SW:   That would have to be Siouxsie Sioux, the surrogate mother who dragged me kicking and screaming through my adolescence and who taught me everything I needed to know in life via listening to the first four albums of Siouxsie and the Banshees. 
 
I had a troubled childhood and was institutionalised for a while; it was something that was never talked about in my family. It was just buried and we got on with it. But it always haunted me and later I reached a point where I felt I couldn’t move forwards with my life until that particular demon had been exorcised. So, when Tim and I split, I regressed back to my teenage self, to a time when I felt most powerful. That was when I was an obsessive Siouxsie and the Banshee fan, buying all their records and travelling up and down the country to watch them play live. Looking back, what I didn’t realise at the time was that I had somehow in my mind adopted Siouxsie Sioux as a mother figure as she was the polar opposite of my own mother.
 
My mother worked in a factory, had three kids and lived in suburbia and was ‘looked after’ by a man, which was the norm in them days. The whole punk rock movement in England in the late Seventies felt like one of the first instances where women were given equal importance alongside men – which was groundbreaking for a disillusioned teenager such as myself. Siouxsie Sioux invented an individual style that kicked down the doors of normality, with thigh-high killer heel patent-leather boots and Cleopatra-style makeup, and guided me to an alternative future from what was already written. As a result, my most recent work is more personal, an introspective awakening, a kind of homage to a woman who I consider to have in some way saved my life.