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.

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!

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.

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.