After the green-paint incident and all the other threatening things that happened, that little lump of fear started growing out of control. I imagined it like a ball of elastic bands inside me, more and more individual fears being stretched over it until it felt as if it was pushing all my internal organs out of the way to accommodate it, squashing the breath out of me, compressing my heart so it could only manage wing-flutters instead of proper beats.

I’d honestly have stayed in the squat if I could, even after we signed our record contract, but the police and property developers launched a dawn raid one day soon after our second album came out. Using police helicopters and riot gear and dogs, they evicted everyone. Fortunately we were all away on the road at the time, so we had our meagre possessions with us. It was our neighbours who bore the brunt of it. The raid made the papers: ‘Europe’s Largest Squat Evicted: Famous Residents Include Band Cohen’.

The boys and I rented a flat together for a year or so after that, but as we amassed more royalties and had more success, one by one they drifted off to buy their own houses with their girlfriends and wives. Then, after we got our big advance, I felt I might as well do the same. Put down some roots, finally. I couldn’t count on the band being around forever.

Things changed.

So, a year or so after Cohen had its first million-selling single, I bought a big Georgian house in a smart London street of identical houses. Naturally, security was high on my list of priorities, and ironically, I had an appointment with a bespoke security firm to come and fit cameras and a panic button in my bedroom. I’d booked them for a date that turned out to be exactly a week after it happened. The police did later pursue that line of enquiry, because how obvious would that have been? Raid the house, knowing that it had no alarm. But every member of the security company had a solid alibi.

And I knew who it was, anyway. It had to have been him – the personification of my nightmares; my paint-throwing tormentor. I was sure of it. I’d been waiting for him, in the sweat-soaked green-painted nightmares I’d been having ever since the album launch.

I’d only been living in the house a month or so, coming and going via the narrow, claustrophobic, weed-choked alley that ran behind it so that nobody recognised me and realised they had a million-selling pop star living in their street. I’d only met my immediate neighbours, both elderly couples who didn’t, as far as I was aware, have a clue who I was.