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.

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.

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.

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.

Sixty years on, it’s hard to explain how revolutionary and shocking rock and roll seemed. Not just the music: the whole culture it represented, the clothes and the films and the attitude. It felt like the first thing that teenagers really owned, that was aimed exclusively at us, that made us feel different from our parents, that made us feel we could achieve something. It’s also hard to explain the extent to which the older generation despised it. Take every example of moral panic pop music has provoked since – punk and gangster rap, mods and rockers and heavy metal – then add them all together and double it: that’s how much outrage rock and roll caused. People fucking hated it.