Quotes from Roisin Murphy

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

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.

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.

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

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

That's the good thing about pop. You can do whatever you like... it's a bendable medium.

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

One night, my father woke me up because he'd come home with a horse. Two days later, I asked my mother where it was, and she said it had run away. She'd sold it.

I went to bed on the night of Brexit, of that vote for leaving the E.U., and I said to everyone it will be a 70/30: nobody wants to leave the E.U. I woke up on the bus in Glastonbury, and everybody had their heads in their hands. They could not believe it. I could not believe it.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

My fashion icons change regularly.

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.

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

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.

You've got to deal with the tools you have in hand. I'm a firm believer in that.

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.