You can hear the tremor in my voice – but it's also one of my proudest performances. It was mentally exhausting, but I got over it by channelling my feelings into my voice. Stepping up to the microphone still makes me nervous, but I’ve learnt how to put that demon on a leash. Nerves are not always a bad thing, and they never really go away, but you can lessen them by being as prepared as you can possibly be, and that means practice. I went home calmer. A few nights in my own bed fixed me and made me feel like my old self again. When I returned, I joked that I just needed the stinking, rotting city smell back under my nostrils. ‘Maybe I should draw a penis on my toilet door for comfort!

It takes blood and guts to be this cool,’ I said to her, and then we cracked up laughing. I was being sarcastic but the line stuck in my head. It’s arrogant, a little camp, and later, when it became part of a song, I sang it with a smirk on my face, a sneering top lip and a bored visage. I wasn’t sure if anyone caught the irony, but I do remember that was when I stopped reading reviews, good or bad. I wasn’t strong enough. I hadn’t learnt how to process them. The good ones swelled your head, the bad ones stabbed you in the heart, and sometimes they were so personal and cutting they would take your breath away. It’s just not worth the agony. Funny, that in those days you could ignore reviews – now it’s near impossible not to know what everyone thinks about you. You can read a thousand wonderful things about yourself, but the comments you inhale into your very core are always the most negative.

As we got bigger, so my interest in fashion grew, and I started to see the art in fashion instead of just clothes that cover my back. Style and music are interlinked, feeding off each other. I was becoming aware of how I could use fashion as a tool to enhance my stage show and my personal self-worth. Clothes directly influence my mood – if I get it right my confidence is boosted and I feel high on life with the audience in the palm of my hand. Get it wrong and I feel like a scruy mouse that needs to crawl back into its tiny hole. I have to feel comfortable in my own skin, so what I wear has to be functional and suit my shape.

Developing a style is the trickiest part, as within electronic music there are many different tiny musical spheres, so it takes a long time to hear the subtle shading between them, and some of the nuances are slight but vital. There is a magical, spiritual side to understanding the flow of energy in a room, knowing which track to play next, nurturing a crowd and taking them on a journey with you. There’s no fast way to becoming a good DJ – it takes a ton of gigs, with lots of embarrassing mistakes along the way.

When people tell you to trust your instincts, it’s like being told to ‘just love yourself’. Well, how the fuck are you supposed to do that? You need tools. I don’t always love myself. I don’t look in the mirror every morning and hit my head on the ceiling jumping for joy. For me, loving myself even part-time came with age and experience, and is rarely easy. It’s the same with trusting your instincts. You have to find and train them, and that’s what happened in Mama Wild. I learnt how to read an audience by doing a hundred thousand gigs, including one for a man with a dog-on-a-rope who turned out to have wandered into the wrong venue.