Editing like this wasn’t a new idea, but the way Garth worked created a fresh take on it. It gave the music a pulsing energy that made it sound exciting. The downside was it blew your confidence out the window, because you had to do a million takes knowing you could never match that kind of perfection, which almost destroyed Mark. I had gone through the anxiety of multiple retakes on our debut album, so I could relate to what he was going through.

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.

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.

From the beginning we’d write a song and send it to Leigh to see what she thought. We wrote five songs a week for a solid year before she said, ‘Okay, that one’s not bad, keep writing.’ She still has that brilliant shit-o-meter now.