Gregory Isaacs, the Cool Ruler, has one of the most distinctive voices in reggae, as rich, velvety and smooth as a perfect pint of Guinness.

And now to my favourite singer, my hands-down number one favourite since the moment I first heard him. No one (not even Mick Hucknall) can express romantic longing with such passion and emotion, which is why he virtually single-handedly invented the genre of Lovers Rock, yet he remained first and foremost a Roots musician.

The perfect example of how he combined both was Night Nurse, using a killer riddim which he produced himself – including the awesome dub version here – released in Jamaica on African Museum, the label he set up with Errol Dunkley in the early 1970s.

It’s hard to find a decent retrospective of Gregory, let alone one album that captures him at his best: it’s estimated that he’s released an improbable 500 albums – just albums over an insanely prolific career.

Sadly, perhaps fuelled by the mountains of cash he must have made from Simply Red‘s replica version of this tune (Hucknall clearly shares the love for Gregory, and had the good sense to recruit Sly & Robbie to build the foundations), he fell victim to the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1990s and his voice was ravaged by the drug.

A friend recalls interviewing him in Jamaica and being led to a skeletal figure lying semi-comatose in his underpants in a darkened room, cradling a semi-automatic weapon, with a crack pipe beside the bed. Heartbreaking.

Gregory then contracted lung cancer, which claimed his life in 2010 at the age of only 59. He is, however, and always will be The Cool Ruler.