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 appealed to an alternative crowd. We all know that sex sells – but I wasn’t that kind of artist. I signed my first record deal when I was twenty-six. I was a grown woman, I had my politics down, I had my attitude and my band. I wasn’t manipulable. I didn’t get much negativity about being bisexual – by the mid-1990s people were cooler about gay sexuality – but at the same time it meant that I couldn’t be marketed as the straight sexy rock chick.

Back then, a shaven-headed black girl was seen as quite radical and made some people uncomfortable, but I also realised the thing I’d been trying to run away from was what people liked about me the most – that I was uncompromising with my look. If you try to conform, I concluded, you’re taking away your own power, putting your best asset away in a box, so instead I decided to accentuate and love my differences.

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.

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.