Quotes from Roisin Murphy

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.

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.

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.

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

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 uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'

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

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.

I just wouldn't enjoy standing there like a paper doll, having someone else stick paper dresses on me. That would be no fun.

Ireland is a great place to be odd.

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.

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.

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

I've worked all my life not to be a simpleton.

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

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

I'm not someone to sit on her laurels.

Music has given me a fantastic lifestyle.

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