Roisin Murphy’s Lobster Dishes

Some­times, the Acme Cake Company-scented winds are blowing just right near Girlpants’s Bush­wick offices; on those days, it is pos­sible to spot the mul­ti­col­ored scarves of media mogul Rohin Guha bil­lowing down the avenue as he arrives bearing sweet, sweet Ritter Sport Butter Bis­cuit and pop tid­ings almost equally as sugary.

Recently, Rohin showed up to draw me out of my end­less loop of old Radio­head videos with some infor­ma­tive tid­bits regarding a rather fan­tastic video. Now, I know the world is all about Beyogaga’s “Tele­phone” today, but if you read below you’ll find video com­men­tary straight from the lady that pulled off head­gear and eye-puncturingly awe­some cos­tumes long before the days of Gaga: one Róisín Murphy, buttery-voiced singer for­merly of Moloko and now solo. “Movie Star” is a pas­tiche of pop ref­er­ences in its own right; you may well rec­og­nize some Cyndi Lauper and some Twisted Sister, but most of all there is the per­va­sive (per­ver­sive) touch of John Waters. This snippet should clarify:

Rohin Guha: Tell me about the “Movie Star” video and its John Waters influ­ence.
Róisín Murphy: It’s a scene I remember so vividly from being a teenager and seeing that scene with Divine being raped by the lob­ster. It stayed with me all that time. It reared its head again. I also know so many crazy people in London who could play these parts. Really through the music, I got to know these people. I just thought it would be great fun. 99% of my videos just have me in them, so I get bored of that.

RG: Was it dif­fi­cult trying to recreate the Lobstora-Divine scene?
RM: We didn’t get a good lobster—that’s a fact right there. When the lob­ster turned up, I was a bit dis­ap­pointed. It was like padded. A padded, leather lob­ster. Appar­ently John Waters didn’t want a lob­ster. He wanted a mon­ster or some­thing else. They couldn’t get the mon­ster, and they could only get this lob­ster from the seafood restau­rant. He was making do with lob­ster. I’ll tell you what: We couldn’t get a lob­ster like that even when we wanted one.

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See? You don’t need to watch the orig­inal Clash of the Titans to see mon­strous sea things. Just check Róisín’s video:

Then, do a bit of YouTubin’ down the river of dreams that is the Internet for the clip of Divine and the dirtbag crus­tacean from Waters’s Mul­tiple Maniacs. You won’t regret it, I promise.*

Then, finally, for good mea­sure, this awe­some song, which has nothing to do with either topic but which does show­case Ms. Murphy’s pipes on her recent col­lab­o­ra­tion with pro­duc­tion duo Crookers:

Crookers feat. Róisín Murphy — “Royal T”

* It is pos­sible you will regret it a little, but then we cannot be friends.