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 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 felt like it was all over and done, and things looked a lot worse than they actually were. Yes, we had some serious issues to deal with; we should have been able to ride through them but we didn’t. Ultimately, I knew we weren’t in a position to make great music. At that point, if we had just stayed on the track we were on, I thought that would destroy us.

In April 2001, Leigh organised a meeting with our lawyer in his London office to discuss the future of the band, and that’s when I said to them, ‘You know what, I’m done with this.’ I was angry, because I felt like I had been steering the band for a long time and taking a lot of the responsibility. Ace said, ‘Well, why don’t we just have a break for a couple of years?’ But I had decided I was done. I didn’t hate them – I just felt like I was the glue trying to hold everything together. That’s very difficult for one person to do. In hindsight, splitting up Skunk Anansie was a mistake. I should have just taken a break rather than ending it. It would have been better for us to sit down and have a blow-out, but we didn’t know how to do that; we didn’t have that level of maturity.

We came to the conclusion that we needed to look after our band. Sometimes you can fix the major breakages by simply talking about what you’ve learnt. To quote one of Ace’s ‘pearls’ of wisdom: ‘It’s like breaking a leg, it hurts, I can walk again, but I’ve no desire to break the other leg!’ There were a few raw, honest moments. In the time apart, I’d seen Cass a lot, because we were friends before we formed Skunk Anansie, and as Mark rehearsed with Feeder in the room next to mine, we were always bumping into each other, and he had played on some of my solo tracks.

One of disco’s big producers was Pete Bellotte, who I’d known back in the sixties: Bluesology had played alongside his band The Sinners at the Top Ten Club in Hamburg. It was good to see him again, and the album we made might have worked, had I not decided that I wasn’t going to write any songs for it – I’d just sing whatever Pete and his staff writers came up with. I suspect the thinking behind this idea was influenced by the fact that I only owed my American label, Uni, a couple more albums. I was still furious about them refusing to release ‘Song For Guy’ and had decided that I wanted to get out of my contract as quickly as possible, with the minimum of effort. Not everything on Victim of Love was terrible – if the title track had come on at Studio 54, I’d have danced to it – but making an album in bad faith like that is never a good idea. No matter what you do, it somehow gets into the music: you can just tell it’s not coming from an honest place. Furthermore, it was released at the end of 1979, just as a huge backlash against disco started in the States, with particular venom reserved for rock artists who had dared to dabble in the genre. Victim of Love sank like a stone on both sides of the Atlantic. Once more, the offices of Rocket rang to the screams of John Reid firing everybody, then sheepishly having to hire them again.