Schoolteacher Clifford T. Ward made an unusual addition to the parade of Glam rockers on Top of the Pops with his sensitive piano ballad Gaye.

This is another of those songs that has lodged in my memory even though I don’t remember having any great fondness for it at the time. Yet it’s there, an inescapable part of my childhood.

I can even remember knowing that Clifford T Ward, with his long blond hair and diffident demeanour, was a schoolteacher. What I didn’t know ’til now (how could I?) that his pupils at North Bromsgrove High School, where he was still teaching English and Drama when Gaye cracked the top ten, included Trudie Styler and Karl Hyde of Underworld.

They may even have been among the children he recruited to sing backing vocals on his popular albums, Home Thoughts and its successor, with its slightly scholarly pun of a name, Mantle Pieces.

Cliff had trained as a teacher after his music career failed to take off in beat bands in the mid-Sixties. He need a “proper job” because he had become a father when he was only 17 and soon had four children to support, the first of whom suffered from cerebral palsy. He released his first album on John Peel’s label Dandelion Records, but it folded soon afterwards.

With a new label, Charisma, he immediately had a top ten hit with Gaye, which sold a million copies and reached No.8 in the charts, enabling him to give up his teaching job. But his strong aversion to touring, or any form of public appearance, including interviews and photo shoots, hindered his chances of further success, and his follow-up single, the oddly-titled Scullery, only just broke into the Top 40.

In 1987 he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis but continued to record, making his 11th and final album in 1995 by crawling painfully on all fours to his home recording studio to finish it. A stage musical called Shattered World, about Cliff and his battle against MS, was produced around the same time, featuring some of his songs. He also had his songs recorded by Cliff Richard, Art Garfunkel and Justin Hayward.

He died in 2001 after contracting pneumonia, aged just 57.