"I was brought up feeling that my mother had sacrificed herself for me. Fortunately she's now got a little business doing homeopathy from home, but she's almost 60. I'm still desperate to get over that sense of guilt. I don't want my baby to feel that."
An infant prodigy, she released her first album at 11 and was touring the world by 18, when the Sugarcubes' first single Birthday went global. She spent years living in London, but decamped to New York in 2000, driven out by British tabloids and a terrible incident where a 21-year-old "fan" videotaped his own suicide after mailing an acid bomb to her record company.
Like fellow emigre David Bowie, she prefers the anonymity of New York, "where they only have one tabloid, not four all competing against each other."
She says that she resolutely avoids celebrity parties but one day might like to run a music school for children.
"Part of me is probably more conservative than people realize. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake."
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