In 1997, we took time off, and that's when Oasis broke and Princess Diana died and I was home with my baby hating the music industry. People asked what I thought about the Spice Girls, and honestly, I was so happy to tell them I couldn't be bothered to care.

I was a full-time mom for seven years. You go back on tour, you're back in hotels, you're ordering room service, and you're getting an itinerary slipped under your door every,day. You're kind of thinking, 'Did I go home for seven years, or was that just a dream?'

U2 and Sinead O'Connor - I haven't a clue why we're compared to them. Apart from us all being Irish, we've nothing in common.

When everybody's looking at you, it does your head in. When you're always on the inside, sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees.

I look like that in the morning: my hair's all greasy - it's not, 'Hey, look at the babe of the band!' I hate that kind of thing, the way women are always pushed forward as beauties... it's very easy: you can make the ugliest pig look lovely in a photograph.

I'm an icon. I'm the Queen of Limerick.

I try to think about optimism. I try to look at the beautiful things in life.

You know that band that are all over 'Melody Maker,' Huggy Bear, they're just a load of crap, right? Riot grrrl group - y'know, it's all sexism and stuff, women standing up for their rights: 'This girl said this at the gig off the stage.' It's nothing got to do with music. They're probably untalented gits when it comes to the crunch.

It's important to take time off because it's a long journey this life, and I want to be singing in 30 years' time. You see a lot of artists who get caught up in the here and now, and they just burn themselves out, and I kind of did that myself with my third album.

I always come across like I'm looking serious, but I just don't like smiling. Honestly, obviously I'm different in person.

There's no point in getting too worried about things, because life is too short.

That's the thing with social media: it's a gift and a curse. It's cool on one level, but it's also bad.

I like soul, I like rock, I like new wave, I like punk music, I like blues, I like jazz, and I was brought up on all of them from a young boy all the way to my teenage years, when I was wild and crazy, in college.

The ghetto music of my era is hip-hop. And Parliament, and Curtis Mayfield, and Marvin Gaye, that was all the ghetto stuff when I was a baby, and then when I was a teenager it was hip-hop and we were taking all those old '70s sounds and recreating them and putting them into a hip-hop format.

All my idols have been in the studio with me, because they wanted to be there.

And hip-hop is about style and finesse and being creative and different, and to do that you have to be ballsy enough to not do what everybody else does.

I like when people don't think I can pull things off.

I'm super cool with Kanye.

I'm cool with Dr. Dre, I have his phone number, and he picks up when I call.

I'm from the pre-Pro Tools era where you had to meet up with the artist and go over things if you wanted to record a track.

I can't make the new generation like me, because they didn't grow up on me. So I stick to what I know.

I used to lie about my age at first because you always want to be 18, but then you start looking at it and you're 40, and the money's still coming. And you're like, 'Man, who cares about that?'

I think the fact that Gang Starr kept getting more and more successful was the reason we never thought about our age.

Black men, we're known for getting into some drama with other black men, specifically black-on-black crime. We're used to the confrontational attitude.