With Soulwax, he launched Despacio, a mobile DJ sound system that certainly offers testament to Murphy’s fabled obsession with sound quality, if not his financial acumen. He opened a wine bar and drove New York’s transit authority to distraction by endlessly petitioning them to change the sound made by the city’s subway turnstiles to “a beautiful electronic symphony”: “We’ve heard from him and have told him many times we cannot do it,” said a weary-sounding official in 2015. Murphy was free to indulge himself in a bewildering panoply of other interests. So it seemed like the most beautiful and honest thing to do was to just not do it.”Īnd so, LCD Soundsystem ended with what Murphy describes as “a perfect swan-dive”: the Madison Square Garden show spawned both a documentary, Shut Up and Play the Hits, and a three-hour, five-CD live album. ![]() And I felt as if I would have to fuck up, make a record that’s like – ‘Fuck you, everybody’ – which is so artificial when artists do that, when they forcefully destroy themselves. ![]() “We were set up, especially in America, to make a similar record to our last one, and just be way bigger. My wife said: ‘You’re just going to die, I don’t even know why I married you.’”Īs a former punk from suburban New Jersey, who had sought advice from the notoriously anti-corporate producer and musician Steve Albini when setting up his first studio, Murphy was uncomfortable with something about the way LCD Soundsystem’s career was heading. “I was probably sick seven months of every year, with bronchial infections, sinus infections, stuff I’d caught on a plane … germ factory, low on sleep, probably hungover, taking antibiotics that were like battlefield drugs … like: ‘I don’t know if he’s going to get gangrene and lose the lower half of his body, let’s just give him this because we don’t have an operating table here,’ drugs. He was also – literally – sick of touring. For one thing, he had been predicting their demise from the start: their debut single Losing My Edge, written when Murphy was 32, was about feeling too old to be involved in music even when the band took off, he kept telling interviewers he was going to quit before he was 40. Some have interpreted this story as LCD Soundsystem announcing they were splitting up purely in order to sell tickets to a big show, but Murphy says, flippant or not, the more he thought about it, the more ending the band made sense. It’s like, if two people have guns pointing at each other and the first person doesn’t care if they live or die, the other one should put the gun down.” We’re not selling out.’ I’ve always thought there’s a lot of power in being flippant if you’re willing to carry it through. ![]() I mean, who does that? I don’t want to be the singing guitar player who writes all the music – I want to play drums and become an engineer.”īut, despite all the band’s achievements, the gig’s promoter didn’t think that they could fill out Madison Square Garden, and suggested they get a big-name support band in to boost ticket sales: “They were like: ‘Well, we’re concerned that it’s a big room.’ So I went, ‘Fuck it, it’s our last show. ![]() “I was a singing guitar player as a kid and I found it really embarrassing, so I stopped singing and became a drummer. “Singing’s my nightmare,” he says, blithely. He says he was so mortified by the thought of getting on to a stage and singing that it took “a bottle of whisky to do a show”. Not an inconsiderable achievement, especially if you believe Murphy’s line that he only began making music in his own right because his relationship with the Rapture, the band he was producing, had collapsed, leaving him with nothing to do.
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