I was given baby doll toys myself, and they proved a stark reminder that my life was expected to revolve around childbearing - just as my mom's had before me, and her mom's had before her.

Thanks to capitalism, the importance placed on beauty has never been so manipulated. We are the guinea pigs force-fed ads that tell us how pathetic we are: that we will never be loved, happy or valuable unless we have the body, the face, the hair, even the personality that will apparently be ours, if only we buy their products.

I mean, if I was living to please people, I'd have never been in a band at all. I wouldn't have anything awesome around. I'd just be bored.

I don't have a good attention span and can't spend long in record stores or video shops or games emporiums without getting grumpy.

The thing about being on the majors, from the beginning, going into this, I was like, "I'm not going to be treated like a factory," because that's never the way it was done before. You're talking about a major label, we're talking about serious business; you're not an artist anymore, you're a business, you have to work in terms of product, you have to release a product, and I don't really think that way at all.

We were a small group of weirdos and baby punks and gays and free spirits who had to use our imaginations a lot. We only saw pictures and read zines, so we could only interpret the aesthetic and message of punk scenes around the world. We were basically the duck-billed platypuses of punk.

I was always being told off at school. The teachers would say: 'Everyone's talking, but you're the one I can hear.