I always thought I’d end up doing something visual but instead I went on an adventure with this man who I fell in love with. Without me knowing, I was starting a music career. I’d been saying “Do you like my tight sweater?” to a few people and it really worked on him. We left the party to go there and there was no one there because it was the middle of the night. He became my boyfriend on the same night I went to his studio to start Moloko. I met Mark Brydon at a party in Sheffield having moved there from Manchester. Moloko – Do You Like My Tight Sweater? (1995) Photograph: Patrick Ford/Redferns Róisín Murphy
‘Because I was young, I’d spot when something was shite or on its way out’ … Róisín Murphy and Mark Brydon in Moloko. But then, I’m quite a peculiar person, too. Sometimes I even think it might be my best novel. When I told her it was a peculiar choice, she replied, “Well, I’m a peculiar person.” Sometimes I wish I could find my way back to the distinctively camp, self-parodying voice in which I wrote it (Nigella Lawson, reviewing it for the TLS, called it “studiedly je m’en foutiste”). At a signing session in Thessaloniki recently, a Greek reader presented me with her copy and said it was her favourite of my novels. Given all that, it amazes me that people are still reading it 40 years later. He paid me a handsome £200 for the world rights and it sold 297 copies in hardback. The original title was Maria and it took 18 months of rejection slips before it caught the attention of the author Alice Thomas Ellis at Duckworth, who persuaded her husband Colin Haycraft to publish it.
It was handwritten, in four pink exercise books. I wrote it in 1984-85, during the second year of my PhD on Henry Fielding at Warwick University.
#Become a rock star visual novel tv#
It’s a weird mashup of the novels I was obsessed with at the time (Watt by Samuel Beckett, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry by BS Johnson), but with a female protagonist and a hefty dose of British TV sitcom thrown in. Because it bears no relation to the books I write now. Then, I usually listen, fascinated to think that the 23-year-old who wrote those unfamiliar sentences four decades ago is – in theory – myself. But not when it comes to Sophie Ward reading my first published novel, The Accidental Woman.
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