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.

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.

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 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.