Cyndi Lauper was inspired by Lady GaGa to wear whatever she ''freaking'' wants to.

The 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' hitmaker disagrees that her outrageous outfits overshadowed her music, but when business-minded people told her she should tone it down in the early 1990s she decided to wear ''plainer'' clothes.

However, when she met with the 'Poker Face' singer in 2009 she ''woke up'' and decided to wear and change the colour of her hair no matter what.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, she explained: ''The suits would say to me, ''Your image is so big, I can't hear you sing.'' But those are corporate people who don't understand performance art. There was a time, around the early 90s, when they kept telling me, 'Your true colours should just shine from the inside', and I got plainer and plainer and plainer. I looked at myself in the mirror and said, 'Who the f**k are you?' I think I was floundering. When I met Lady Gaga [in 2009], I think I woke up. ''I'll have freaking colored hair when I want!''

Meanwhile, the 62-year-old pink-haired pop star has just released a country album titled 'Detour' and says her changed her direction because she felt she ''missed out'' on being experimental in the past as she was too focused on being a celebrity.

She said: ''I always felt I missed out, because I was so busy being famous I couldn't go and experiment on all these things that everyone else did. For God's sake, I never even move to New Orleans to write an album like Rickie Lee Jones did [recently].''