11. Roisin MurphyRuby Blue
I think the production on this – who did she work with? But she used things like forks and – oh yes, it was Matthew Herbert! – and so when I first heard it I thought it was a bit mental, but it’s really not mental once I had lived with it for a bit. A lot of it’s really poppy and the last song is a ballad that’s just heartbreaking. Talk about the radio not playing things, how could they not play this?
Her style of singing really influenced mine on a track I did called ‘Jealousy’, and I’m basically trying to sing like her. When I listened back to the demo, I’d done a pretty good impression of Róisín Murphy! It’s just her delivery, and she’s really brave and I think that record was exactly the record I needed to hear. It wasn’t necessarily what the record company wanted, and that’s why I love it. It came out, and I don’t know where it charted, but I would hear bits of it on TV over the next three years. And then five years after it came out, So You Think You Can Dance did a massive thing to it. And it warms my heart that music that is genuinely great does get to have a life beyond the chart and starts getting into the ether.
