What is your new show about?
Its about the period in my life when I was trying to make it as a singer / songwriter with my own band ‘Wilby’. I released an album, played at Glastonbury and Ronnie Scott’s, and supported people including Bob Geldof. I documented all the parties, weird auditions and fraught band relationships in a column called Rosie’s Pop Diary in the now defunct magazine Making Music. I recently decided to read these again for the first time in the ten years since the mag folded, the column ended and the band broke up. And I hardly recognised myself. So I suppose there’s a philosophical element to the show thinking about how time changes and colours our memories and how people change. And how popular culture has moved on. The first diaries are from 1996 when the Internet seemed like a new thing. And everyone had a Filofax. It was an incredibly eventful time for me on a personal level and it seemed like enough time had passed to see the comedic side of this. Fortunately I’d saved enough stuff including old diaries, old photos, old lyric sheets, old reviews and so on to build the picture back up again.

How does it feel to move from a music career into comedy?  Was it a seamless transition?
It was quite a slow gradual transition. Music was central to my life throughout my teens and twenties. And comedy had really not occurred to me until my band started to break up. I didn’t feel all that confident when I started to do gigs as a solo acoustic act so I thought I could add something by telling stories in between the songs. I started trying to make these funny because I realised that my songs were quite sad and was self aware enough to be able to joke about this and how I was conforming to the ‘wailing woman with a guitar’ stereotype. More and more people said I had something naturally funny about me. So I heard about some of the comedy competitions and entered a couple of those in 2004 and 2005 reaching semi finals in So You Think You’re Funny and Laughing Horse without really knowing what I was doing. But I was clueless about how the comedy circuit worked. I thought it was like the music scene in London where bands tended to do about one gig a month because promoters wouldn’t rebook you unless you brought about 20 friends along every time. So it was impossible to gig with any regularity. It took me until summer 2006, when I reached the final of Funny Women at the Comedy Store and as a result started getting offered more gigs, to realise that most comedians gig every night. I couldn’t get my head around it at all.

Describe your worst ever gig.
What started out as one of my worse ever gigs actually turned into one of the best ones. It was on International Womens’ Day in 2007 when I was still very new to comedy and a friend of mine had to pull out of a gig and asked me to replace her. So when I turned up I was not who they had been expecting. And the gig was not what I had expected either. It was at a Christian centre in Battersea with an audience of mostly black women. I was shown to the lectern in front of a large cross from which I was deliver my set, and had visions of them tying me to a chair and doing an exorcism like the scene in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. And yet, my preconceptions turned out to be all wrong. Although when I brought my gay material in, there was a woman who almost fell off her chair with shock I managed to have fun with her and challenge her ideas about lesbians. And there was a lovely connection that developed. I think we managed to unearth some of the universal things about human beings in love and relationships, gay, straight or bi. And it made me think twice about pre-judging a gig and an audience after that. Another tough one was at a night I’d been asked to compere by a website called Gay Camberwell. The first one ran at a pub that turned out to be the wrong venue for it. When I arrived the manager informed me that she hadn’t yet put the microphone onstage in case someone stole it. She then told me how people even stole air fresheners from the urinals when you could buy 3 for £1 at the shop across the road. When my friend Cilla arrived, she mentioned that there seemed to be some people in the audience that she would refer to as ‘street drinkers’. I was compering and trying to encourage the audience to give lots of applause as I brought the first act on. One member took this as a cue to run up onto stage himself and I had to hold him at arms length. By the time our headliner Julie Jepson had gone on, she found herself upstaged by a dog called Rascal (who looked like a dangerous breed to me) who decided to run around chasing his tail directly in front of the stage. After this we ran a regular night at a more suitable pub just down the road.

Are there any things you particularly like or dislike about Edinburgh?
I like performing every day and the fact that you can run around doing lots of other shorter showcase spots too. Last year, I was sometimes cramming in 5 gigs a day. And of course you can go and see lots of shows too. Paul Foot was my highlight last year. I dislike the loneliness. My girlfriend for the last five years hated the Fringe and would only come for the briefest possible visit. I missed her every Aug so badly. But fortunately my new girlfriend is still un-jaded about comedy and supporting me so has three visits planned. Yay! I understand though that going out with a comedian is really difficult. We’re a weird breed with odd schedules.

What makes you angry?
Really small things like a chocolate bar getting stuck in a vending machine. This happened to me recently on a deserted platform at Market Harborough station. I put more money in thinking that I could then trigger 2 chocolate bars coming out. But still nothing. I can feel quite bereft about things like that for a long time until I feel somehow the chocolate bar has been ‘replaced’ ie if a friend gives me chocolate out of the blue. Maybe the chocolate has a larger life significance here?

What makes you laugh?
My best friend Rachel Holmes. We’ve always had an odd way of interacting which sometimes can include making cat noises at one another. She’s teetotal so there’s not even alcohol involved. I think she’s just always been someone who opens up my silly side. After years of bemusing our friends at parties, we decided to actually record some of our conversations and now have a podcast together called Odd Ones Out which is a spoof take on the LGBT news.

Tell us about your LGBT radio show in London.
I also present and produce LGBT magazine show Out In South London on Resonance FM. People can listen online anywhere in the world on resonancefm.com and its every Tuesday at 6.30pm. I’ve been doing it for 3 years now because I thought it was a real shame there was nothing like that on the BBC any more. Why can’t LGBT people hear themselves on the airwaves? Of course we have filtered through a bit to the mainstream with people like Sue Perkins. But she’s not the only LGBT person out there. And sometimes its nice to tune in when you know there will be LGBT issues discussed. We’ve had brilliant guests on our show including Sarah Waters, Stella Duffy, Patrick Wolf and we’ve highlighted a lot of important community issues too including homophobic violence.

The last couple of years in your Science of Sex shows you performed as a wonderful nutty professor type character. Will we be seeing her again?
Ha ha yes I miss ‘Dr Love’ too and she does pop up from time to time. I still get asked to do excerpts of Science Of Sex from everyone including the South Bank (on World Book Day) to London Zoo (for their Summer Lates).

Do you see yourself as a role model?
I haven’t really thought about it. But if I have ever inspired any LGBT people to go out there and do stuff and be bold about their sexuality, then I’d be really happy.

There are many out lesbian comedians performing at the Fringe this year and there does seem to be a lot of lesbian comedians on the circuit. Is there a reason for this?
Hmmm, yes we seem to be ‘breeding’ which is ironic as its much more complex for us to do this. Maybe someone is running around the circuit with a turkey baster filled with comedian lesbian DNA. I’m glad to see it. Up’n’coming Suzi Ruffell, Sarah Campbell and Sarah Archer have all featured heavily on Out In South London.