I have to confess I never really paid much attention to the rise of D’Angelo, wrongly filing him away as a smooth R&B crooner of bedroom ballads.

I guess he was that – he wrote his first album literally in his bedroom – but he was much more besides, combining a honeyed voice with a hip-hop swagger, old soul and contemporary R&B.

Equal parts Curtis Mayfield and LL Cool J, he has much more in common with Prince, playing most of the instruments – guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and saxophone – and producing his own records. 

“I was one of those guys who read the album credits and I realised that Prince was a true artist. He wrote, produced, and performed, and that’s the way I wanted to do it,” he once said.

His 1995 debut album Brown Sugar, released when he was just 21, was one of the foundation stones of what would come to be called neo-soul, an evolution that brought us artists like Maxwell, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Alicia Keys and Angie Stone.

The album’s organic grooves, created with live instruments and recorded to tape, fused contemporary R&B and hip-hop with earlier influences from his parents – a gospel-loving Pentecostal minister father and jazz-loving mother with a passion for Miles Davis.

D’Angelo used vintage analogue equipment including Wurlitzers, a Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes electric piano and dated effects boxes alongside more modern drum machines and computers.

It was a radically different approach for R&B in the mid-90s, which tended to place vocalists in the hands of well-known producers and (sometimes) songwriters, with digital-driven backing tracks.

This track – Shit, Damn, Motherfucker – is a dark tale of death and infidelity that you could well imagine Prince coming up with; here he is performing it with Soultronics at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000.