On 'Hairless Toys,' I've tried to create an ambiguous character to go with an ambiguous record. She's anything but rock n' roll - she's so not rock n' roll that, in a twisted way, she's kind of radical. She's like someone from my memory, almost like my mother, and she's lost in some space-time between the 1960s and the late '80s.
I love Andrew Weatherall; he's so real and uncompromising and a sweetheart.
My family were wheeler-dealer class. They were their own bosses and very glamorous. We lived in a beautiful, big townhouse in Arklow, in Ireland, that we couldn't afford to heat. My father had a business fitting bar furniture, and my mother is an antiques dealer.
There's a great deal of tension between so many kind of distinctive and restrictive female archetypes and images in the world. When you play with the archetypes, you get free.
I'm quite drawn to women artists who use themselves in their work. There is a very feminine point of view, the use of female archetypes. I love artists who play with those kind of things genuinely.
If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.
I found my style in my aunt's attic. She hoarded all her '60s clothes there, along with the tiaras she'd won as a beauty queen, and I'd steal her wedding dress to wear around town.
I didn't spend my childhood trying to be a performer; it was a big surprise to me that this was what I was doing. But it has always felt quite natural to me. I wasn't taught to do what I do; I found out bit by bit.
I never thought that was even possible, to have your friends working with you. In the music, yes, in the creative side, yes, but in the business side, I need people who take me fully seriously.
When I was 16 and on a tour of Europe, I fell in love with Le Corbusier's Notre Dame du Haut chapel in Ronchamp, France. I'd quite like to live in it.
'Take Her Up to Monto' is a very satirical song. I don't really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn't. It's a bit cheeky calling it 'Take Her Up to Monto,' but the whole idea was to be very irreverent.
I was given this beautiful coffee table book of Soviet architecture for my birthday. It has a lot of holiday camps, swimming pools, theatres, and buildings that were built for leisure activities. Incredible architecture in the most obscure places. It's a little bit sad, because a lot of it has been left to fall apart.
When I started out, the idea of wearing interesting clothes seemed to contradict the idea of being a serious artist. The first Moloko record, 'Do You Like My Tight Sweater?' was kind of a reaction to all that.
Once I was embraced by gay culture, I finally started to feel I was fitting in. I was understood by those people in a way I had never predicted or courted.
With Moloko, we tried to be the opposite of what was out there at the time. I like to be different. In the mid-Nineties, music was quite dour and serious, and everything was dressed down. So we went the other way. Our first record was about not wanting to do four-to-the-floor dance music.
I like taking different elements - clothes, shoes, lighting - and creating a total transformation. But it's never about hiding: it's about drawing something out from deep inside of me that's really true. I'm always trying really hard to tell you the truth. That's what this is all about for me.
That idea of not always being in control of the primitive parts of yourself - the bits that fall in love or the bits that dance or lose the plot or drink too much - and putting that across... that's pop for me. It's playing with all the different colours of the rainbow of life.
I use maps in my phone a great deal because I can't tell left from right. Having easy access to maps has given me a completely different life. When I first moved to London, I couldn't get anywhere and spent so much money on cabs because I couldn't figure it out.
On 'Overpowered,' there was a nostalgia for disco and early house music. But I'm a modernist and futurist as well. I do believe - and this is going to sound really pretentious, I know - that humanity will figure it out, so I'm optimistic about the future.
When I go home, I go to my house in the countryside. I don't hang out in Dublin. I go home to be with my family and have a rest and so on. I don't know anything about the Irish music scene, and I've never felt part of it.
