Grammy-winning LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy chats with PRIOR about snorkeling for oysters in Sweden, the Paris bistro that sparked a natural-wine obsession, and the lessons learned in running The Four Horsemen bar in Brooklyn.

Melon and prosciutto at The Four Horsemen. Credit: David Malosh

Having toured the globe many times over as the frontman of LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy not only soldered a status as a sort of dance-punk poet laureate, he also steadily cultivated an impressively rounded palate for food, wine and travel.

It was an incremental education for the singer, songwriter, founder of the seminal DFA Records and, in more recent times, the part-owner of Brooklyn wine bar and restaurant The Four Horsemen. Until adulthood, he had barely flown in a plane. In fact, his broader explorations would not begin in earnest until his thirties in the mid-2000s when LCD Soundsystem graduated from New York’s downtown to worldwide repute.

“I went from not traveling apart from in punk bands driving in vans around the US to perpetually being in airports,” Murphy explains from New York City. “Suddenly I was living a lot of my life in Europe and Japan and South America—it was a remarkable, life-changing thing.”

Between music commitments, he immersed himself in culinary scenes at home and afar, befriending chefs like David Chang and René Redzepi and becoming a genuine gastronome with an attendant obsession with natural wines.

After LCD Soundsystem disbanded in 2011 (although they have since reformed), he channeled his energies into various ventures, including co-opening The Four Horsemen in 2015 with his Danish wife Christina Topsøe and two others. A homely space whose white walls and blonde wood lend it a Nordic-meets-Japanese vibe, its menu places a heavy emphasis on natural wines.

Beyond the bar, Murphy tends to a panoply of interests, having scored films, acquiring a Grammy last year with the newly active LCD Soundsystem, and traveling for select music projects, as well as with Topsøe and their son on vacation. “Although my wife is more adventurous,” he notes of their contrary preferences. “She wants to go to Sri Lanka to see elephants, she’s trekked through Bhutan and backpacked through Russia and China. My job, which takes me from city to city, means I’m sort of like a perpetual urbanist.”

Are there any places that frequently appear on your itinerary? I like traveling to places where I can ski. I used to snowboard when I was young and I learned to ski not that long ago, so I feel like a kid again. Like, it’s good to suck at something. I still enjoy going to Copenhagen, which I do a lot, and London and Japan. I have friends in different cities from my work and that draws me to places a lot.

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Do you have a favorite hotel from touring with LCD Soundsystem? It’s since changed names, but the Great Eastern Hotel in London. The first show we ever played over there was at some party in their ballroom. I think it was the first fancy hotel any of us had ever stayed in and it blew our minds. We were like, “Look at these towels, look at this robe.” I always had the same room with a corner bathroom where you could take a bath and look out at East London. We became friends with them, so I would leave a box that had socks, toiletries, a turntable and a speaker, so that when I came to stay, they would have already set up everything I needed in the room like it was my apartment.

You are famously evangelic about natural wines. Was there a particular experience that ignited the obsession? Yes, I was with Justin Chearno, who’s one of the partners and the wine director at The Four Horsemen. He worked at Uva [in New York] in the early, early days, and he was turning me onto wine. One time we were both in Paris—I was DJing or something—and a couple of our friends said, “Let’s go to Racines in Passage de Panoramas.” Pierre Jancou was the guy who ran it and he just had charcuterie, cheese, coffee, bread, small plates and natural wine. I think it was the first time I had a Frank Cornelissen MunJebel or a macerated white wine—I may have even had a Massa Vecchia—but it just tore my head off. I didn’t really care about wine when I was younger—I thought it was fancy, and I’m from a pretty shitty suburban background where wine seemed like a feat. That wine in that particular space with those people was a big a-ha moment for me.

Has it been a steep learning curve opening The Four Horsemen? Yes, I learned that it’s wise to stay out of the fray to a certain degree and to make sure you have people that you know you can trust to run it. We have a professional manager, we have a professional chef, we have a good accountant, and it allows me and the other partners to do our different specialties of thinking with some abstraction and distance.

Do you have any ambitions to do something else like that? I mean, yes and no. The Four Horsemen is such a personal place that I don’t know that we would love doing a lot of them, but we’re looking to expand behind the Horsemen and have a little sneaky bar perhaps. That would be pretty great.

What are your favorite wine bars around the world? Oh, there are a ton of them. I love Verre Volé in Paris. Ved Stranden 10 in Copenhagen. The Ahiru Store over in Tokyo. And I love Brawn and the Laughing Heart in London.