He added fuel to the controversy with his stage get-up: he wore a pair of burning horns at his gigs (and on Top of the Pops), and later performed a series of gigs in front of three burning crosses.
“I get asked a lot if I get sick of performing ‘Fire’,” he answers, to the inevitable question. “And I don’t. I see every performance as something different, which it is. It’s rather like asking a stage actor if they’re sick of playing Hamlet”. Arthur’s return to England, after a spell in Austin, Texas, was hastened by a brain haemorrhage he suffered while performing the song. “I was hitting the high note of ‘Fire’ at the time,” he remembers, “in a horrid little club in Southend. When I was recovering, Texas was too hot for me, so a friend put me up in a spare room they had in a house in Lewes.” He’s been living here ever since.

It would be wrong to think that there was little more to Arthur’s career than one successful song. He can be credited with sowing the seeds which led to Glam Rock and Theatrical Rock; his early eighties collaboration with Klaus Schultz introduced synthesisers to a bewildered public; he was part of the first project that used a drum machine live, thus being at the vanguard of the electro-pop explosion. He is currently performing with the highly talented Brighton-based musician Nick Pym, a multi-instrumentalist who uses recorded loops of music he plays on the guitar in one part of a song to accompany his violin playing on another part. “We will, of course, do a version of ‘Fire’, he promises. And rightly so. AL