TOWARDS the end of Nina Simone’s life, her concerts were not so much performances as a gathering of the faithful. If Frank Sinatra could be hard on the press pack, Nina Simone raised unpredictability to extravagant heights.

The last time I heard her in London, four or five years ago, her entry on to the stage followed a spectacularly high-flown introduction by the president of her fan club. Potentates at the United Nations General Assembly receive less of a fanfare than Simone was given that night.

There was every bit as much drama once she began singing. Her voice, to be frank, was a shadow of what it had been in her prime. Yet there was no mistaking her ability to turn every tune into another chapter of an unfinished autobiography. No jazz singer since Billie Holiday had invested songs with as much personal anguish as Simone. And just as Holiday attracted a ghoulish following during her final years, so there was an almost voyeuristic air to some of Simone’s admirers. The more erratic her behaviour, the more they indulged her.

Tales of Simone’s eccentricities followed her everywhere. In the early Eighties she found a new home at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, where she inevitably drew full houses. Regulars grew accustomed to her arriving at the bandstand in a fur coat and trainers, a plastic shopping bag in her hand. Scott and Pete King, his business partner, had dealt with many a difficult artist over the years but Simone found ways to stretch their patience.

One night in 1986, after some close calls earlier in the week, she failed to show up at the club at all. Pete King received a telephone call from a restaurant in Fulham. “Isn’t Nina Simone working for you this week?” he was asked.

King said: “She’s supposed to be. She hasn’t shown up.”

The caller replied: “I know. She’s at the next table.”

Most of us forgave her because we recalled how potent a talent she had been. And there was always the chance that it would be the night when the planets would be in alignment again. Sometimes they were. Sometimes we convinced ourselves that they were.

Like the albums she released in the last 20 years of her life, her concerts mixed tantalising flashes of brilliance with long stretches of self-indulgence. Yet even a dullish record such as Baltimore — released during a lacklustre spell in the late Seventies — was illuminated by a charismatic reworking of Randy Newman’s elegaic tune that gave the album its title.

The political upheavals of the civil rights era prompted a fiery response. To Be Young, Gifted and Black and the raucous sentiments of Mississippi Goddam were to remain favourites across the decades. If Simone — who chose exile, first in the Caribbean, then in Africa and Europe — sometimes gave the impresssion she was reliving the Sixties, it was a reflection of the turmoil the decade left in her soul. Radical politics, mixed with a volatile personality, made an unforgiving combination.

It could be argued that her gifts were always going to be too diverse and too overpowering to make her at ease with the demands of the music business. Embracing jazz, pop, rhythm and blues, show tunes, chansons and gospel, Simone mastered them all. Life, as ever, was a little harder.

• Clive Davis is jazz critic of The Times

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