She absolutely was. 110 per cent. One of the best Lauras I’ve ever met. Then after Rust I started having these recurring dreams where there was this line of strangers, an absolute train of them, all coming into my house, and I looked for the end of the train of strangers, where it might finally stop, and I couldn’t see it, there were just more and more people stretching off, into some trees in the distance. And I think that was a pivotal moment for me. And of course I was lucky because I’d had Reka to tell me what it was like, from her experience, which makes me feel sorry for people who are in that position and don’t have somebody to tell them what it’s like or guide them through it. She was there for a while, right there, somewhere much scarier than I was, and she killed it stone dead, snuffed out the fame she had created. And was undoubtedly happier for it. Not everyone can do that. Not everyone has the choice. I used to read about these rock suicides, the 27 Club and so on, and not understand it, baffled as to why these beautiful and talented and adored people would want to end it, apart from maybe that they were fucked up on drugs and booze. I wondered why they couldn’t just step off the rollercoaster for a while, stop doing gigs, stop making records, stop appearing. But now I understand. People want so much from you. You have no idea until you’re there. Also there’s another kind of overdose going on, an overdose of yourself being reflected back at you, and a sort of weird need for it, a preoccupation with it, and that need, and the simultaneous hatred of it, finally becomes a cage you can’t get out of. Because the adoration you experience from strangers is every bit as dangerous to your mental health as the loathing you sometimes feel from them too. I stopped before that happened, and wasn’t even that well known in the first place. And now here I am. I rarely get recognised, especially as I no longer look like ‘Her’, the screen me, the other me that never existed properly anyway, that I partially invented. I can still live. But of course I still want what I do – what I really do, the work – to be appreciated. I still want to communicate and be heard. That’s entirely human, and entirely natural. Communication is positive. I love it.

Are you absolutely sure? You said a few weeks ago that your new LP was going to be a concept album called Cave and that the concept was that you were going to record it as a gatefold double album featuring twenty-three songs, get just one copy of it pressed, then travel to France and leave it in the furthest, dampest recesses of a cave in the Pyrenees.