I don't think Ireland has really embraced me, but it is not really for me to say. Obviously, people shouldn't embrace me just because I'm Irish, but it is where I'm from. I'm extremely proud to be Irish.

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.

One of my favourite books of all time is 'The Borstal Boy.'

I don't have any problems on social media. I have the most wonderful fans. I'm the luckiest girl in the world in that way.

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.

I've not got any terrible stories of what I had to do to scrabble my way to the top, obviously, because I didn't scrabble my way to the top. I just scrabbled my way to the middle!

Ireland is a great place to be odd.

Timeless and unclassifiable - that's the goal. My oddness is the pursuit of this above all else.

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.

Ambition can get you freedom.

Music has given me a fantastic lifestyle.

My music's like waiting for a bus. You wait a long time for one, then a whole heap of them come along.

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.

I'm proud that I've even had a career, but 'proud' isn't the first word I'd use. I feel lucky that I moved to Manchester when I was 12 because I don't think I could have done this in Ireland. And I feel lucky that the government took care of me from the age of 16 to when I signed my first record deal at 19.

If they were siblings, 'Hairless Toys' would be the nice child, and 'Take Her Up to Monto' is more of a problem child.

I became a singer and a songwriter by learning on the spot, so think I always need to be slightly out of my comfort zone when I do something. I've never stopped being experimental because that's how I started.

Originally, I thought of being a photographer and nearly went to art school, but I got a record deal instead.

I don't have a personal stylist, because I don't need one. I just really enjoy meeting designers and picking up clothes.

I won't let anything destroy me.

I don't like permanency. I just like to slip and slide, and in identity, I think that's a very feminine artist's point of view.

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 a situationist when it comes to anything creative, and that stands with the visual part of anything I do as well. I deal with the concrete things I have in front of me, and I think that's a wise way to be.

The sound of 'Take Her Up to Monto' and 'Hairless Toys' is the sound of me and the producer in the studio doing whatever we like. There is no reference. It's too easy to be referential now; I'm trying to find something else.

I really do prioritise humour in people. It's a sign of intelligence. One of the most important things I heard that moulded me was Derek and Clive. That sense of release when I heard them for the first time, crying and laughing, was akin to seeing Sonic Youth for the first time.

I couldn't even sing when I started.

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.

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.

I don't really know if I am thought of as a style icon. I don't feel like that at all. Music comes first, but I also just enjoy being creative in whatever I'm doing, be it wearing clothes, making images, or performing.

Humour is ahead of everything creatively. I think if things aren't humorous, they are just crap.

I think I have an instinct of, like, the right record comes knocking at my door and says, 'Want to come out to play?' and I go.

You can't get a better education in what it is to write songs until you listen to American soul music.

There'll always be a part of me that wants to remain mysterious.

I've only ever had surprises. My whole career's a surprise!

I've got crap teeth, crap hair. I never have facials. I still have hairs in the middle of my eyebrows.

The Church controlled so much in Ireland for so long. I'm not going to get into whether or not religion per se is a bad thing, but my point is the political aspect in Ireland was way out of kilter, and it wasn't right.

I never said, 'Lady Gaga is a poor imitation of me.' That was a completely made-up quote.

I love Andrew Weatherall; he's so real and uncompromising and a sweetheart.

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.

I am very attracted to funny people - I'd go so far as to say I find it hard to trust unfunny people.

Someone said to me a long time ago, 'You're a drag queen,' and at the time I was a little like... hello? But then I realized over the years that I actually am.

We were brought up to think we were amazing. Maybe I was too confident, too full of myself. I found school difficult. I'd get followed home by 20 kids throwing stuff at me. The teachers didn't like me, either. We left Ireland for Manchester when I was 12, and I was happy to go.

'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.

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 work with men a lot, and there's a yin and a yang that goes on when you work one guy and one girl. And there's things that I bring that they don't bring and things they bring and I don't bring.

My fashion icons change regularly.

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.

Designers become translators for me. That's why I've gone to people like Gareth Pugh and Viktor and Rolf - they are speaking a nuanced language. Fashion says a lot for me.

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.

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.

The most healthy way to be creative is to work with what you have and not sit around wishing you had something different.