Selling newspapers outside the grocery store for two years.

I once had to dig a fire escape from a basement in a health club. It took two weeks.

When Rufus first came out, it was all white guys and myself, but then the band changed and Tony Maiden, Bobby Watson and Andre Fischer came in. This guy booked us for a gig in Illinois, based on our original album cover, and when we got there he said that there were too many black people in the band. He actually put some white guys on the stage with us.

Cleaning the freezer room at Bejam as a Saturday job, aged 13.

When I was losing my sight, I couldn’t see where I was going, and I went into an undertaker’s thinking it was a barber’s. I asked the undertaker whether he had many waiting.

I was thrown out of a club by bouncers when I walked into somebody and told them that I was registered blind. They said: “Don’t give a fuck – you don’t belong in here.” As a straight white man, it gives you a taste of what other people have to contend with.

Hard-working, resilient, irritating.

To Kill a Mockingbird – I was meant to read it for an exam and I didn’t and I cheated. I was allowed to use a laptop to type my answers because I couldn’t see my writing, so I hid an electronic copy of the book on the laptop.

My college years when I was 17 to 19, before the responsibilities of adulthood, just doing the things that I was good at and liked – computers, maths, further maths (I was a geek).

Strictly. I went into it thinking I would last two weeks!