Roisin Murphy

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.

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.

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 love performance, but I'm quite happy making videos as well, and I'm inordinately happy writing songs.

I don't like to work with stylists - I find the relationship too intimidating - but I love fashion.

My fashion icons change regularly.

It's a natural disposition for me to become muse-like in a relationship.

I do come alive in front of a camera. The first video I ever made was a formative moment for me.

My family are all mad. But I got a lot of strength from them.

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.

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

I respect Lady Gaga's work as an artist and as a fellow fashion icon. She is a very talented performer, playing the piano, singing live, and dancing, too.

I'm brave and fearless when I'm performing, but in real life, I'm actually quite prudish.

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.

Being able to express yourself is one of the hardest things in the world.

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 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.

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.

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.

Peggy Guggenheim is a real hero to have done what she did in a man's world, as the art world still is.