We’re wrapping up!
Thanks so much to everyone who posted questions, and to Róisín for her brilliant answers. Until next time!
woodstok asks:
What influenced your decision to pick Italian pop songs in general, and the specific songs on the album? Did you speak any Italian prior to recording them?
Also there’s a Scottish beer named after you: http://www.williamsbrosbrew.com/beerboard/bottles/r%C3%B4isin. What’s your drink of choice?
Guardian contributor I fell in love with an Italian record producer. He surrounded me with Italian music. I've always loved Mina, and the more I researched her, the more in love with her I became. The song Non Credre was the first one I tackled, and it was as much her performance of the song, as seen on YouTube, as the song itself that led me to take up this challenge.
These feminine icons, both Mina and Patty Pravo, seem to be hugely modern in their performances, which are full of wit. I cannot overstate their influence on me at this point in my career.
And I used to drink Guinness, because I was told it was good for you. I recently found out the opposite is true. Silly me.
NightmareBoy asks:
Hello Roisin, can you tell us more about the different visual characters you created for Hairless Toys? Who are these women and what’s their stories?
Guardian contributor I do love to play in the visual side of all this. I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I'm always up for a bit of experimentation.
On Hairless Toys, I've tried to create an ambiguous character to go with an ambiguous record. She's anything but rock'n'roll – she's so not rock'n'roll that, in a twisted way, she's kind of radical. She's like someone from my memory, almost like my mother, and she's lost in some space-time between the 1960s and the late 80s.
She, like me, has been away in her own world for quite some time and as she enters the fray, she's seen as an oddball outsider. In no way is she trying to be a teenager or "youth": my work is no longer about youth culture in any way, as I am a realist.
Angie is quite a lady.
laketrout declares:
I don’t have a question. I would just love to have your babies.
Guardian contributor I know it's a modern world, but … how exactly could you have my babies?
Jonny Brazen O’Clock asks:
Hello Little Rose, in not 1 but 2 of your videos you are featured doing things on the lavatory, which suggests that this much ignored and ignored location has some special significance in the World Of Róisín Murphy. Would you care to expand on this theory, and maybe share your favourite things to do while seated on the loo? Lots of love from Mr O’Clock from The Village
Guardian contributor Often, I try to make videos that are not like videos: anything other than look like a pop video! So, the videos become more cinematic, less all-singing-and-dancing, and more psychological and dramatic. This, for some reason, has led me to the toilet. Perhaps it's short-form for intimacy.
JackNimrod asks:
Who were you most scared of as a kid: Dracula, Frankenstein or the Child-catcher?
Guardian contributor Well, in Ireland we were told the Banshee would get you. And then I was told I was the Banshee, my brother was told he was an anti-Christ – it's all very confusing in Ireland when you're growing up.
Michael Sharpe asks:
What’s your favourite song that never made it onto an album? What will happen to the two tracks you have performed live but have yet to release – Demon Lover & Silent Running?
Guardian contributor I can't tell you what's going to happen to those songs: maybe one day they will reach the light of day, but for now I have 25 other songs I need to worry about as I wrote a mountain of tracks with Eddie Stevens last year and only eight made it to Hairless Toys.
For sure, there's another album there and maybe an EP.
Simon Marshall asks:
Fish and Chips in paper or Michelin star restaurants?
Guardian contributor I'll tell you what, it's hard to get a good fish and chips these days, and the cod is nearly gone! So, it's quite a delicacy nowadays. I was brought up around a fish and chips shop – or a chipper, we call it in Ireland – and my nana ran it.
But Michelin star restaurants? I certainly will give it a go.
"I find it hard to trust unfunny people"
doctorzee says:
I’ve been a fan for a long time – I first got turned on to your style when I heard John Peel play Fun for Me and was excited by the wit and the wordplay. All of your songs are literate and witty, do you have any favourite writers?
Guardian contributor 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.
I am very attracted to funny people – I'd go so far as to say I find it hard to trust unfunny people. When I think about writers with humour, I immediately think of Brendan Behan.
Updated
"Perhaps there is some depth missing from the current [feminist] conversation"
MarkStormRon asks:
Where do you stand in relation to the feminist movement in its modern incarnation, and what if anything would you change about it?
Guardian contributor I come from a generation of women who were slightly perturbed by the feminist movement as it stood in the 1980s, with its residual humourless-ness and lack of subtlety concerning female possibilities. In short, feminism seemed fine on the one hand, but it also seemed to take the fun (the fantasy) out of being a girl.
So when, in the late 1980s, I came across the word of Cindy Sherman, I felt relief. Here was an artist who reclaimed all the role-playing and ambiguity associated with femininity, and created beautiful art with it. She controlled every aspect of her images, so therefore was unquestionably a feminist.
And yet … now it's very difficult to gauge the true meaning of feminism. For sure we're seeing a lot of it about – it's so hot right now! – but perhaps there is some depth missing from the current conversation.
And here's a picture of Róisín
Here she is at Guardian Towers ...
Updated
On motherhood: "'Double life' is how I feel at the moment"
Mark Fergusson asks:
Do your kids like what you do? Are they aware of a mummy’s double life? What songs do they like the best? Keep on!
Guardian contributor Interesting you use the phrase "double life" as that is how I feel at the moment. Over the summer, artists go out at the weekends to festivals and during the week we are at home. So yes, it feels very much like a double life right now.
My kids saw me perform for the first time a few weeks ago, when I sang at a rave for young children – a kiddie rave. But they have never seen my full show. Perhaps they'll come to one of the more sedate, middle-class festivals (of which there are now many).
My daughter and son are fascinated by the costumes, and hats and masks and many fabulous items that are coming into my house at an almost alarming rate. How this will all affect them in the long run, nobody knows.
Updated
ID8792183 asks:
One of the things I absolutely love about your music is your ability to move me through the beat and melody but make me think through the lyrics.
What inspires you to write or what things do you find you mostly write about?
Guardian contributor I'm not sure I mostly write about things. I suppose I'm drawn to the senses – I very much will use any method at my disposal in order to write. Sometimes I collect ideas in journals, things people say, things that come to me in my sleep, etc. Sometimes I record ideas into my phone.
I also make lots of scrapbooks with cuttings from newspapers and magazines. Sometimes I can be inspired by a whole article, other times just one word or a phrase. I've written songs about films I've just watched, I've written about how I feel personally and I've written about imagined stories and imagined characters.
In fact, the more ways to write a song, the better – as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to look at that blank page for too long.
But, it's always revealing, no matter how I approach any kind of creativity. I reveal something of myself in the end. In fact, it reveals something of myself to myself in the end.
"If someone expects me to conform to anything, then they're not really my fan at all"
gothlane asks:
Do you feel a sense of entitlement in music fans, in terms of them demanding that the artist produce exactly what they want and expect?
Guardian contributor … Well. I do tell my fans to expect the unexpected from me at every opportunity, and many of them are very understanding of this tendency of mine. You do get the occasional "why doesn't she make straight dance-pop music?" but I do that as well!
I think I'm lucky with my fanbase. I can't believe so many of them have waited for so long for an album from me. If someone expects me to conform to anything, then they're not really my fan at all.
Updated
Pepe Llinaz asks:
Out of all the songs you’ve written, which are you the most proud of?
Guardian contributor I write different kinds of songs: sometimes I set my goal at making people dance. For songs like Jealousy and Simulation I come from a purist point of view, and it requires immense discipline for me to write like that, as I can have a tendency to over-intellectualise.
But when I do achieve this purity, it makes me very proud. On the other hand, I'm very proud of the songs on Hairless Toys as I had to follow some pretty complex song structures and write in a way that was very poetic. And so, for different reasons, I'm proud of that side of what I do, too.
debrophy asks:
What kind of collaborations have you ever refused ?
Guardian contributor It's well-known that I didn't put a certain song on my last record Overpowered. It was a decent song called Off & On, written with Cathy Dennis and Calvin Harris.
On paper, this should have been pure pop gold but in the end, it didn't quite come up to standard.
Róisín is with us now
Guardian contributor Hi, I'm here at the Guardian, and I will endeavour to answer your questions truthfully.
So let’s get cracking.
Post your questions for Roisin Murphy
Róisín Murphy made her entrance on to the pop stage in 1999, fronting the group Moloko, breaking into the charts with a sunkissed house remix of their track Sing It Back.
She later went solo, co-producing her 2005 debut album Ruby Blue with experimental musician Matthew Herbert, and following it with the dark electropop of 2007’s Overpowered.
She eased out of the spotlight after becoming a mother, but 2015 sees her back in a flurry of activity: earlier this year she released Mi Senti, an EP of covers of classic Italian pop songs, and earlier this month she released the album Hairless Toys, inspired by the 80s ball scene in New York. Murphy reanimates its world of outcast beauty with lounge ballads and strutting disco.
She’s joining us to answer your questions in a live webchat from 2pm on Monday 1 June – post yours in the comments below, and she’ll answer as many as possible.
I've got to go everyone, but thanks for your all your questions.