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

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

The day I turned 16, I moved into my own flat. My parents had just broken up, and I didn't want to go back to Ireland with my mother. I was doing my A-levels, and my friends would come over and watch 'Twin Peaks.'

It all started with music for me. Everything still does.

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

Me making music happened not even from a desire to make records.

My uncle was a photographer for 'The Irish Times.'

I'm not someone to sit on her laurels.

I have a little antennae, and even when I'm trying not to be, I'm connected with the bloody zeitgeist.

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

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.

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.

Lyricism was placed into my head in Ireland.

I was surrounded by music in my family, surrounded by people who sang songs - every single person I knew as a child growing up had one, two, three songs they knew from start to finish.

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

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 always try to lace my work with just a teensy-weensy bit of humour. It's rather like putting a sprig of feathery stuff in a flower arrangement: I believe humour is a great balancer.

I thought I would be a visual artist when I was growing up, so I'm always up for a bit of experimentation.

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.

I feel more like an artist than a pop star, and I accidentally fell into what I do. Everything was just an experiment.

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.

I work extremely hard, but I love every minute of it. Although I couldn't work as hard if I felt there was a ceiling on anything. I spent £125,000 on four pictures for the sleeves for 'Overpowered,' and I loved spending it! It was like making a little movie.

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

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.