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’.

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.

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!

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!

It was the song that was playing when I had my sudden moment of clarity in South Shields. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed of being a musician. Those dreams had taken many forms: sometimes I was Little Richard, sometimes Jerry Lee Lewis, sometimes Ray Charles. But whatever form they had taken, none of them had involved standing onstage in a supper club outside of Newcastle, not playing a Vox Continental organ, while Long John Baldry alternately crooned to the accompaniment of a tape recorder and angrily threatened to fine members of the audience fifty pounds. And yet, here I was. Much as I loved John, I had to do something else.