Her sexuality was something her songs hinted at – not least 1978’s Taking My Baby Uptown, which certainly sounds like it’s about homophobia – but few artists have been so unfailingly insistent that the public enjoy the music, then mind their own business about everything else. Or perhaps it’s Armatrading’s unassuming nature, her disinclination to act as anyone’s standard-bearer. Even before she started releasing jazz and blues albums and Shakespeare-inspired song cycles, she declined to fit easily into any category: she was clearly as comfortable setting her songs to Kraftwerk-ish synthesisers or the guitar squall of Bowie and King Crimson alumnus Adrian Belew as she was toting an acoustic guitar. Perhaps it’s linked to the fact that Armatrading’s music was genuinely hard to pin down. But 45 years on, the 100 best albums ever lists remain closed to her oeuvre, the heritage rock mags don’t run retrospective features and the hipster rehabilitation of 70s soft rock never seems to reach the lush textures of Tall in the Saddle or the funky undertow of Show Some Emotion. She has a brace of singles that will evidently remain on the playlists of solid gold radio stations until solid gold radio stations cease to exist – Love and Affection, Me Myself and I, Drop the Pilot – and a handful of yellowing music press clippings that reveal critics heaping praise on her eponymous 1976 breakthrough album.

Loyal brave true piano