Sinéad O’Connor could lend her voice to anything and it would sound beautiful to my ears. Like this collaboration with Asian Dub Foundation and Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien from 2003, produced by the great Adrian Sherwood.

“Sinead O’Connor was our generation’s Nina Simone,” says ADF leader Steve ‘Chandrasonic’ Savale. “Like Nina, she wasn’t afraid to put her career on the line in by speaking truth to power. Like Nina she was an excellent songwriter and innovative collaborator. Again, like Nina, she was one of the greatest ever interpretive singers.

“Any song she chose, from Irish folk standards like Cockles and Mussels to Prince’s Nothing Compares 2 U would take on an entirely new meaning as she exposed a song’s innermost beauty and power. So imagine how we felt when she said she wanted to sing one of our songs.”

Savale says the song title came to him in a dream that he later learned was part of Indian folklore, but the song itself only began to take shape after he heard about the case of Zoora Shah, a Bradford woman who served a life sentence for killing her violent and abusive husband, who had pimped her out to his friends much like the recent Pelicot scandal in France.

“I was moved to write the lyrics after hearing a speech by her daughter, Naz, now a Labour MP. I wrote the chords in a downtempo jazz style influenced by The Specials’ third album though of course Dr Das’ bass and Adrian Sherwood’s production took the song to incredible heights. Plus of course Sonia Mehta’s soaring alaap vocals.”

Asian Dub Foundation formed in 1993 as an outgrowth of the documentary Identical Beat, a film shot at London’s Farringdon Community Music House, site of a series of summer workshops designed to teach Asian children the essentials of music technology.

In charge of the workshops were tutor Aniruddha Das and youth worker John Pandit, also a noted DJ; with one of their students, a 15-year-old Bengali rapper named Deedar Zaman, they soon formed a sound system that they called the Asian Dub Foundation.

After each adopted an alias – bassist/tabla player Das became Dr. Das, Pandit became Pandit G, and Zaman became Master D – they gradually evolved into a working band with the 1994 addition of former Higher Intelligence Agency guitarist Steve Chandra Savale, an innovative performer known for tuning his strings to one note like a sitar, turning up the distortion unit, and playing his instrument with a knife.

Emerging in the midst of considerable anti-Asian violence throughout Britain, they channelled influences ranging from punk to ambient music to Bengali folk songs, making a vocal stand against racism, going on to add dancer Bubble-E and second DJ Sun-J to their line-up.