You’re very welcome!

It was lovely, yes. My children came too, which was great. The audience was lovely and very chilled, the music was pumping, and they really enjoyed it. The first half of the set is pretty closely dedicated to the new stuff and it gets going really quickly.

Yes, that’s the great thing about being a collaborator. I don’t make music alone, and if I switch it up, it gives me a whole new sense of purpose and stretches me in ways that the last project didn’t. And on it goes…

It was meant to be one each month but I got very, very tired. I’ve still got to shoot the video for the third one. I’ve had to put it off, so I’m letting Plaything run its course here. Then, in September, I’ll release the next one, Jacuzzi Rollercoaster.

That’s a duet. I co-wrote the lyrics with Ali Love, who also sings on it. The name was his idea – he’s amazing –: he just came into the studio and said, “Do you know what? I just read this thing about this thing called a Jacuzzi rollercoaster”. It’s a real thing in Japan. You sit in a Jacuzzi and then it goes around on a rollercoaster. (Laughs)

In the tracks not so much, it’s more of a visual thing. The reason why it’s on four 12”s is because that’s how I rationalised it in the end. We went into it with an open mind, and then just carried on making more music. Only a certain amount of talking with Maurice could be done – as he would say, “Oh, no, I can’t change it because I played it in the club this weekend and it works”. So I thought, well, that’s what this music is for. So that’s how we packaged and presented it: what the concept is. And out of that came the visuals.
It’s really helpful to have a rule for any visual. There was a different rule for Hairless Toys, another for Take her up to Monto, and now we’re in another place again. The rule for these tracks then led to the inspiration for the videos. I began by looking at VHS footage on the Internet from the era when I started to go clubbing. The first music video [All My Dreams] is very much based on my first rave experience, at a place called Shelley’s, in Stoke. I didn’t have to focus on it in terms of music because Maurice was, but the lyric writing really came from an emotional place. 

I write in the moment. The lyric “get clean, brought up in the middle of a scheme” was because I was writing in Sheffield. Sheffield has one of the most famous housing schemes ever built in the United Kingdom. I used to live in it, in a big block of flats. There’s also a certain amount of darkness in Maurice’s work. In a way, it’s light and bubbly and funky, but it’s coming from such a gut place that there’s an element of darkness there. And that was what I was picking up on in the lyrics.

I think dance music has that capability more than any kind of music – to hold different emotions at once. Well, certainly as much as any other kind of music anyway. But in the environment of dance, there’s a unity that’s created out of all these disparate feelings and emotions between all these different people. They’ve all got different points of view and different histories; they come from different classes, cultures and backgrounds. In a way, there’s a stage there more than other music to really encompass the euphoria, the connection, and the admittance of the disconnection and sadness that’s in life too.

(Laughs) Oh, come on!

Yes, and you can definitely see that on screen. It would’ve been much harder to get that authenticity from hired hand. It was all me, I directed it. But I’m not just directing, I’m going around with my loudhailer and, sometimes, I’ll even break into song. They love it, they get even more loved up. It’s beautiful; it’s actually a beautiful thing.

It’s funny, when they actually weren’t off their nut. I was just shouting, “Come on, gurn it off, roll your eyes back!” (Laughs) But also, the other thing you have to get people to remember is not just to show off but also to be in the moment. You see people turn towards the camera, then have to get them to turn back. They need to do natural things like talking to each other and hand each other drinks – not just dance and perform.
The reference material was so wide sweeping. A lot of research went into those little invitation films, editing different footage that I’d found on the net. Then, I developed this character for a voiceover in order to speak to the participants through the invitation films. He’s my alter ego, this northern MC fella. It enabled me to say stuff that I wouldn’t normally say and explain the idea to them before they arrived on set. And they were ready when they got there, so it was great.

Yes, we have a stupid amount of clothes, and it was mostly from the ‘90s.

(Laughs) I didn’t do very much in the first one [All My Dreams]; I was just a shadowy figure, a cameo appearance. It was very personal, so instead, I cast someone as me. The three girls that start the video were really the three of us back in the day – my two friends and me. But the second one [Plaything] is a little further on in the story. It sort of shows what happened when commerce began to get involved. The girls are all on stage, they’re elevated and they’ve separated themselves, so there’s less unity between them and the audience. They’re on a higher level. Which, back at that time, was what people used to do to find jobs inside that world. That’s where it starts to get a little bit darker…

I think I will, yes. In fact, I know I will. I would like to make a film that evolved almost at the start of this project.

Well, I think I am, probably. The way I entered the music world was not as a singer; I entered it as a ‘face’ – that was what it was called back then, as I was on the scene in Sheffield. I bumped into Mark Brydon and was just chanting this stupid shit at him, and then he wanted me to do it on his music. In the beginning, I was much more of an agitator and took being a singer as a conceptual thing rather than as a musician. I was tied to a record deal before I had even sung. It was really my attitude that was more of experimentalism.
I don’t want to sound pompous but I really did have a conceptual attitude. I had a broader interest in it rather than ‘I want to sing’. We had a concept of what we were not going to do… We weren’t going to do acid jazz or four on the floor, which were all popular at the time. We wanted to do something different and unique. Without even being the producer, I’d had a concept – it would start with ideas rather than scales, if you like. That’s the way I started and that’s the way I’ve continued.
But my singing has developed over the years and I do have this other side where I actually became a real singer. There’s a tension there, but it all goes together. Half the time I don’t know what it is that I’m saying. I’m not super clear on why I would’ve had masks on the last tour and why I don’t have them on this one. It’s just a story that I’m reading myself – and I don’t know the end of it.

The truth isn’t simple; I’m trying to get to the truth. I need all these complex tensions to get anywhere near it. I always felt that back when I came into it, turning up in my daywear – t-shirt and jeans – would’ve been just as much of a fake. In the ‘90s, it was very serious in the music industry. Grunge and music from Bristol like Massive Attack didn’t chime with me as a truth.
Alongside the outfits, I even fiddled around with different characters in the music. In Moloko’s first albums, I try out different voices as if I’m trying out clothes. After Moloko, I could’ve easily put on the cloak of this sad, broken-hearted, confused person, and people might’ve bought it. But it wouldn’t have been true. Granted, there is more of the serious singing than there used to be. My voice has made a journey towards the truth that has been a valid one. It’s been valid for me not to jump straight in at nineteen years old and say, ‘this is who I am and who I’m going to remain’. I’ve always left as much space as I can to surprise myself and really find myself through what I’m doing. It’s just not that simple.
But then, I was brought up around people who weren’t simple. My parents were different to the people around them: they were non-religious in a time where everyone else was religious in Ireland. They were forward-thinking, they were party people, they had their own businesses, they were independent – they were modern. They were poetic as well. There’s a great saying in poetry in Ireland where nothing’s that simple, everything can’t be read, and there’s this kind of acceptance that everything’s not as black and white as it is grey.

I’ve always said honesty is the best policy. I don’t have time to lie. I haven’t got a great memory, so even if I tried, I wouldn’t remember the lies I told (laughs). It’s definitely part of my personality; it’s who I am.

“Take me with a pinch of salt, break me don’t give a thought”. Yes, I mean, I’ve felt that way. I’ve felt taken for granted as an artist, but I’ve also felt a great deal of love from the people who do care about what I do. And I’m very lucky to do what I do, I realise that. I’m especially lucky to have children and do what I do; I really do have a good life!