I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music – I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter – that I got from my dad.
The equipment you’ve got really dictates what you’re going to do. When I started touring, there were no monitors, so I had to take the sound from the hall, and of course it was on a delay, so I would sing, and then I would hear it back, but later. It was very weird.
I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.
I want to do movies, but I want to do something that’s good. I don’t want to make any more films until I feel that I’m ready for it. I want to have good work, and a very elegant life. I believe you get what you want.
When you are 18, 19, 20, you’re used to being photographed all the time, in a certain way. So, the narcissism becomes almost out of control. And the way that young women are photographed, they become addicted to this feedback of the image.
Sometimes you just have to get a shock to grow up and wake up, and I’ve had lots of shocks because it’s as though I don’t learn the lessons, so something new comes and hits me.
When you split from someone, it doesn’t have to mean that you don’t love them anymore, you realize that the period of that particular romance is over. One always has to get out before one gets kicked out.
I’ve got a lot of little compulsive problems, and I’ve thought about it a lot. And one of the things I ask myself is, ‘What are the things I can do that won’t hurt me and will help me?’ The first answer is work.
