Cause the sweetest kiss I ever got is the one I’ve never tasted

For a quarter of a century, the two lives of Sixto Rodriguez ran in parallel without ever touching. In Detroit he was a construction and demolition worker who had once made two albums nobody bought. In South Africa, where Cold Fact passed from turntable to turntable until it was simply part of the furniture, he was a legend — and, according to the rumour everyone there believed, long dead, having set himself alight onstage.

“Sugar Man” opens that album: a plea to a street dealer, sung so gently it could pass for a lullaby, carried on a slow descending bassline that producers Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore dressed up in backwards strings and early-synthesizer bleeps. It was recorded in Detroit in the late summer of 1969, released by Sussex in March 1970, and ignored almost everywhere it went.

The correction took until the internet arrived. In 1997 a Cape Town fan named Stephen “Sugar” Segerman put up a website called The Great Rodriguez Hunt, and journalist Craig Bartholomew followed the trail until word came back from Rodriguez’s eldest daughter: alive, well, Detroit. In March 1998 Rodriguez walked out in front of sold-out South African crowds who had grown up on his voice. If you’ve seen Searching for Sugar Man, you know that moment. If you haven’t, listen to this first — walk in already converted.