Lou Doillon

The French press can be very harsh, and the one thing they can't bear is multi-tasking. They despise it to the highest degree, so from the age of five I've been taught that if I did two things at the same time, it meant I didn't know how to do one. It's an obsession that they have.

I'm a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood - I've carved two of my guitars.

I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess - I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.

The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.

In a modern world where a majority of women say, 'I don't need you, I've got my money, I've got my stuff,' I say, 'I desperately need men.' My whole album is a tribute to men. It takes a man in me to tell you that I'm on my knees for men.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.