must be empty tonight. The fashion pack has clearly descended en masse to Camden to see how their favourite clothes horse is doing after her recent enforced hiatus, caused by a horribly bizarre onstage eye-bashing accident in Moscow.
Never one to follow convention, Murphy’s voice is audible for a good ten minutes before she appears. Her excellent band pump out a ludicrously heavy version of ‘Cry Baby’ which seems to increase in volume impossibly until Roisin finally takes the stage to wrap it up. In a set heavy with tracks from her ecstatically received ‘Overpowered’ album, she follows with the mournful disco romp ‘You Know Me Better’ and the minimal funk of ‘Checkin’ On Me’.
As with all of her recent shows, she changes outfits onstage between songs, a flunkey appearing every now and then to grab discarded accessories and bring more. Besides Slash, she must be the only person out there with a hat roadie, and the glittery crowd lap it up. She certainly knows her audience – during ‘Let Me Know’ she sidles up to the barrier, stroking her leg and proclaiming "That’s right. Ski-pants!"
Despite these theatrical flourishes, she clearly has a producer’s ear. The beat-loving head-nodders in the crowd are rewarded when she wheels out the outrageously overlooked ‘Truth Hurts’, her 1999 Handsome Boy Modelling School collaboration. She even performs J-Live’s rap perfectly, which is no mean feat; as Madonna and Kylie can surely attest, electro-gals can’t ‘do’ hip-hop without looking like complete idiots.
Though there are moments when her band noodle a bit too close to acid-jazz mediocrity for comfort, whenever attention threatens to wander a huge, random burst of techno noise is inserted into the mix, as if Squarepusher has naughtily snuck onstage and pushed several buttons on the sequencer at once. For ‘Movie Star’ she unexpectedly brings back the chair involved in her Russian headbanging ‘incident’. There is a collective intake of breath, but she’s bonkers, not stupid - it is quickly dispensed with before she does herself another mischief.
She closes her main set with ‘Overpowered’, whose astonishing acid bassline is right up there with Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’. With a swish of her cape she is gone, reappearing later at the upstairs bar for last orders. Well, she’s bonkers – not stupid.
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