One night, desperate for the loo, I stepped on a giant slug and it squelched between my toes in long green tubes. I think that’s the night I became a soprano. After that, I made myself a salt path every night to dispose of them. As young, first time tenants, we had no idea that we could complain – we had to pay the whole term’s rent up front, so we had no leverage at all. God, it was awful, but we loved having our independence.

I appealed to an alternative crowd. We all know that sex sells – but I wasn’t that kind of artist. I signed my first record deal when I was twenty-six. I was a grown woman, I had my politics down, I had my attitude and my band. I wasn’t manipulable. I didn’t get much negativity about being bisexual – by the mid-1990s people were cooler about gay sexuality – but at the same time it meant that I couldn’t be marketed as the straight sexy rock chick.

It was hard on Mark, because he hadn’t actually toured with us yet – he so badly wanted to do a great job. His confidence was knocked but he played brilliantly, like a powerhouse, an engine. Recording that album was pure torture, but the result was that Garth knocked it out of the park and the record took us to another level.

My guitarist Elliot came with me, all ready to work with his beautiful guitar ideas. When we walked into her studio in Burbank, forty-five minutes outside LA, we were stunned. It was impressive, with around fifty amazing vintage guitars in the live room. Elliot and I exchanged glances – what Linda didn’t know is that he is a left-handed guitarist, so he couldn’t play any of them. Ouch! That did not help the vibes.

Seven years apart gave us a decent amount of time to look back and reflect on our band dynamic and what we had achieved. My perspective had changed – I was much less stressed and better at living in the moment. I’d been through a lot of challenges as a solo artist, I was better at problem solving and I had lost my fear of the unknown. Everything had gone so well, and we enjoyed putting together the live album so much that we decided to continue and go on tour. This would be unknown territory; we didn’t know if the magic would be the same.