The London-based singer/songwriter talks to Heidi Maier about creating a performative persona, writing songs in “stolen moments” and exactly what it took to create the concept behind her recently released second album.

AS SHE tells it, Marina Diamandis is something of a magpie, in both music and life, casting about for ideas and influences “the same way magpies look for shiny pretty things and then, you know, line their nests with them, get a bit inspired by the pretty things they find.”

She was living in a self-described “really seedy part of Los Angeles” when the concept for her recently released album, Electra Heart, truly began to take shape.

Comfortably ensconced in “really very nice hotel in a rather skuzzy part of town,” she did a lot of op-shopping and credits happening upon a bright pink PVC dress with “sort of bringing Electra alive in my mind in a really full, proper way.”

The titular heroine, if you like, of Diamandis’ musical landscape would be, she says she realised, “a proper woman: multi-faceted, interesting, sometimes likeable, sometimes infuriating, sometimes heartbroken, sometimes vengeful. The sort of girl who can wear a dress like that or be quieter and more subdued.”

She has, she readily admits, always been “quite obsessed with American pop culture” and it was, in essence, the notion of the American Dream that inspired many of the album’s 12 songs and the character of Electra Heart herself.

“I think, for all of us from outside of the US, we sort of have that thing where we think it’s something totally different to what it is, you know? The idea of escapism and reinvention is quite ingrained in their culture. The whole notion of being able to completely reinvent yourself is definitely reinforced. There’s that entire idea that it doesn’t matter who you are, where you’ve come from, what you’ve done – you can become anybody and rebuild yourself in some sense,” Diamandis observes.

“I think that’s why I find American culture so alluring. As an artist, I think that’s really good, fertile ground to be creative in and that was certainly the case for me. I don’t think that making Electra Heart has necessarily quenched my desire to research American culture. I touched on it on the first record, but I wanted to explore it a lot more this time and I think I nailed it. I was very inspired by the visual, even though it’s really an album about love and heartbreak.”

Electra Heart is very much Diamandis as a theatrical performer as well as a singer. For much of the album she inhabits several distinctive and very different female personas, all of whom she says “do, to some extent, represent various parts of me, various feelings I’ve had, various emotions I’ve gone through.”

There’s the wanton temptress who croons, by turns snide and sardonic, on ‘Bubblegum Bitch’ and ‘Primadonna’; the pleading, hopeful, occasionally desperate woman who gives voice to her fears and longings on ‘Lies,’ ‘State of Dreaming,’ ‘Valley of the Dolls’ and ‘Hypocrates’ and also the more level-headed, avowed realist who delivers two of the album’s stand-out tracks, ‘Starring Role’ and the withering, wrenching ‘Fear and Loathing.’

When Diamandis and I speak, Electra Heart is sitting pretty at the top of the UK Albums Chart. It’s an undisputed triumph for the artist, though not necessarily for the immediately obvious reasons one might think. It represents, for her, “a bit of an acknowledgement that my experiment worked, that I’ve crossed over from one genre to another and people get it.”

“My first album [The Family Jewels] did quite well. Quite a lot of critics liked it and I have a really wonderful, loyal fanbase, but I was also criticised for a lot of the stuff on there and it did make me feel timid for a time. Plus, this album is much more overtly pop than the first and that was very much a conscious move, but it was also scary. I started out as an indie artist, really, and I was concerned about making the shift. I was concerned that my fans might not understand what I was doing or that I’d perhaps be perceived as vacuous or empty-headed,” Diamandis says.

“I wrote ‘Living Dead’ a month after the first album came out and the songs that followed that were very much in that vein. It’s darker pop, but also quite a lot more electronic, a lot colder and much more detached. So, I think, from then I knew that I actually wanted a lot of the album to be like that, to be purposefully quite cold and detached, but at the same time really quite emotive, so I think that’s the main sound of it really. Well, except for ‘Primadonna,’ which is really upbeat and really happy, but that’s kind of the odd duck out.”

Currently on the road undertaking an extensive UK and European tour, Diamandis says she would “absolutely love” to play in Australia. She toured here in 2010, doing a short run of shows at various festivals in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. She also played two sold-out sideshows in Sydney and Melbourne.

Should she tour here again, Diamandis has a clear vision of what she’d like her shows to be, namely “proper sit-down pop shows. Because the album’s quite complicated and I quite like the idea of people being able to sort of sit and process it all as it’s happening rather than being jammed together the way you can be at festivals.”

She has, she says, already got some ideas for record number three “percolating in the old mind” and confesses that, while touring, she listens mostly to the artists whose work has inspired her: Dolly Parton, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love, Garbage and No Doubt among them.

“I have really diverse taste in music and my influences are kind of crazily broad. I love Shirley Manson and I love Gwen Stefani. I do have an idea for the new album. I find they always come quite quickly after you finish your last piece of work. Or, you know, that tends to be the case for me. Having said that to you, though, it’ll possibly become another beast entirely by the time I properly get into writing properly,” Diamandis laughs.

“But, yeah, for the moment, I do have a strong idea, though I haven’t really done much about it yet. I will, though. Being on the road is quite good for my songwriting. I do a lot of it in stolen moments, in hotel rooms. If I get extra time, I try and do something useful with it. It happens when it happens and I’m quite content with that for now. I like to do it a bit at a time, as I go along, then it’s much less scary when I’m called in and asked to show them songs because, you know, I actually have some!”

Electra Heart is out now through Warner Music Australia.