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 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.

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.

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.

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.