It was a double-edged sword, but being a major-label artist, I felt like a commodity, a thing to be sold.

I cleaned for a very posh lady in Knightsbridge who made me handwash her knickers. I’d advertised myself in The Lady as a dog walker, so I’m not sure how I ended up there.

Collecting glasses in a Lancashire pub. Try to take a pint glass with a millimetre of foam still in it, and you get a lit cigarette on the back of your hand.

I was a floor model briefly at Bloomingdale’s in New York in 1979. I hated it. When no one was watching, I would lock myself in the toilet and read.

It’s like digging a field together: it’s hard work, not very glamorous, but you can stand back and think, “We did that.”

I am going straight to cremation like David Bowie, so there would be no funeral.

I wish I’d told my mother that, in all the years I knew her, she was never once boring. We weren’t demonstrative, so that would have meant that I loved her.

The moment my daughter was born in 1999, because it took me seven years to conceive.

I had no female role models growing up. I lived an incredibly sheltered life: there was no TV at home and we had no visitors. It wasn’t until rock and pop came into my life that I concocted myself as a role model.

Romantic love – what a con. (I do still believe in it.)