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.

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.

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.

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.

It is difficult to speak in simple terms about Nkrumah’s legacy. He was freedom fighter and dictator; father of the nation and pillager in chief. He decried tribalism and jailed those who disagreed with him. He hated colonialism and loved the Queen of England—a photograph of himself with the Queen at her estate in Balmoral was one of his prized possessions. Those same tensions that existed in Nkrumah still shape the lives of many Ghanaians. The old way and new ways coexist. People pour libation to their ancestors and proudly sing the national anthem. Members of my family were jailed for opposing Kwame Nkrumah, but both my grandfather and father saw Nkrumah as the father of modern Africa.