I wasn't embraced as an Irish artist back in the Moloko days. Modern electronica isn't what you think of when you think of Irish music.
A year before I met Mark Brydon - he was the one I used to make all the music with in Moloko - I was living in Sheffield with a guy who was studying architecture. I used to go to his college and crash the lectures there. I had enrolled to do a fine art course, but then I met Mark, and we signed a record deal instead.
I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I'm always up for a bit of experimentation.
Being able to express yourself is one of the hardest things in the world.
The reason why I'm not a pop star is I would have hated it. I'll stick to being an artist. I'm not trying not to be commercial; I am just doing what I do. I have finely tuned tastes, and that gets prioritized above everything else. That's just how it is.
When I had my first child, I went back to Ireland to live with my mother. So, a typical day there was me being a mother, with my mum showing me how to do things.
Fashion in the mid-'90s was too easy. Artistic culture was very earnest, so I was flamboyant and dangerous. I wanted to be seen as more than an outline, so I used fashion to say that for me.
I am very attracted to funny people - I'd go so far as to say I find it hard to trust unfunny people.
I've got crap teeth, crap hair. I never have facials. I still have hairs in the middle of my eyebrows.
The most healthy way to be creative is to work with what you have and not sit around wishing you had something different.
My music's like waiting for a bus. You wait a long time for one, then a whole heap of them come along.
When you're a kid, right, and you're surrounded by all these other kids, and let's say they don't have the same interests or the same goals or the same world view as you... It's difficult because a child doesn't know that there's another way. A child doesn't know that there's another place outside of the systems and hierarchies in school.
I love performance, but I'm quite happy making videos as well, and I'm inordinately happy writing songs.
I always try to lace my work with just a teensy-weensy bit of humour. It's rather like putting a sprig of feathery stuff in a flower arrangement: I believe humour is a great balancer.
I'm not someone to sit on her laurels.
I was about 10 when I first began to sing. My mother had been away for three weeks, and I learned 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina.' When she came back, I sang it in front of her, my auntie Linda, my father, my uncle Jim, and my grandmother.
At 16, I got housing benefit, and I had my own flat in an old woman's house. I was the only 16-year-old I knew living alone.
Performance was a shock to me. The first time I remember feeling I could do it was during the making of my first video, 'Fun for Me.' I couldn't sleep the night before the shoot, I was so frightened. I had to play a ghost and a piece of merchandise in a shop window, and I had no idea whether I was going to be able to pull it off.
I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.
The day I turned 16, I moved into my own flat. My parents had just broken up, and I didn't want to go back to Ireland with my mother. I was doing my A-levels, and my friends would come over and watch 'Twin Peaks.'