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.

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 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.

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 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.