ELIOT SUMNER

On my fourth or fifth birthday, a guitar was given to me, and I made a new friend. A very loud friend.

Being Sting's daughter hasn't kicked any doors open for me - he has had absolutely nothing to do with my career. It's all been down to me so far, and that's how I want to keep it.

It's not a nice thing to have a song written about you.

I'm an extremist. I don't do things in halves. I don't moderate anything. That can be with work or with good things as well. But often, I take it a bit too far.

I can only be myself, and if I have to suffer for that, that's okay, because to pretend to be somebody else - I tried that, it's terrible.

I like to move around. It suits me. I grew up in Wiltshire on a farm, and that's the only place I call home.

I wear a lot of black. Like my heart.

I would make documentaries if it was a worthy cause. I have a lot of respect for people who put themselves in harm's way to make people see that something needs to be done.

I don't look into myself too much. I don't think I'm shy so much as a better listener than I am a speaker. I just really don't wish for attention.

It stresses me out writing songs,; I get really super nervous and speedy. I feel like I'm possessed.

It's always best to challenge yourself and go to a place out of your comfort zone.

I only wear black. I think it suits me.

For me, Paul Simon has always been an incredible songwriter, as he writes very complicated songs that sound very simple, and he makes it look so easy when it's not.

I picked up the guitar when I was 4, and from then, I could never be bored.

Music is the only thing that I trust.

It's difficult to explain exactly how I react to music, but if it makes me feel anything at all, then I'll have some kind of emotional relationship to it. That's what defines good music to me - if it makes me truly feel something.

My French is terrible, and my Spanish is even worse. I find Spanish really difficult. They speak so quickly, whereas in German, it's very clear what they're saying. It's easier to repeat.

I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to music. I like studio gear. I'm always looking it up on eBay and seeing what I can afford.

Self-sufficiency is vitally important to my self-respect. I never wanted to rely on my parents in that way, because I knew that if I got used to it, I'd be reliant all my life.

With social networks these days, everyone needs to know everything all the time. But the problem is, people are so used to short snippets of information that no one has any attention span anymore. I don't, anyway.

I sometimes suffer from insomnia, and one of the first times it ever happened, I was like, 'I don't know what to do with myself,' so I started writing a song, and by morning, it was finished. It was about how I couldn't sleep... I was 14.

I make my songs slightly abstract so that people can interpret them their own way. I think that's a lot more special, so you can hear a song and think, 'I feel exactly that way,' even if it wasn't written for that feeling.

People always have to have a reference - I think I'll always be in the shadow of my parents.

I think I have a lot of energy, and most of it is quite aggressive energy. But in a positive way, I think. It's like a positive aggression.

In 2009, I fractured my skull in a freak accident at an L.A. restaurant. I suffered a seizure and was rushed into hospital. I was so out of it that I refused to let them scan my brain. My dad rushed to my bedside and talked me into having the CAT scan - he told me that I might die if I didn't go through with it.