Dave Ball was one of the least starry rock stars I ever met. It’s probably why we became mates.

For a man who made a song that just about everyone knows – constructed from one note (“Doot, doot”), played twice – and sold around 10 million records, Dave was as down-to-earth as they come.

You’d never see him in a limo or a chauffeur-driven car; not even a taxi. Dave invariably took the bus. He preferred pubs to members’ bars; pints to cocktails and champagne; leisurewear to Savile Row suits.

Even onstage he was the quiet one, content to twiddle his knobs at the back while his flamboyant front man Marc bathed in the glitter and glitz of pop stardom.

When he was recording round my way in Stokey with Richard Norris, his partner in The Grid, he was delighted to find he could update his wardrobe across the road from the studio at Sports Direct. Not that he was a penny-pincher: it’s just that he valued generosity with his time and friendship over frivolous spending.

I can’t remember when or how I met Dave but it must have been about 25 years ago. For several years we met for Richard Thomas’s weekly pop quiz at the Three Crowns, where “Big Dave” (aka DB) and his good friend “Little Dave” Chambers (aka DC) were regulars in a team that also included, at various times, Jeremy Simmonds, Graham Mathias, John Earls and Karin Mochan.

Dave and I would also meet up for gigs – not his own, but bands from our parallel youths – and saw some great bands together – Sparks (before their recent resurgence), Suicide (three times, I think), Wire, The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, with whom he once had an unseemly brawl over something or other: an unusual event for such a mild-mannered and genial character as Dave, who was usually the gentlest of giants but met his match in a man even bigger than him in Mark.

I last saw him shortly before the accident that almost claimed his life three years ago, which hospitalised him for half a year, put him in an induced coma with pneumonia and sepsis, and confined him to a wheelchair.

I was on my way to a cricket match at The Oval with my friend Francis Peckham and the two Daves were propping up the bar in his local pub. Francis, who is by no means a music fan but knew Tainted Love – because, well, who doesn’t? – took some convincing that one of them was a rock star who had sold millions of records.

I saw him at the same pub, and possibly on the same bar stool, when I went to see a Stewart Lee stand-up show there some time later. I introduced them to one another afterwards and while we were chatting a couple of guys asked for selfies with Stew – oblivious to the multi-million-selling rock star at his side.

We had rather lost touch since his accident so the last time I’d seen him was probably onstage at the O2 at what was initially supposed to be a one-off reunion concert by Soft Cell. It was never going to be that, and it was no surprise when they carried on playing, and carried on recording.

He was always working on new music, whether with Soft Cell or The Grid, or remixing; it’s entirely typical of him that when I once mentioned my not-entirely-serious idea of making some sort of electro-country record, fancifully imagining myself as a kind of Leonard Cohen of the spoken word, he was not merely enthusiastic but entirely-seriously offered to compose and record the music for no fee whatsoever.

I’ll miss him enormously, and so will the millions who enjoyed his music, of which this is my favourite song… and not just because of Cindy Ecstasy’s contribution but also because Dave once told me that when Marc sang “I hear the saxophone” he wasn’t, and he had to tell him: “It’s a French horn!”