I wasn't terribly sociable. I had two or three friends at school. I drew things, played with Lego. My parents left me free to do whatever made me happy.
I do always look back and feel faintly embarrassed by anything I've done in the past. I think that's not a terrible thing, because if you don't do that, how are you growing and moving forward?
I wore a cloak for many years, I had long hair, I may have had a drop earring for a week and I fancied myself as a philosopher poet but was somewhere more in the gay female leisure pirate.
As a performer you often feel that you're the child and everyone else is a grown-up.
It's a controlling thing on stage - you're directing the action, getting people to play their role. In real life, I take being kind and nice seriously, so the last thing I'd ever want to be is that weird, controlling, manipulative character.
When you're with your partner, I think, does everyone else sing and do the stupid voices and all that stuff that I do and always have done?
I really liked 'Heist,' and that seems to be a popular favourite, but I think my personal favourite was 'Hero at 30,000 ft,' about the guy who ended up landing the aeroplane.
Sometimes you need to be aware of the bigger picture you are missing.
I've got a house full of taxidermy. It's like a museum. I have about 200 pieces in total, all ethically sourced.
When you're made to be frightened within a safe context, like watching a horror film, you have that tension/release which triggers all those happy chemicals that feel good.
There's something a bit embarrassing about saying you're a magician. It immediately suggests all these horrendous cliches, let alone that you're a grown-up doing a child's job.
Magic, whether it's mind magic or conjuring, is about the cheapest and quickest way of impressing people, and I think if you don't grow out of that as a magician then it shows, and people get a bit sick of that after a while, because it starts to feel like posturing. So I grew out of it.
I never quite know how to describe what I do. I normally just say, 'Oh, I'm a magician', which probably puts fairly naff ideas in people's minds but is pleasantly conversation-stopping.
I was in Leeds, just starting out, and I was hypnotising one person up on stage. Suddenly I had members of the crowd unsuspectingly go to sleep on me as well.
Being gay facilitated my capacity for shame. As a child, I carried around this thing that gradually became this big dark secret. When I came out in a newspaper interview at 30 I was expecting the reaction the following day to be like the climax of 'Dead Poets Society,' but actually no one really cared.
I was a Christian when I was young and didn't know any better.
What I do is rooted in magic - it's got a big foot planted firmly in conjuring, even if the other foot's planted in psychological techniques.
Magic's quite a solitary pursuit - a thing you can do for hours and hours, getting better and better.
Sexuality is often tied in with something you feel you lack in yourself and look for in others.
I'm a British psychological illusionist, which is a term I made up, but I do these kind of mind-reading and psychological experiments. There's nothing magical about it at all.
