On 7 September 1986, our great supporter and my former lover Ruth Polsky set out to attend an Aids benefit in New York. It was the first-ever Aids fundraiser in the world and Ruth had already seen the havoc this disease was wreaking among many of her friends in New York clubland. She was very serious about it, and so ‘the Queen of New York City’, who had never paid to get into a club in her life, did something she’d probably never done before. She queued up proudly outside the Limelight to get in – her way of respecting the gravity of Aids and making a strong statement.

However, as she waited, a driver ran a red light and crashed into a taxi, which hit the kerb, took off into the air and landed on the pavement in front of the club, scattering everybody but her, and killing her instantly.

Rob went to her funeral alone, on our behalf. Truth was, we couldn’t all afford to go; we just didn’t have the money, still suffering the fallout from our tax debacle. Instead we’d pay our respects when we next went to the US, which was towards the end of that year, a mammoth tour. Of course the preparations were tinged with sadness, because as our US fixer and agent Ruth would have been responsible for the tour, and as well as being our biggest yet it would have been her biggest production too. The fact that she was unable to see it through when it was something she’d begun – something she’d been a part of since the very beginning, since before Ian died – was very, very sad indeed. On that tour – overseen by Tom Atencio in place of Ruth – there was a sense that we were doing it for her.

The idea was to capitalise on our growing US popularity, which we did. We wanted to behave like a regular band by doing a regular long tour, and indeed it would turn out to be the zenith of our touring career.

The other three hated it, of course; they despised the very idea of it, six weeks away. The question of lengthy tours would be a thorny issue from then on. I never got why this one was different.

Me, I loved it. For the first time we introduced merchandising; we had run out of excuses not to. Tom Atencio described it as the life-blood of touring in America and it ended up being very profitable; also, for the first time we were being driven around – in limos, no less – so yours truly no longer had to worry about ferrying everybody around (or staying sober, which, as will soon become clear, was very much another part of my downfall). In addition, we took a lot of drugs. If Ruth was looking down on us, she would have loved it.