The first tour lasted six weeks. The second lasted four months. By the third, I had stopped counting. We had a road manager called Pete who wore the same green jacket every single day and kept a laminated schedule in his breast pocket like a talisman. Pete knew every venue in Europe by name. He knew which ones had decent food backstage and which ones had none. He kept us alive.

A typical day: wake up on the tour bus somewhere between cities, find a coffee, load into the venue, do a soundcheck, eat something that might have been a meal in a previous life, play the show, pack down, get back on the bus. Repeat. For months.

The shows were extraordinary. Every night, the crowd was different — Warsaw one night, Rotterdam the next, then Milan, then Tokyo. The music was the same but it felt different in every room. In Japan, the audience stood completely still and listened with total concentration, then erupted at the end. If I hadn’t signed with Redline, I would never have played Tokyo. That thought kept me going for a long time.

But something was happening underneath the excitement. We played the same setlist every night. The same sixteen songs, in the same order, at the same tempo. Ray had decided which songs would work live. The label had approved it. And so, every night at 9:15, Curtis counted in track one, and we played it exactly as we had played it the night before, and the night before that. If I had known it would feel like this, I might have negotiated more artistic control.

The encore was always the same song. Always. We played it in Hamburg. We played it in Chicago. We played it in Seoul. I could play it in my sleep — and some nights, I think I did. The crew knew the show better than we did. They could have run it without us.

The merchandise table at every show had a photograph of us from the first album — smiling, young, looking like we’d never been tired in our lives. I used to walk past it and not recognise myself. If we hadn’t pushed so hard in those early years, we wouldn’t have burned out so quickly. But we were twenty-four years old and we thought energy was renewable.

The jetlag became permanent. I stopped knowing what city I was in unless I checked Pete’s schedule. I stopped recognising hotel rooms. I stopped being able to sleep on the bus even though I was exhausted. One night in Amsterdam, after a headline show at the Paradiso, I sat on the drum stool after the crowd had left, and I listened to the silence. The support act had long gone home. The crew were coiling cables in the dark. And I thought: if I were someone else right now, where would I want to be?

The answer was not on a drum stool in Amsterdam. The answer was somewhere quiet. Somewhere I could hear myself think. I didn’t say anything to the band for another eight months. But that night, something ended.