They expected to release a mainly instrumental album, whereas Tight Sweater is crowded with Murphy’s multiple vocal personalities. In the course of our amiable conversation in their publicist’s west-London office, they have a sweet tendency to finish one another’s sentences.Murphy: “We wouldn’t have made the music we made …”Brydon: “… if we hadn’t been a couple.”Brydon: “I was allowed to be very sensual without being embarrassed. We could bring sexuality into the studio and work with it.”Could they be like the Eurythmics, and continue their professional partnership if they stopped being a couple? Murphy hesitates nervously before replying “I don’t think so Jesus, that would take a lot of .. something. But I don’t think we’re gonna fall out, are we? We have a lot more than most couples.

He has the bird’s-nest hair of someone who has just crawled out of bed; she has the dyed, self- consciously kooky coiffure of someone who’s just stepped out of the salon. His voice is rough and Northern; her accent hops back and forth from England to Ireland, where she was born (on Moloko records, it travels much further afield) But the pair complement each other. According to the oft-repeated anecdote, in 1994 Murphy was at a party in Sheffield, where the duo is based, and was chanting: “Do you like my tight sweater?” Brydon heard her unsettling voice, and wondered if he could put the phrase to music They recorded it at a nearby studio that very night. Murphy and Brydon have been romantically involved ever since.They make an odd couple. “Do You Like My Tight Sweater?” became the title of their first track and of their debut album, and it was a highly effective chat-up line to boot. It’s a very liberating experience to be out of all that, to say: ‘Yes, let’s stick in some speed-metal riffs or whatever.’ “The formation of Moloko (Russian for “milk”) is the “How We Met” story to end them all.

If you were attempting to do something in a Herbie Hancock style, circa ‘73, then you had to use the right synthesisers, there was only one way to do it. He has collaborated with Boy George, and played in the jazz-funk combo, Cloud 9. “I was writing within a soul-jazz bracket and it became increasingly frustrating There’s a lot of trainspotters in that scene. Murphy, 22, was expelled from her art-school foundation course “because I kept arguing with them You had to have explanations for everything Moloko is a reaction against that.