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!

To my mind, it also stands out because it was mixed by the great Andy Wallace. We were obsessed with every record he mixed or produced. He was our idol. How did lil’ ole Skunk get to work with such an American legend? This was the man who had mixed Run DMC’s Raising Hell and Nirvana’s album Nevermind. Quite simply, Leigh did it. Years before, when she was starting out in the industry, working for the Rolling Stones’ booking agents, Leigh had spotted Andy’s home address on the office's Rolodex and had copied it down. When we got our first record deal, every time we had a gig she would send him a flyer, even though she knew he probably wouldn’t come. This was a piece of genius foresight because he later told us how it had sparked his curiosity. ‘I kept getting these red flyers from this English band that looked cool,’ he said, so by the time we had an American record deal, he took the meeting. He wanted to be involved, so that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship!

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.

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.