The clues were there all along if we’d only looked for them. His first-ever single, ‘Hearing Me (Rising Up)’ samples Campbell’s ‘Rise Up’. He delivers guest raps on three different tracks of her unfairly maligned experimental album The Northern Lass, which tried to marry the traditional folk songs of seventeenth-century Scottish poet Robert Burns to modern-day musical forms, including grime (seriously, ten years on it’s well worth a re-listen and this critic, for one, is prepared to admit he was very wrong about it).

Za Flow is the South London wideboy from a strict Pakistani-British family who found his release in the rebellious crunks of the grime scene; Clio Campbell, who took her own life earlier this week, was a much older redhead from the Scottish Highlands, raised in the folk traditions of her ancestral homeland, with a career as a feisty pop-starlet years behind her. And yet for six years – as her career was on the wane and his just beginning – these two utterly different musicians, with a sixteen-year age gap between them, shared a life and a bed. A sort of gender-swap multiracial A Star Is Born set in contemporary London, perhaps?

What brought this unlikely couple together? Politics. Campbell, whose angry, bouncy single ‘Rise Up’ brought her fame at the height of the Poll Tax riots, as a doe-eyed twenty-two-year-old with a radical streak, was always an awkward fit in the bubblegum-coloured world of early 90s pop, not to mention the horn-blaring, Blairite and boorishly ironic Britpop era that followed. Ironically, her music and message would probably have found much more sympathetic ears with Millennials, who responded overwhelmingly to her toy-boy lover’s 2010 Mercury-nominated debut Halfboi, which concealed a dark fury about world politics and allegedly ‘post-racial’ Britain behind a cheeky wit and gripping, sublime hooks. He’s since gone on to use his position to speak out about various injustices affecting his community, from alleged instances of racial profiling by the Met, to the rise in anti-Muslim hate crime after Brexit to the ongoing issues with the Grenfell Tower tragedy. What has always made Za Flow stand out is that he never goes too far, always stays fair, is always considerate of mainstream opinion (much as critics of his recent tweets on Theresa May’s time as Home Secretary might disagree).

Knowing what we know now, it’s easy to see how Campbell, a lifelong activist outspoken on everything from the Poll Tax to Scottish Independence, who was famously the target of an undercover spy-cop campaign in the 1990s, could have helped mould a young man from an impoverished background with raw musical talent into the voice of today’s disenfranchised generation.