"When I was around eight years old, us girls used to run down Arklow main street screaming 'Like a Virgin' from the top of our lungs, and of course the hilarious thing was we were virgins."

Now one of the most critically acclaimed female dancefloor maestros, Murphy enjoys the playful side of post-feminism. "I can embrace the power of the things that were before because the battles have already been fought."

Another influence, particularly on her zany predilection for costume, was the legendary photographer Cindy Sherman. "I saw her play with those female archetypes. She was so playful with them. She turned something that the generation before her threw out with the bath water.

She said, 'no, let's be playful with it'. It is an incredibly liberating thing for a young girl to see. It had a jubilance to it. When people ask me about Madonna I always think of Cindy Sherman.

Although based in England since her parents split up more than 20 years ago, Murphy has a curious Irish/English accent.

And she still holds an Irish passport. "Sure they wouldn't give me a British passport. I'm a paddy through and through, " she laughs. "I don't want an English passport, " she continues mock haughtily, sounding a bit like Twink. "But they have been very good in the passport office here. I do lose my passport quite regularly." The thought of the former Moloko frontwoman losing her passport quite regularly has the both of us in giggles, not really sure why. Murphy manages to say she misses her family, all of whom are living here.

Apart from the laughter, Murphy has a terrible cough. but she's excited about her new album, her second as a solo artist after Moloko came to an end when her relationship with Mark Brydon had run its course. Ruby Blue sold quite well in Britain without much of a push. It perhaps suffered from its own idiosyncrasies. Wasn't a cohesive enough record to endure.

"Ruby Blue was meant to be a disco record, " she says regaining composure. Recorded with electronic uber-producer Matthew Herbert, "it just went off on its own journey", she says. Overpowered, her new album, doesn't. It's a big, lovely, dancy, fun, happy monster. Isn't it? "Hopefully, " she dangles. "That's what it's meant to be."

Created with a long cast list of producers, collaborators and mixers, Overpowered is Murphy's biggest risk to date. "It's a big responsibility for me. I had to take it around a lot of different people." She had a truckload of old, rare, disco records that she has been collecting all her life.

She would build melodies, rhythms, songs around them. If she wanted additional production, she would go to a certain studio. If she wanted extra vocals off she went to get that. If she wanted it mixed in the US, off she went to New York. If she wasn't happy with that, she went somewhere else.

"It was always up to me where each track was going to go and where it needed to go." It sounds like a lot more work. "The writing was a lot less painful, which is ironic, because I was really scared when I was writing it."

Why? "Well I had signed with EMI before I had recorded, so I had talked the talk. When it came to walking the walk, I was a bit scared. The work I had done before had all been on an intimate level with people I knew really really well and with whom I didn't feel embarrassed to make a mistake in front of. I had to jump into studios with people I didn't know and go for it."

Bizarrely enough the opening track, 'Overpowered', is about oxytocin, the chemical secreted in the brain when you are in love.

"I read an article about it and I had to wait until I had a track that was scientific enough-sounding to draw from the article."

The album is unashamedly nostalgic, almost reverential to classic disco and house music.

There aren't many people making records like this at all nowadays. "No, there's not much vocal dance music around, full stop.

But I really needed it to be a functional record and I don't know if it is. Will it make you dance?

When disco is good, it also has an emotional complexity to it . . .another level to it . . . and almost the opposite of functionality.

"The very two things that shouldn't go together do . . . that makes for the very best disco. It makes you feel at once uplifted and connected, but also melancholic."

Commercially viability is not that high on the list, not when you've had a couple of hit singles and shifted plenty of albums.

"A lot of disco was never successful, but I suppose the record company is hoping it will be, " she says. Well, Madonna's last record was a disco record, and it did quite well. "Yes, " she pauses, "I suppose it is. I like to think I'm a bit different to thatf" Yeah, well I suppose you don't go strapping yourself to crucifixes in front of thousands of people, now do you? "I write really good lyrics, mate, " she says, delivering the verbal equivalent of a smack in the gob. Oh yeah, and that.

"Everything I sing is what I want to sing, for good or for bad."

As the coughing continues, I suggest some honey tea. "Do you know what I need, " she asks mischievously. "I need a dwarf, a kilo of cocaine and a straw."

Arklow must have been an interesting place back in the early 1980s.