You get your confidence and intuition back by trusting yourself, by being militantly on your own side. You need to trust yourself, especially on a first draft, where amid the anxiety and self-doubt, there should be a real sense of your imagination and your memories walking and wool-gathering, tramping the hills, romping all over the place. Trust them. Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance.

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.

So, after all the positive things that I had come to believe about myself, like being open and political about my sexuality, I suddenly found myself having to be guarded about my life. I tried to get round it by convincing myself I was just being economical with the truth, but you get yourself into trouble pretending to be single when you’re not.

In Mama Wild I learnt to step back and take a good harsh look at our songs, building up a mental database of what worked and what didn’t. If something shined I needed to know how and why, and if it blew chunks I needed to know the size and flavour of them. I’d think about the audience, and try to imagine what the girl in the third row was thinking. Being objective is hard, but sometimes you get close enough to weed out and reject your worst ideas, leaving room for better ones to grow. There is no quick way to being good – it’s a long road.

No matter how excited I am about a new song, the best test is to play it in a room to other people and feel their reactions. Unless they’re in the music business, it’s difficult for them to put into words what they think. I read people’s body language, like when they look up and smile and start tapping a toe or, conversely, when they fiddle with an arm-rest or look around the room for help. If they pick up their phone mid-chorus, I know I’ve lost them, it’s over – throw that song away! In the very early days, when people didn’t know my voice, I’d play tracks in the background with friends in the room to see if anyone started nodding along. I did that when I was living in the housing co-op in Brixton, and when I was DJing at parties – a cute, sneaky way to see if I was on track.

Try to change your relationship to your fears. Don’t banish them. Don’t fight them. Don’t turn and face them down. Instead, see whether you can learn to honor your fears—which means listening to them, being curious about them, and admiring them as part of the real you. Do this—gently, generously, kindly—and they will show you what you truly love.

On your journey, you’re told to dismiss your fears, to confront your fears, to step outside of your comfort zone. Yet this is all so misleading. Your big choice in life is not “comfort or no comfort.” It is “love or no love.” When you step into things you love, you will feel fear. That’s not just OK, it’s fundamental. So fundamental, in fact, that if you’re doing something and you feel no fear, then you’ve lost your love.

So, take the path of fear, because the path of fear is the path of love.