Roisin Murphy

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.

The sound of 'Take Her Up to Monto' and 'Hairless Toys' is the sound of me and the producer in the studio doing whatever we like. There is no reference. It's too easy to be referential now; I'm trying to find something else.

I never thought that was even possible, to have your friends working with you. In the music, yes, in the creative side, yes, but in the business side, I need people who take me fully seriously.

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

I didn't spend my childhood trying to be a performer; it was a big surprise to me that this was what I was doing. But it has always felt quite natural to me. I wasn't taught to do what I do; I found out bit by bit.

If they were siblings, 'Hairless Toys' would be the nice child, and 'Take Her Up to Monto' is more of a problem child.

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.

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.

My fashion icons change regularly.

I've seen massive changes in Ireland in my lifetime.

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.

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.