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.

Roisin Murphy

I've got crap teeth, crap hair. I never have facials. I still have hairs in the middle of my eyebrows.

The Church controlled so much in Ireland for so long. I'm not going to get into whether or not religion per se is a bad thing, but my point is the political aspect in Ireland was way out of kilter, and it wasn't right.

Roisin Murphy

Religion Whether Way

When I had my first child, I went back to Ireland to live with my mother. So, a typical day there was me being a mother, with my mum showing me how to do things.

Roisin Murphy

Wit Wing Win

Someone said to me a long time ago, 'You're a drag queen,' and at the time I was a little like... hello? But then I realized over the years that I actually am.

Roisin Murphy

Time You Years

On 'Hairless Toys,' I've tried to create an ambiguous character to go with an ambiguous record. She's anything but rock n' roll - she's so not rock n' roll that, in a twisted way, she's kind of radical. She's like someone from my memory, almost like my mother, and she's lost in some space-time between the 1960s and the late '80s.

Roisin Murphy

Time Space Wit

We were brought up to think we were amazing. Maybe I was too confident, too full of myself. I found school difficult. I'd get followed home by 20 kids throwing stuff at me. The teachers didn't like me, either. We left Ireland for Manchester when I was 12, and I was happy to go.

Roisin Murphy

Teacher Home Amazing

'Take Her Up to Monto' is a very satirical song. I don't really like people calling it a folk song because it kind of isn't. It's a bit cheeky calling it 'Take Her Up to Monto,' but the whole idea was to be very irreverent.

Roisin Murphy

Whole Who Very

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.

Roisin Murphy

Love Life Art

My fashion icons change regularly.

Roisin Murphy

Change Regularly Regular

I never said, 'Lady Gaga is a poor imitation of me.' That was a completely made-up quote.

Roisin Murphy

Up T Said

I love Andrew Weatherall; he's so real and uncompromising and a sweetheart.

Roisin Murphy

Love Art Weather

Designers become translators for me. That's why I've gone to people like Gareth Pugh and Viktor and Rolf - they are speaking a nuanced language. Fashion says a lot for me.

Roisin Murphy

Design Age Why

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

Roisin Murphy

Work Health You

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.

Roisin Murphy

Yin Ways Way

I've always been attracted to weirdos.

Roisin Murphy

Weirdo Weird Ways

It's not nice to be called a nutter, because it dismisses the input I've had into my own destiny over the years.

Roisin Murphy

Years Year Utter

I respect Lady Gaga's work as an artist and as a fellow fashion icon. She is a very talented performer, playing the piano, singing live, and dancing, too.

Roisin Murphy

Work Respect Art

Peggy Guggenheim is a real hero to have done what she did in a man's world, as the art world still is.

Roisin Murphy

Art World Till

I'm really into architecture, I'm a member of the Brutalist Appreciation Society; I'm a member of the Postmodern Society. I write letters to save buildings.

Roisin Murphy

Society Architecture Write

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.

Roisin Murphy

Time Window Wind

I collect words and phrases and cut things out of newspapers and keep scrapbooks and write down ideas in my phone or 10,000 notebooks all around my house. It's not very organised, but I keep collecting, so I did have a lot of material to help me to write songs.

Roisin Murphy

Being able to express yourself is one of the hardest things in the world.

Roisin Murphy

The reason why I'm not a pop star is I would have hated it. I'll stick to being an artist. I'm not trying not to be commercial; I am just doing what I do. I have finely tuned tastes, and that gets prioritized above everything else. That's just how it is.

Roisin Murphy

My father ruined me for men. Not many can live up to him.

Roisin Murphy

If I had gone to art college and everybody was being a conceptual artist, I probably would have wanted to be a portrait or landscape painter.

Roisin Murphy

My da used to sing 'Take Her Up to Monto' to me when we were walking down the street - he still does, actually - because it's got a walking tempo, and I still sing it to myself when I'm walking along.

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.

Roisin Murphy

That's the good thing about pop. You can do whatever you like... it's a bendable medium.

Roisin Murphy

One night, my father woke me up because he'd come home with a horse. Two days later, I asked my mother where it was, and she said it had run away. She'd sold it.

Roisin Murphy

I think my whole career has been marked - or marred - by what people presume about me. But even that's fed back into the creativity. I'm saying that I'm about contradiction, that you can't put me into a box.

Roisin Murphy

I was about 10 when I first began to sing. My mother had been away for three weeks, and I learned 'Don't Cry for Me Argentina.' When she came back, I sang it in front of her, my auntie Linda, my father, my uncle Jim, and my grandmother.

Roisin Murphy

When I started out, the idea of wearing interesting clothes seemed to contradict the idea of being a serious artist. The first Moloko record, 'Do You Like My Tight Sweater?' was kind of a reaction to all that.

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

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.

Roisin Murphy

Lyricism was placed into my head in Ireland.

Roisin Murphy

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.

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.

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

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

Roisin Murphy

I'm not someone to sit on her laurels.

Roisin Murphy