No-one would have predicted that the biggest hit at po-faced super-muso festival All Tomorrow’s Parties earlier this year would have been former "voice of an angel" Charlotte Church doing pop covers in a spangly leotard. But this is her latest project – her Late Night Pop Dungeon – and the Welsh singer absolutely smashed it: the crowd went wild for her band covering everything from En Vogue to Joy Division to Nine Inch Nails. Critics also raved, with NME calling it “better than The Fall”. She's taken the Pop Dungeon to a few other festivals and each time, the audience "absolutely lose their minds for it" – as much to her surprise as, perhaps, their own.

But then, Church has always been unpredictable, whether it’s throwing off the shackles of child-star, Pope-serenading sweetness in favour of a sexed-up teen-pop career, becoming a prominent voice in the Leveson inquiry into press intrusion, or reinventing herself with a series of experimental EPs and an apocalyptic dance-opera version of The Little Mermaid.

In recent years, however, she’s become best known as an outspoken political activist: Church has been a regular face at anti-austerity marches in her hometown of Cardiff, and is refreshingly loud and proud in her liberal views on social media. Alongside touring her “completely joyful” Pop Dungeon to a few more select festivals, including Simple Things in Bristol this month, she’s also starting a new project to get people talking more about politics – down the pub. Here, she shares her own views on the current political climate…

What was your initial spur for getting involved in politics and anti-austerity campaigning?

When the Tories got in for a second term, it was such a shock. All the austerity measures have been discredited, and they’re really, really harming people. The sense of the injustice of it all made me sick to my stomach and I felt like I couldn’t sit back and watch and not do anything about it anymore. It’s about being human, and whether we want to look after each other, or whether it’s survival of the fittest.

What was your response to Brexit?

Absolutely gutted. You can feel things changing around you, maybe irreparably. We see racism on the rise, and people becoming more and more segmented.

I’m starting something called Pub Politics – the first one’s going to be in Cardiff, in Grangetown. It’s the idea of trying to make debate and conversation about this stuff mainstream again. [The majority of] Wales voted out, which is just like ‘what?’ People feel like the UK’s so Westminster-centric, and that they’re not being listened to. And where do people go to talk about politics? They go to the pub. I really want to hear from everyone and I reckon down the pub you’re going to get a whole load of different characters, people who believe a whole range of things. It might get quite heated at times, I should imagine. I’m going to chair it, and then we’ll find two learned folk who are interesting and two people with differing views who are just from the community to come on the panel as well. But I want it to be fun and fiery; it won’t be like Question Time.

You grew up in Wales and still live there – what’s the pulse of the nation at the moment? Is it in a good place, or suffering a bit?

It’s been suffering for a long time – especially the South Wales Valleys, where there’s no industry, there’s no growth… We’ve got some of the worst poverty in the whole of the UK and we’re made to feel like England’s scruffy little cousin, getting shitty hand-me-downs.

What do you make of Jeremy Corbyn?

If you say somebody’s unelectable enough times, you make them unelectable. I am so fucking fed up with the mainstream media – the propaganda is doing my head in. I don’t know; it’s all a massive shower of shit. I think he’s wonderful. He has conducted himself with great integrity, and I’d like my leader to be somebody who isn’t a mad, egotistical person spinning rhetoric and saying empty soundbites, like Farage or Cameron or any of the other tools. You’d think that after Leveson, the media would have to be a bit fairer, and not so biased. But I think it’s all got worse.