Skin

As a child I always felt weird inside, like something was out of place. Little did I know that it was me who needed to find her place.

My mum had a huge chest freezer in the kitchen for over fifty-five years full of things she had cooked and frozen. A few years ago it finally broke and, when she defrosted it, I asked if she’d found a leg of dodo at the bottom! They don’t make appliances like they used to, that’s fo’ sure. She eats Jamaican food most days. Even when she comes to my house she brings her own food, not because I can’t cook but because she knows I like her cooking better.

Brixton came to be seen as a riot zone. A lot of shops were boarded up for months afterwards and never reopened. It felt like Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government just left us to rot. There was no investment in the community, nothing was repainted and everything was underfunded. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go; we felt like a forgotten generation.

Despite such fear and animosity in the UK at that time, Mum enjoyed living in Grandad Bertie’s house with her cousins and half-siblings. He created one of the coolest drinking clubs in south London, the Era Residential Club, in the basement of his house in Acre Lane. I’ve seen pictures of Muhammad Ali (when he was Cassius Clay) coming through the door, and musicians like Bob Marley and Peter Tosh used to drop in for a drink. Norman Manley, cofounder of the People’s National Party and the first prime minister of independent Jamaica, went to the club when he was in London, and even had a conversation with my mum. He told her he was rebuilding Jamaica, saying: ‘All the young people like you have to come back.

This infuriates me. The Windrush scandal shows a callous disregard for Commonwealth immigrants, part of a wider lack of respect and appreciation for good, decent people like Grandad Bertie and my mum, who paid their taxes for years and who in their own way contributed so much to their local areas and Brixton cultural life. Grandad Bertie’s club was a great place for Mum and her half-siblings to hang out. But it was also a vibrant, important social place for the black community that was not accepted into wider society. These Commonwealth immigrants were officially invited to the UK, but after decades of hard work and loyalty to the Crown, they were just kicked to the kerb like discarded cans.

There was a wall between the gardens, and arches below the train track that ran from Brixton to Loughborough Junction, and we would run along the wall, using it as a pathway to the other gardens, and play in derelict houses. The trains were regular and loud, but to us it was normal, so when they stopped for a bank holiday the silence felt eerie. My partner reminds me that even now I find it difficult to live in complete silence. She’s always walking into empty rooms where I have the radio blaring. I grew up with trains and planes passing overhead, brothers ranting, music playing, mother shouting – and I cannot sleep without an audiobook playing. I’ve lived a loud life.

As the second eldest, I was old enough to be aware of how difficult the situation was for my mum, and so I was the quietest. Sometimes, the person who is the best behaved receives the least attention and is the most overlooked. I tried to be good, not causing my mum any more grief, but in doing that I tended to make myself disappear. At home in England I was often subdued, but when we went to Jamaica I felt carefree and happy and able to express myself in a completely different way.

They were always talking about going back home to retire. That raised the question: If my parents go back, do I go too? In the words of The Clash, Should I Stay or Should I Go? After Grandad Bertie left in 1972, my mum considered it, and my school friend Carole’s parents eventually went back. My generation felt like we belonged in two worlds – we were not considered British, but we also felt like Jamaicans once removed.

I was desperate to play piano but there weren’t many spaces, so I got stuck with the violin. At first, I hated it, but I still had to practise. For the first three years my playing sounded like a cat being skinned alive but, to the credit of my family, no one ever complained. I passed my grades and got quite good at it despite my brilliant but miserable tutor. Oh, she was awful! And clearly hated the job. I eventually became a soloist and was one of only five kids who played in the chamber group at the front of the orchestra. After six years I was pretty good, and had fallen completely in love with the instrument, but it got to the point where I had to buy my own violin and give mine up to a first-year student. I just couldn’t afford it, so that was that.

It wasn’t until years later that it struck me what a wonderful training violin had given me. Having an instrument so close to my ear meant I had to hit the strings at the correct point, and that gave me an invaluable ear for tuning later on, and fuelled a love of orchestral music that has never left me.

I told this secret to the careers officer while she listened very carefully. Great, I thought. She knows what I’m talking about. I showed her all the information I’d collected about becoming a photojournalist or camerawoman, and when I nished talking she carefully put it to one side and slid an application form in front of me.

‘While you’re thinking about that, there’s a full-time job going in Woolworths,’ she said. ‘They’re looking for people like you. I’m sure you’ll get it.’

I was astounded. I’d just poured out my dreams to her, the first person I’d told them to, thinking she understood me, but the whole time she was just waiting for the right moment to show me that Woolworths application form. I was hurt because I hadn’t been listened to, I hadn’t been seen and I knew exactly what she meant when she said ‘people like you’. I knew all about Woothworths. I’d already had a Saturday job there. I picked up the form out of politeness, then left disgusted.

The first thing to change was my sense of style. I was raised a Christian, with a dress code that was smart, conservative and old fashioned – dresses that went all the way up to the neck, down to the wrists, and fell below the knee, topped with no make-up and a wet-look curly perm or straightened hair. It was important to look like a modest, perfectly behaved girl, which I was. We all bought our frilly church-friendly crêpe dresses from a shop in Brixton at the end of Railton Road. The dresses had pleats – the tinier the better. I had a white one that I wore to church and I hated it. Those tiny pleats were hell to iron. You had to try and line four of them up at once then make sure the iron was exactly the right temperature, but once you sat down they would crease and never fall the right way again. I hated that shop because the clothes made us all look the same. By this time, The Kids from Fame were on TV, and we were obsessed. We all wanted to be those leg-warmer-wearing, somersaulting dancers in the show. We also had our minds blown when Jerey Daniel of Shalamar body-popped on Top of the Pops. That was a revelation to us – a completely new style of music, fashion and dancing. The next day we were all trying to ‘pop’. Watching this, we knew our Stepford Wives-style God dresses had to go!

My yellow brick road to rock started with ska-flavoured bands like The Specials, The Beat and The Selecter. Ska was familiar music to me – Prince Buster was the soundtrack to my nappy changes – but those 2 Tone bands from Birmingham and Coventry sped it up to sound punkier and a bit nutty. They all had something strange going on: The Specials were darker and political, The Beat had that driving eighth-note bassline, and The Selecter had Pauline Black in a suit. But what really caught my interest were the guitar riffs, with an edge that was different from sounds I was used to. They had a prominent, stabbing melody, and they weren’t just about showing off chops and musical virtuosity.

During weekdays, at the London College of Furniture, I felt free to explore my new self, but at weekends when I saw Tony I softened my appearance. A change of look can happen quickly, but changing on the inside is a more gradual process. On the outside, I was a trendy college student, but in my head I was still the good Christian girl wanting to keep everyone happy. As I look back, I know that I had zero interest in Tony. The fact was I didn’t know how to say no to him; it was that simple. We didn’t do anything or go anywhere, and I don’t recall him ever taking me to a restaurant or a movie like normal couples. He’d pick me up from my home in Brixton, drive me all the way to north London, and we’d watch telly in his room. That was our relationship. I was so meek I didn’t have any voice at all.

I ended up in Middlesbrough, at Teesside Polytechnic, in 1986, doing an honours degree in Interior Architecture and Design. At its height, in the early 1900s, Teesside Steelworks in North Yorkshire had over ninety-one blast furnaces and was one of the largest steel producers in the world, but by the 1980s, Teesside was a post-industrial area in decline. However, I loved being there, and it was a joy and a relief to be away from Tony. I felt free to reinvent myself again. I was five hours away from London and nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew my background, and I could be who I wanted to be.

One night, desperate for the loo, I stepped on a giant slug and it squelched between my toes in long green tubes. I think that’s the night I became a soprano. After that, I made myself a salt path every night to dispose of them. As young, first time tenants, we had no idea that we could complain – we had to pay the whole term’s rent up front, so we had no leverage at all. God, it was awful, but we loved having our independence.

I passed my first year comfortably, but in my second year I relaxed and spent more time on my social life than my studies. I got called in by the head of department – a dry, sour man I found intimidating.

‘You’re only here as an experiment,’ he said. ‘You’d better buck up!’

As the only black student on the course, I knew what he meant. In those days there was no one to complain to, and if I had I would have been kicked off the course. My friend and housemate Deborah, who also went to the London College of Furniture, and joined the course a year after me, told me recently that the same tutor gave her such a hard time, downgrading her marks and saying her work wasn’t ‘ethnic enough’. In the end she had to leave Teesside, and said she was traumatised for years.

In my second year I was heavily involved with the Students’ Union and became Entertainments Officer, booking bands and DJs. I was always listening to music on my Walkman and would sing walking along the corridor between courses. Word spread that I could hold a tune, so I started getting offers to sing. A student jazz pianist asked me to sing jazz standards so he could practise his piano, and we would rehearse in a hall on campus. After a solid year of bugging from a guitarist friend, I also joined a covers band, a jazz/soul septet we named JASS. We practised with lesser-known songs like ‘Blind’ by Talking Heads, Rufus and Chaka Khan’s ‘Stop On By’ and Hue and Cry’s version of Prince’s ‘Kiss’.

Our first gig was in the Students’ Union – it my first time on stage and it was terrifying. As I looked out to the packed crowd, all there to check out the Student Union band, every part of me was shaking. Because I was so nervous at first, I forgot all the words to the songs and just made up the lyrics. For our Talking Heads cover, for instance, I just sang, ‘I’m blind, I’m blind’ over and over because it was the only part of the song I remembered. Once I got over my nerves, though, watching that big crowd of drunken students dancing and jumping up and down, I thought, I could get used to this. We did a few more gigs in the Union and I played with the jazz pianist one night in a local club in Middlesbrough. I got a taste for being onstage… and it was sweet.

Although I was still a little shy, and not a typical bruiser bouncer, growing up with three brothers meant I knew how to break up a ght. From afar my shyness could be mistaken for arrogance or over-confidence. The first night I was there, a tough-looking woman came up to me and said sneeringly, ‘What do you need to work here, then?’

Putting on my best James Bond face, I fibbed, ‘Three black belts.’ I hadn’t done any martial arts, but she looked shocked and wandered off. She must have told everyone because after that I was always instantly obeyed and continued working as a bouncer during the holidays.

Some years later, I would go on a trip to Namibia to visit Tom, when he was then working for the newly independent government, and I would also meet Mandela after he became South Africa’s first black president. But in 1989, I had no idea what my future would be.

I’d found myself. Once I’d shaved my head people would look at me, so I had to be confident, to let go of my shyness, and a bold new me emerged. Every time I went to the barbers they whined and complained. They were from a different era: ‘C’mon, baby, you mus’ leave a lickle ’fro fe de man dem’ – they figured I wouldn’t catch a boyfriend with such short hair – so eventually I bought a pair of clippers and learnt how to do it myself, backwards in a hand mirror, and I haven’t needed a barber since.

First loves are awful: you don’t have the mental tools to cope; you give every last tiny drop of yourself to the other person, and the relationship, and you believe with all your heart that it will last forever. When it doesn’t work you’re devastated, because you held nothing back, and so you have nothing left.

After about six months, with my help, Sabrina managed to move into Number One when a room became vacant. She was upstairs and I was in a room downstairs. One day, I got bored of all the chat with no action, so I said, ‘Let’s do a five-year plan.’ My plan was to write better songs, put a band together and get a record deal. I had no idea how I was going to do it, so step one of my plan was to find a manager. I can’t remember all the details of her plan but there was definitely an incredible book at the end of it. Straight away I started working on my plan by writing songs and hanging out in places where I thought other musicians and managers would be.

By then I no longer worried what others thought of my musical tastes. From my DJ stint at college, to my role booking bands as ENTS Officer at Teesside, I discovered all types of music, from A-ha to Aerosmith. I would read the NME and Melody Maker religiously every week. On evenings and weekends I sang with a jazz band from east London I’d met through an advert in the NME classifieds. I would also do small gigs with the band’s guitarist in local bars like the Brixtonian. I learnt jazz standards like ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Summertime’ that were a good grounding for my voice, teaching me how to sing properly. I learnt to sing by listening to the greats: people like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington; singers who had big, thick voices, wonderful phrasing and voice control, one-take kings and queens. I’d sing in my house, my kitchen, the street, everywhere. I wrote songs all the time, dissecting those I heard on the radio, copying the structure: verse, chorus, verse, middle eight, out. I recorded some melodies on my tape recorder, because my head was bursting with tunes.

The pianist tapped out the first few intro notes, the whole room was quiet, expectant. I was so nervous I sang the first four lines really badly and everyone went back to their conversations. I knew I’d lost the room. I felt I had captured the crowd’s attention with my look and now I was sure they were thinking, She looks good but she can’t sing. I took a deep breath – I knew I could do better. I had to get the room back. So I closed my eyes and just went for it, and sang like I’d never sung before. At the end I got a standing, cheering ovation. It was my A Star Is Born moment, like a Disney movie on steroids.

I snatched my power back and healed myself by confronting him, the anger making me courageous. That day I pulled something out of myself, a fearlessness that never left, that I could channel into my voice, my music and my songs. I found my strength.

I centred my life around songwriting with Len. That’s what had kept me going through those dark months after the attack, travelling every day from Brixton to his home in a tower block in Deptford. We were very disciplined, setting ourselves targets. We had to write a song every day, and we would make ourselves nish it even if it wasn’t good. Len originally came from Teesside, and started off on the music scene of the mid-1980s as a jazz guitar player, playing in quartets, when the jazz/soul sound was popular, capturing people’s imaginations with films like Absolute Beginners and musicians like Courtney Pine and Sade. By the time we started working together in 1990, the sound had morphed into the funkier style of acid jazz. We had traces of that in our early songs, but were soon experimenting with different sounds.

Len was calm and introverted; he didn’t stalk the stage like an arrogant rock god. After a year, I had to make the really difficult decision of taking him out of the band line-up. That was really hard. We assumed he would be my guitarist, and had no idea it wasn’t going to work, and he found it difficult letting go, but we continued writing songs together, including some of our biggest hits.

We went from playing on sticky pub floors and eating dodgy food in the backstreets of King’s Cross to having a private chef and en-suite bathrooms in the lush British countryside. Not one room had a penis drawn with a Sharpie on the wall! Not one!

Sylvia spotted our discomfort. ‘We need to fuck shit up,’ she drawled, so we deconstructed the space, making it more like a battleeld. We raided an army surplus store and, ever so politely, trashed the studio, building a vocal bunker out of soundboards with netting for a roof, covering it with slogans and rubbish so you couldn’t see the floor. A lot of the songs were political, and it felt like war. I was fighting my own demons, but it was also an incendiary time in London. In 1994, for instance, there was civil unrest against the Criminal Justice Bill (which outlawed free rave parties) and a resurgence of riots in Brixton in 1995 after the death of Wayne Douglas in police custody. So, inside the bunker, I covered the walls with notes, lyrics, feelings, fears, thoughts and advice for myself.

You can hear the tremor in my voice – but it's also one of my proudest performances. It was mentally exhausting, but I got over it by channelling my feelings into my voice. Stepping up to the microphone still makes me nervous, but I’ve learnt how to put that demon on a leash. Nerves are not always a bad thing, and they never really go away, but you can lessen them by being as prepared as you can possibly be, and that means practice. I went home calmer. A few nights in my own bed fixed me and made me feel like my old self again. When I returned, I joked that I just needed the stinking, rotting city smell back under my nostrils. ‘Maybe I should draw a penis on my toilet door for comfort!

After my crisis, everyone became more supportive and realised I was vulnerable. I learnt how to cope better by expressing myself when I felt too much pressure instead of pretending I was invincible. For me, it was the beginning of the realisation that I don’t have to sound like Aretha or anyone else. I just have to sound like me.

It takes blood and guts to be this cool,’ I said to her, and then we cracked up laughing. I was being sarcastic but the line stuck in my head. It’s arrogant, a little camp, and later, when it became part of a song, I sang it with a smirk on my face, a sneering top lip and a bored visage. I wasn’t sure if anyone caught the irony, but I do remember that was when I stopped reading reviews, good or bad. I wasn’t strong enough. I hadn’t learnt how to process them. The good ones swelled your head, the bad ones stabbed you in the heart, and sometimes they were so personal and cutting they would take your breath away. It’s just not worth the agony. Funny, that in those days you could ignore reviews – now it’s near impossible not to know what everyone thinks about you. You can read a thousand wonderful things about yourself, but the comments you inhale into your very core are always the most negative.

It was those conversations at the Rape Crisis Centre that gave me a clearer understanding of the impact of trauma, and how it’s possible to not be treated as a powerless victim. I don’t want to be pitied. I’m very uncomfortable with that. I want options and opportunity, and I want to be listened to and respected. I don’t want anyone to do all that for me because then I’ll never learn how to do it for myself. Songwriting is very cathartic and provides a method for doing that. In those days, I couldn’t find the words in conversation to express how I felt, but strangely I could sing them.

Sylvia was so much fun to record with. She loved anything unconventional, and no idea was too crazy. Skunk Anansie worked by two mottos: ‘leave your ego at the door’ and ‘you never know until you try’. That way, everyone was free to criticise anyone else’s contribution, and no one was allowed to kill an idea without trying it first. Some things sound awful in your head, but when they hit the air magic flies into them. We always worked hard on the groove so our music wouldn’t sound disparate. Cass used to say that we weren’t about being ‘clever bollocks’, until Robbie (the drum virtuoso) proved him wrong when he wrote ‘Fuck you jazz cts’ out in Morse code and then played it for fun. I call that very clever bollocks!

To my mind, it also stands out because it was mixed by the great Andy Wallace. We were obsessed with every record he mixed or produced. He was our idol. How did lil’ ole Skunk get to work with such an American legend? This was the man who had mixed Run DMC’s Raising Hell and Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Quite simply, Leigh did it. Years before, when she was starting out in the industry, working for the Rolling Stones’ booking agents, Leigh had spotted Andy’s home address on the office's Rolodex and had copied it down. When we got our first record deal, every time we had a gig she would send him a flyer, even though she knew he probably wouldn’t come. This was a piece of genius foresight because he later told us how it had sparked his curiosity. ‘I kept getting these red flyers from this English band that looked cool,’ he said, so by the time we had an American record deal, he took the meeting. He wanted to be involved, so that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship!

In the end, video production duo Hammer & Tongs (who later made videos for Blur and Pulp) shot it in the car park at Santa Monica airport in one morning in the middle of a US tour. MTV were keen to support us, so how could Derek justify not making a video? This skirmish was the rst in a series of battles that started to undermine our relationship with One Little Indian. We felt we could never rest on our successes and that we had to keep fighting for a slice of the label’s promotional budget.

Everywhere we went, in every record shop in every town in the US, our album would be in the R&B section instead of rock, just because there were two black faces in the band. College radio support was vital for success and we had none. We would turn up at radio stations and DJs hadn’t listened to the album and knew nothing about us. Howard Stern bloody loved us! I did interviews with Mr Shock Jock himself! But it’s striking that the only radio play we could get was from a shock jock, because we were considered so alien.

I appealed to an alternative crowd. We all know that sex sells – but I wasn’t that kind of artist. I signed my first record deal when I was twenty-six. I was a grown woman, I had my politics down, I had my attitude and my band. I wasn’t manipulable. I didn’t get much negativity about being bisexual – by the mid-1990s people were cooler about gay sexuality – but at the same time it meant that I couldn’t be marketed as the straight sexy rock chick.

As we got bigger, so my interest in fashion grew, and I started to see the art in fashion instead of just clothes that cover my back. Style and music are interlinked, feeding off each other. I was becoming aware of how I could use fashion as a tool to enhance my stage show and my personal self-worth. Clothes directly influence my mood – if I get it right my confidence is boosted and I feel high on life with the audience in the palm of my hand. Get it wrong and I feel like a scruy mouse that needs to crawl back into its tiny hole. I have to feel comfortable in my own skin, so what I wear has to be functional and suit my shape.

Back then, a shaven-headed black girl was seen as quite radical and made some people uncomfortable, but I also realised the thing I’d been trying to run away from was what people liked about me the most – that I was uncompromising with my look. If you try to conform, I concluded, you’re taking away your own power, putting your best asset away in a box, so instead I decided to accentuate and love my differences.

By spring 1996, we had released a hit debut album and four singles, including ‘Weak’, and were riding a wave. We had to keep up the momentum. To capitalise on this, Leigh said, ‘You need another album out now.’ So, right in the middle of touring and the summer festivals, we went back to Linford Manor. Garth Richardson, who had worked with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage Against The Machine, was our producer for our follow-up album, Stoosh. We thought up the name driving from one gig to the next, when Leigh declared, ‘We need an album title right now or we’ll miss the deadline.’ (That album felt like it was just successions of crazy deadlines.) We all looked at Leigh and said, ‘Let’s name it after you.

Editing like this wasn’t a new idea, but the way Garth worked created a fresh take on it. It gave the music a pulsing energy that made it sound exciting. The downside was it blew your confidence out the window, because you had to do a million takes knowing you could never match that kind of perfection, which almost destroyed Mark. I had gone through the anxiety of multiple retakes on our debut album, so I could relate to what he was going through.

It was hard on Mark, because he hadn’t actually toured with us yet – he so badly wanted to do a great job. His confidence was knocked but he played brilliantly, like a powerhouse, an engine. Recording that album was pure torture, but the result was that Garth knocked it out of the park and the record took us to another level.

You’ve got to remember that what you’re doing is spiritual and soulful – not that it’s religious, as such, but the connection between you and the audience is circular. You send out the energy and they give it back to you. It’s like your performance wakes them up and gives them permission to lose their minds for a couple of hours, and they don’t have to worry about anything else. People walk into a room with their nice clothes on, and they want to go a bit crazy but don’t want to embarrass themselves. You’ve got to give them permission to freak out, and wake up the demon inside. Once you transmit that wild vibe into the audience, they lose it and don’t care. I can feel the energy before I run onstage – sometimes the crowd feels like a giant keg of gunpowder and I am the match.

When I look back, the absolute highlight was meeting Mandela himself. When I shook his hand, I felt like he was a very old soul, gentle and kind. I know absolutely nothing about reincarnation, but the only way to describe it is that it felt like this wasn’t his first life. His energy was unique, unlike any person I’d ever met. He was comfortable, wise, settled and strong. Being in his company, celebrating his birthday, was one of the greatest honours of my life.

I liked experimenting with new sounds, and started thinking about doing a solo album, working on song ideas with Len. I was unsure about Skunk Anansie, and was becoming more and more focused on the idea of making my own record. I started work on it, and sent Leigh a demo of ‘Burnt Like You’. Leigh listened to it alone in her flat, to the lyrics:

I can’t watch the same mistake

Waiting for the boys to turn out straight

No I can’t run the same dog race

And get burnt like you

You’re swollen in the gut

From all those last nights

Still swinging vodka punches

That don’t land right

She told me later, ‘I sat and cried my eyes out for a whole afternoon because I knew the band was over.

It felt like it was all over and done, and things looked a lot worse than they actually were. Yes, we had some serious issues to deal with; we should have been able to ride through them but we didn’t. Ultimately, I knew we weren’t in a position to make great music. At that point, if we had just stayed on the track we were on, I thought that would destroy us.

In April 2001, Leigh organised a meeting with our lawyer in his London office to discuss the future of the band, and that’s when I said to them, ‘You know what, I’m done with this.’ I was angry, because I felt like I had been steering the band for a long time and taking a lot of the responsibility. Ace said, ‘Well, why don’t we just have a break for a couple of years?’ But I had decided I was done. I didn’t hate them – I just felt like I was the glue trying to hold everything together. That’s very difficult for one person to do. In hindsight, splitting up Skunk Anansie was a mistake. I should have just taken a break rather than ending it. It would have been better for us to sit down and have a blow-out, but we didn’t know how to do that; we didn’t have that level of maturity.

So, after all the positive things that I had come to believe about myself, like being open and political about my sexuality, I suddenly found myself having to be guarded about my life. I tried to get round it by convincing myself I was just being economical with the truth, but you get yourself into trouble pretending to be single when you’re not.

Relationships are hard, all of them, but you have to make your own mistakes and deal with your own dramas. The only way to learn is through experience. We don’t put enough emphasis on the value of failure and how overcoming it is character-building, and how pain can be a useful tool because, without it, you’ll never know happiness. Anger is also a powerful tool that gives you the energy to move on, but you have to let it fade otherwise it will consume and poison your thinking. That’s what ‘Til Morning’, one of my favourite songs on the album, is about.

So, from that day on, I have always asked questions about how the gear works. I watched and listened to everything, absorbing as much knowledge and information as I could, so that I’d never have to hear those words again. You need to have the right words to communicate your ideas properly. There’s no point asking an engineer to make something sound ‘nice’ – it’s too vague. Better to say, can you compress the vocal, EQ the harshness out of it but add some air, then add a touch of reverb to sweeten it? Boom! The engineer knows exactly what you want. Knowing how the gear works gave me more power and creative control in the studio, so I could capture the sounds and feelings I imagined, rather than what the engineer wanted.

My guitarist Elliot came with me, all ready to work with his beautiful guitar ideas. When we walked into her studio in Burbank, forty-five minutes outside LA, we were stunned. It was impressive, with around fifty amazing vintage guitars in the live room. Elliot and I exchanged glances – what Linda didn’t know is that he is a left-handed guitarist, so he couldn’t play any of them. Ouch! That did not help the vibes.

I looked down at the frills in horror. ‘You know what, you’re right.’ The dress was tossed and I bought a whole new outfit. Shortly after, I shed the boyfriend as well. He was a great guy but he brought out an inner frill in me I’d rather never see again.

I’m not particularly girly, I’m happiest being in the middle, and it’s so strange to have a career where I’m constantly being asked by journalists about my sexuality. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was still pressure to put yourself in sexual categories, like lesbian, bisexual and straight. How wonderful it is that sexuality is now seen as fluid, and if I’m forced to define myself, queer is the flag I’d wave – it’s what I’ve always been and I guess always will be.

Developing a style is the trickiest part, as within electronic music there are many different tiny musical spheres, so it takes a long time to hear the subtle shading between them, and some of the nuances are slight but vital. There is a magical, spiritual side to understanding the flow of energy in a room, knowing which track to play next, nurturing a crowd and taking them on a journey with you. There’s no fast way to becoming a good DJ – it takes a ton of gigs, with lots of embarrassing mistakes along the way.

I was super happy with it, and Timo and Martin were about to release it, but then fell out over allocation of music publishing royalties, and Timo left the project. I guess they’d had some underlying issues with each other that this album brought out. The album was shelved as a result. I was very hurt by the experience. I felt I’d written some of the best material of my career, and it seemed they put it on the shelf to gather dust.

We came to the conclusion that we needed to look after our band. Sometimes you can fix the major breakages by simply talking about what you’ve learnt. To quote one of Ace’s ‘pearls’ of wisdom: ‘It’s like breaking a leg, it hurts, I can walk again, but I’ve no desire to break the other leg!’ There were a few raw, honest moments. In the time apart, I’d seen Cass a lot, because we were friends before we formed Skunk Anansie, and as Mark rehearsed with Feeder in the room next to mine, we were always bumping into each other, and he had played on some of my solo tracks.

Seven years apart gave us a decent amount of time to look back and reflect on our band dynamic and what we had achieved. My perspective had changed – I was much less stressed and better at living in the moment. I’d been through a lot of challenges as a solo artist, I was better at problem solving and I had lost my fear of the unknown. Everything had gone so well, and we enjoyed putting together the live album so much that we decided to continue and go on tour. This would be unknown territory; we didn’t know if the magic would be the same.

The year 2008 was pivotal, not just for Skunk Anansie but also for me personally. It was the year I met my partner Lady – known as Ladyfag – at a Fashion Week party in New York for the designers Dsquared2. I was hanging out with my ‘Italian ’usband’, the designer Liborio Capizzi. I remember getting out of a lift on the rooftop, scanning the scene, and I saw her, bang in the centre of the dancefloor. Who is that? I thought. She’s drop-dead gorgeous and chic as hell! She wore a dazzling outfit and had beautiful dark hair. Up to that point, I’d rarely chatted anyone up. I was scared of being rejected, so I always let people approach me. But on this occasion, I worked my way round the room to where she was standing.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Would you like a drink? Would you like some champagne?’

‘It’s all free here, let me get you one,’ Lady replied.

We got chatting and she invited me to her birthday party the next day, which was taking place in an infamous gay nightclub called Mr Black. Many years later she told me that when I curled my fingers around the champagne glass and smiled at her, she thought, I think I’m going to be serving this woman champagne for very a long time.

In Italy they love to do things in a way that is ridiculously dramatic, so at eleven o’clock one evening in March 2011, at the height of Carnevale season, I rode into Teatro La Fenice in Venice on a white stallion in full Carnevale dress, designed by my great friend Liborio Capizzi. It was a nod to that iconic 1977 photograph of Bianca Jagger sitting on a white horse in New York’s Studio 54 nightclub. Wearing a black corseted Marie Antoinette-style dress and mask, I sat on this really tall, slightly edgy horse and slowly made my way through the stalls to the stage. It was a moment that, even for me, was fantastically off the scale.

Our equipment was ruined. We didn’t know if we could go onstage, and thought it was all over. But then the most beautiful thing happened: every crew member from every other band brought all their towels and blankets, anything they could find, and stretched them out in the field backstage. Then they all proceeded to dismantle our entire production – lights, speakers, amplifiers, instruments, flight cases, amps – they even took the valves out of the guitar. All of our gear was spread out to dry. It took up a whole field behind the stage.

It was a clear sunny day, so everything gradually dried out. Then, all of those wonderful, beautiful human beings put our stuff back together again, and we did the gig. It was one of those moments when people pulled together and helped us, so that we could carry on and play in memory of everyone who had died. We could not have played without them, and it’s one of the most special memories of all my years of touring. It makes me emotional just thinking about it. Reminds you of how much love there is in our rock community.

When Mandela died on 5 December 2013, I thought a lot about meeting him and the energy he gave us. It was sad that he died, but he had lived a very long life and had been through so much. He emerged a man not soured by experience but someone who tried his absolute best to bring his people some power and some dignity, without anger, death or retribution. I’m glad he spent his later years in happiness at home with his family. But the damage apartheid did was so heinous and deep, I feel it will take many more decades to heal.

After the split, I threw myself into work projects, and I acted in my rst lm, playing a doctor in a sci-fi thriller called Andron, which starred Danny Glover, Alec Baldwin and Michelle Ryan from EastEnders. We shot most of it in a deep, underground quarry in Malta that was beautifully decrepit and dank. Quite like the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes! But better received three years later was my second film, Ulysses: A Dark Odyssey, a modern version of Homer’s classic tale starring Udo Kier, Italian actor Andrea Zirio and, again, Danny Glover. In the movie I played a blind seer who could see the future and the past. I was in make-up for ve hours being transformed into a slightly comical Live and Let Die-style witch.

I grew up in a black world filled with soul and reggae music, a world where Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder were kings. But Ace grew up in middle England, where Motörhead and Black Sabbath were his heroes. He’s on beat one, I’m on beat two, and because we’re open to hearing things in different places, that sometimes creates wicked, weird, warped musical ideas. I love that. There have been days all four of us hear a riff in four different places in the groove – that’s when magic happens!

We were in the race but not competing with the jet stream. We were creating our own story, and in the process became an antidote to what was considered hip. Skunk Anansie were neither lads nor ladettes, not Britpop nor Britrock, just part of a new, alternative scene that was political, aware, caring and diverse.

I think our audience comes to entertain as well as to be entertained, and we attract some characters: outsiders who want a different life and who abandon themselves to the experience. I search them out sometimes because they’re magical!

The best gigs are where something unique happens. Once, during our 2019 tour, I was thinking, Why is there a big gap in the audience? All of a sudden, out of the gap, bursting like a volcano, comes a guy in a wheelchair, beaming with joy and held aloft by about six people. Everyone went ballistic while I walked across the hands of the audience to him, and they held me up while I sang right into his face. A similar thing happened two gigs later, except this time it was a ten-year-old girl, sitting on her father’s shoulders. We screamed every word of the lyrics at each other, eyeball to eyeball, straight into the mic, both of us loving every second.

In Mama Wild I learnt to step back and take a good harsh look at our songs, building up a mental database of what worked and what didn’t. If something shined I needed to know how and why, and if it blew chunks I needed to know the size and flavour of them. I’d think about the audience, and try to imagine what the girl in the third row was thinking. Being objective is hard, but sometimes you get close enough to weed out and reject your worst ideas, leaving room for better ones to grow. There is no quick way to being good – it’s a long road.

No matter how excited I am about a new song, the best test is to play it in a room to other people and feel their reactions. Unless they’re in the music business, it’s difficult for them to put into words what they think. I read people’s body language, like when they look up and smile and start tapping a toe or, conversely, when they fiddle with an arm-rest or look around the room for help. If they pick up their phone mid-chorus, I know I’ve lost them, it’s over – throw that song away! In the very early days, when people didn’t know my voice, I’d play tracks in the background with friends in the room to see if anyone started nodding along. I did that when I was living in the housing co-op in Brixton, and when I was DJing at parties – a cute, sneaky way to see if I was on track.

When people tell you to trust your instincts, it’s like being told to ‘just love yourself’. Well, how the fuck are you supposed to do that? You need tools. I don’t always love myself. I don’t look in the mirror every morning and hit my head on the ceiling jumping for joy. For me, loving myself even part-time came with age and experience, and is rarely easy. It’s the same with trusting your instincts. You have to find and train them, and that’s what happened in Mama Wild. I learnt how to read an audience by doing a hundred thousand gigs, including one for a man with a dog-on-a-rope who turned out to have wandered into the wrong venue.

From the beginning we’d write a song and send it to Leigh to see what she thought. We wrote five songs a week for a solid year before she said, ‘Okay, that one’s not bad, keep writing.’ She still has that brilliant shit-o-meter now.

I missed so much, running to get to the top of the mountain, that instead of sitting down to take in the view, I fretted over conquering the next one. I was a working-class Brixton girl figuring out which fork to use in the Palace, and everything was brand new. I’d say to her, yes, be concerned for the future, but don’t forget to find the joy in the present.

Success to me is waking up and being happy with the day in front of me. Okay, sometimes that means a shitstorm, and sometimes it’s pure bliss, but it’s my shitstorm that I’ve curated for myself, and my bliss to enjoy. I haven’t been bored since 1988. At the time of writing, in spring 2020, I’m sitting in the apartment I share with Lady in New York, with the Covid pandemic at its height. It’s scary, because 70 per cent of what I do as a musician is dependent on a crowd and, for the moment, I can’t tour or sing live. I can’t do the thing I love. My situation would be a lot worse if I hadn’t been well managed. We’re not from wealthy families, but Leigh made sure that each of us in Skunk Anansie could afford a house. As a musician, your manager is the most important person, because they pick your team and run your team and do the nancial planning, and for that I am so grateful.