Roisin Murphy

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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