Our first gig was in the Students’ Union – it my first time on stage and it was terrifying. As I looked out to the packed crowd, all there to check out the Student Union band, every part of me was shaking. Because I was so nervous at first, I forgot all the words to the songs and just made up the lyrics. For our Talking Heads cover, for instance, I just sang, ‘I’m blind, I’m blind’ over and over because it was the only part of the song I remembered. Once I got over my nerves, though, watching that big crowd of drunken students dancing and jumping up and down, I thought, I could get used to this. We did a few more gigs in the Union and I played with the jazz pianist one night in a local club in Middlesbrough. I got a taste for being onstage… and it was sweet.

After about six months, with my help, Sabrina managed to move into Number One when a room became vacant. She was upstairs and I was in a room downstairs. One day, I got bored of all the chat with no action, so I said, ‘Let’s do a five-year plan.’ My plan was to write better songs, put a band together and get a record deal. I had no idea how I was going to do it, so step one of my plan was to find a manager. I can’t remember all the details of her plan but there was definitely an incredible book at the end of it. Straight away I started working on my plan by writing songs and hanging out in places where I thought other musicians and managers would be.

By then I no longer worried what others thought of my musical tastes. From my DJ stint at college, to my role booking bands as ENTS Officer at Teesside, I discovered all types of music, from A-ha to Aerosmith. I would read the NME and Melody Maker religiously every week. On evenings and weekends I sang with a jazz band from east London I’d met through an advert in the NME classifieds. I would also do small gigs with the band’s guitarist in local bars like the Brixtonian. I learnt jazz standards like ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Summertime’ that were a good grounding for my voice, teaching me how to sing properly. I learnt to sing by listening to the greats: people like Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and Dinah Washington; singers who had big, thick voices, wonderful phrasing and voice control, one-take kings and queens. I’d sing in my house, my kitchen, the street, everywhere. I wrote songs all the time, dissecting those I heard on the radio, copying the structure: verse, chorus, verse, middle eight, out. I recorded some melodies on my tape recorder, because my head was bursting with tunes.

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.

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!

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.