Suddenly the song was being played to crowds who had arguably taken 50 quid’s worth of high-powered drugs and weren’t thinking of getting much sleep for days. None of us realised how the line “I can’t get no sleep” would resonate with generations of clubland audiences. There were eyebrows raised about the lines “Making mad love to my girl on the heath / Tearing off tights with my teeth” but they managed to stay in. That was forced on us by MTV because they felt the original first line – “I only smoke weed when I need to” – was too graphic. That first line – “Deep in the bosom of the gentle night” – is not me channelling Dylan Thomas. I had an electricity meter and when the money ran out you’d get six or seven pounds of credit and then – “Boom!” – the lights would go out. The lines about having no electricity and reaching for the pen in the darkness were also from real life. It was so painful it would keep me awake. I didn’t suffer from insomnia, but I’d just had an abscess on my tooth. I spent 20 minutes with a pad jotting down my thoughts, finished the lyrics in the studio the following evening, then spent about 25 minutes putting the vocals down. I got a call from Rollo asking if I could write some words for a new dance track called Insomnia. We went in at No 3 – and the next thing we knew we were doing our first Top of the Pops with the Spices. That was a massive day for record shopping. Our record label Cheeky/Champion was run on a shoestring, but cannily they held the single back so it came out the same day as the Spice Girls’ Say You’ll Be There, which meant we were racked next to them in shops. We were very excited when it got to No 27, but it later proved so popular across Europe that Pete Tong campaigned for us to re-release it.
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