I'm either not on Twitter for days or I do about 10 tweets in 10 minutes. For the most part I enjoy it. It's a double-edged sword with social media, because you can get people who just want to be [trouble-makers], so we try to gloss over those. But I have to say, there aren't many. It's quite a community environment, which is weird, considering we're such a disparate group of people from all over the world. I think making a good album is hard enough, and making one that your fans—old and potentially new—are going to like, it's quite a mystical thing. And I don't think I did that very well with the last album. Retrospect can be a total pain, because you see everything really clearly. And looking back, I understand why there was some dissatisfaction that there wasn't more about the recent time that I've been through. And I fully appreciate that now. But then again, I haven't made up for that by doing it with this album, because it's not the zone that I'm in at the moment.

I consider Jake Shears to be the fairy godmother of this album. He was the one who was quite insistent and very passionate about my project—which is amazing, considering he had so much going on himself. Jake is so genuine. He's fruity. He's out there enough. I have a lot of mad friends, and he's one of them. He's needy, too! I guess I can see a bit of myself in him—in fact, more than a bit of myself. I think sometimes we might have been twins in a past life. We just get on. There's kind of an unspoken understanding of each other, even though we do talk an awful lot once we're together! The times I've worked with Jake and Babydaddy, Babydaddy's at the computer doing the more musical side, Jake and I have our pen and paper and are scrapping it out with lyrics and all that kind of stuff. Jake will get up and maybe do some chords on the synth. But it's pretty much heads-down when we're working. People might think thats it's going to be a whole lot of hilarity, but they're pretty serious about music-making.

I still can't say I totally know what it is to be a gay icon. It's just that the coming together and the kind of mutual support that exists between the gay community and myself happened so organically. It wasn't perpetrated by the record company or by me or by anyone. I was embraced, and I'm always more intrigued to know why that was from your point of view. From my point of view, I think that early on I was very successful but I had no credibility. I was given a really hard time, certainly back in Australia and then here in England for a while. I just feel like there was solidarity and a support that was manifested. And perhaps it was my gay audience seeing me being slightly vilified for me just being myself.

I can totally see the day when I do a performance of all my unreleased songs in a very small club for a limited run, and perhaps that would be recorded. In my head I've already done it! I just need to find the time. But that's something where I definitely wouldn't be as aware of the fans' feelings about a lot of those songs, were it not for Twitter and other social media platforms. The last thing I'd like to say (and if you're a fan, you might know what I'm talking about) is here's to us—the loveliest thing on planet Earth is love, love, love. It's a line from a song I performed once, called "That's Why They Write Love Songs." Which, whenever I do this gig that I was talking about—the kind of anti-gig—that's another song I'd perform.

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