"He turned to me and said: 'You know the one I really loved? Kevin Coyne. He was amazing.'"Coyne had 10 years at Virgin, but none of his extraordinary albums such as Blame it on the Night and Dynamite Daze managed to attract a mass audience. Virgin hoped for platinum discs: Coyne gave them songs about lunatics, Jack Russell terriers, and suicidal women with bulimia, almost all of them recorded on the first take. While most musicians appear to have made little impact on Branson, Coyne was an exception."I was with Richard a couple of years ago," says his authorised biographer, Mick Brown. His first solo album, Case History, also on Dandelion, drew on his observation of psychiatric patients.He brought his family to London, where he helped run The Soho Project, a rehabilitation centre, where he worked till he signed to Virgin in 1972.

In 1967, he and his young wife took jobs as therapists at Whittingham Mental Hospital, near Preston. Their sons Eugene and Robert were born there; Coyne was still at Whittingham when he recorded two albums with Siren, for John Peel's Dandelion label. It was the first time I'd seen a singer and thought: this person is truly amazing I knew he was special right away. It was - is - the greatest voice I ever heard."While Cudworth and contemporaries such as Ian Breakwell left Derby to develop their international reputation as artists, Coyne joined Trent Buses as a conductor.

He first saw Coyne perform in the refectory."This little guy stood up on stage," Cudworth recalls, "and this incredible voice came out. Coyne, who proved to be no fool, went to Derby College of Art, where he met his first wife, Lesley Fox.Fellow-student Nick Cudworth, piano player in Kevin Coyne's first band, Siren, now has work hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. It's his frank and ironic farewell to the world; he called the CD - what better epitaph for a buried renegade - Underground.Coyne grew up on a council estate in Derby, where his father was a house-painter. He was two and a half before he could walk, because his large head made him overbalance.