Seventies singer-songwriter Kevin Coyne deserves to be celebrated as one of British music’s cult icons as much as the likes of Nick Drake and Syd Barrett.

Kevin Coyne is a name that won’t mean much to many music lovers younger than me. It didn’t mean much to most people in his heyday in the early 1970s. But he deserves cult status as much as Syd Barrett or Nick Drake. Perhaps his mistake was not to die young.

I don’t remember where I first encountered his unique voice: probably through the John Peel show: his first band, Siren, was signed to Peel’s Dandelion label. It must have been around 1973 because that’s when I bought his fourth album, the wonderfully (albeit sinisterly) titled Marjory Razorblade.

It was a radical departure from my usual diet of T.Rex, Slade and Sweet, Coyne’s peculiar but enormously emotive voice being even more of an acquired taste than Bob Dylan’s.

His songs celebrated, with a curious blend of compassion and rage, the forgotten people at the margins of working-class Britain, especially those forced to live in institutions – something he had personal experience of as a social worker and drugs counsellor (his first album, drawing closely on his work, was even called Case History).

Although I hadn’t listened to the album in decades til now, I remembered its songs as if it were yesterday, from the arrestingly odd a capella title track to the shoulda-been-a-hit Marlene.

The rattling blues boogie of Eastbourne Ladies (once cited by Johnny Rotten as one of his favourite songs), captures a certain sort of quintessential Englishness with the same accuracy and detail as the lens of photographer Martin Parr.

Then there is this – the terrifying folk-blues of House On The Hill, about a psychiatric hospital where Coyne once worked while suffering from depression himself.

It’s performed here on the Old Grey Whistle Test with guitarist Gordon Smith and percussionist Chilli Charles. A couple of years later I saw him live with a different band including Zoot Money and Andy Summers (soon to be of The Police) on electric guitar, and it was even more terrifying.

I still vividly recall the discomfiting sight of Coyne singing this song holding one of those plastic auditorium chairs upside down over his head, singing through the letterbox-shaped aperture at the bottom of the back.