I'm not living my life under the spotlight for anybody.

My issue with the state of women became incredibly stimulated when I was visiting developing countries and it became obvious that women bore the brunt of so many things in society.

The music scene in the '70s was like the United Kingdom in the '70s - we had a lot of unemployment, we had inflation, we had a lot of strikes going on, on a national scale, and a lot of discontent. That was reflected in the music.

I can't understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven't really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa - 60 percent of people in - infected with HIV are women.

I find beauty in a very independent state. It lives quietly. It's there to be discovered.

There's so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it.

More than anything, I think everything about appearance is illusory. People see you, and they think they understand what you're projecting, but actually, they have their own interpretation of it, or they put a label on you.