Róisín Murphy is sitting in an old-fashioned shabby-chic drinking club in Soho, central London, that she approvingly describes as “very literary”. She is telling me about lockdown in Ibiza, where she lives with her partner and two children. “It was lovely to have the island so clean and quiet, driving along the salt flats, nobody around. Except they sent the Guardia Civil [Spain’s national gendarmerie] to Ibiza – they really clamped down. You couldn’t walk your dogs, you couldn’t smoke on the street. There were policemen with machine guns. So you were between this magical place with no people in it and this background feedback, like white noise, of authoritarianism.”
The experience was, she says, “like living in a JG Ballard book”. Then again, she quite enjoyed that: “That gave it a bit of an edge. Come on! Let’s have it!”
