She feared flying ... but her voice soared

made Franklin, understandably, deeply distrustful of the media thereafter.

A fear of flying

I felt the effect of this myself. I had a rare interview with her in 1980, on her last visit to Britain. (She never returned, largely due to a fear of flying following an incident in 1984, which meant that thereafter she’d travel only by bus.)

It is a meeting that stays in my mind for all the wrong reasons. I was ushered into her suite at the Savoy, to find her seated on a sofa, flanked by then husband, Glynn Turman, her brother and manager Cecil, and two PR women, all sitting in a semicircle — it seemed to give her reassurance.

I pulled up a chair in front of them, tape recorder in hand, feeling as if I was facing a firing squad. She was awkward, suspicious, her answers brief to the point of monosyllabic. She seemed to have no interest in talking about her life but also, and more depressingly, her music. As the interview ground on, desperate to ignite her interest, I asked about the two albums she had made with Curtis Mayfield in the ’70s, Almighty Fire and Sparkle — wonderful records, made at a time when her sparkle was actually threatening to fade and her music descend into formula. She shrugged.

They were, she said, making no attempt to disguise the boredom in her voice, “just records”. After little more than 20 minutes of this excruciating stuff, and having determined that she spent much of her time cooking and watching soap operas, to my eternal regret, I abandoned the interview, frustrated, disappointed but also deeply saddened. Aretha was the Queen, and I idolised her.

A gift to the world

At that time she was on the brink of a revival in her fortunes, that would come when, after 19 years, she celebrated her first platinum-selling album in 1985 with Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

But consistency always eluded her.

She fought constant battles, with her weight, her drinking and agoraphobia, which kept her confined to her home for months at a time. She failed to show up for recording sessions, cancelled concerts, often at the last minute and with no explanation, short-changing her audience when she did turn up with perfunctory performances, where hits would be dismissed in hasty medleys and show tunes and schmaltz given the high five.

Biographies and accounts of her life depict her as smallminded and mean-spirited, deeply insecure and jealous of others’ success.

None of this matters — at least to me. It is not necessary for geniuses to be nice people too, although we would wish them to be happy.

But even that, one feels, escaped Franklin. Her unhappy life was the weight she carried, but also the grist of her genius.

Her sister Erma once said that it was Franklin’s lot to channel “more emotion than one human being could bear”.

It was also her gift to the world.