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.

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 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.

Seven years apart gave us a decent amount of time to look back and reflect on our band dynamic and what we had achieved. My perspective had changed – I was much less stressed and better at living in the moment. I’d been through a lot of challenges as a solo artist, I was better at problem solving and I had lost my fear of the unknown. Everything had gone so well, and we enjoyed putting together the live album so much that we decided to continue and go on tour. This would be unknown territory; we didn’t know if the magic would be the same.