I didn’t know Claudia Fontaine’s name until this week, when she died at the age of 57. I knew her face, though, and her voice: she was as much part of my pop adolescence as being poised over the pause button of the radio cassette recorder while listening to John Peel, or wondering whether I’d get back to Paddington from some London venue for the last train home to Slough.

Fontaine was part of Afrodiziak, first as a duo with Caron Wheeler (later of Soul II Soul), and later as a trio with Naomi Thompson, who were the British record industry’s backing singers of choice for much of the 1980s. In those days, even for mimed appearances, solo artists or groups would often bring along to the Top of the Pops studio the people who actually appeared on the records, and so Afrodiziak became regulars at BBCTelevision Centre, as well as on Channel 4’s The Tube.

That’s Fontaine in the background when Marilyn performed Calling Your Name on Top of the Pops. There she is again as Elvis Costello does Everyday I Write the Book, and with the Special AKA demanding Nelson Mandela’s freedom. She wasn’t there when the Jam did Beat Surrender, but she was on stage when they played it on The Tube; she’s there with Madness, playing Sweetest Girl on Saturday Live and No 73. She’s back on ToTP with Howard Jones, when he sang Things Can Only Can Better.

Some backing artists become famous in their own right. Sometimes it’s because of one specific performance: Merry Clayton on the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter; Clare Torry on Pink Floyd’s The Great Gig in the Sky. Sometimes it’s because of the enormous number of incredible records they appeared on: the Funk Brothers at Motown; the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles; the Swampers in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

You wouldn’t make those claims for Fontaine. Afrodiziak’s contribution to Sunset Now by Heaven 17 is not, whichever way you cut it, going to be talked about in the way of the Swampers’ performance on Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You) – but that’s fine. If you were growing up in the 80s, Afrodiziak – even if you didn’t know who they were, as I didn’t – felt as oddly central to Top of the Pops as Ooh Gary Davies, awkward teenagers and the feeling of embarrassment as you demanded silence from your family for the three minutes of your favourite band.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ubiquitous in the 80s ... Pino Palladino. Photograph: Gary Gershoff/Getty Images

They weren’t the only constant but unknown presences in 80s pop. I think the first time I became aware of a musician who wasn’t one of the stars was through the gurgling bass sound on the singles from Paul Young’s album No Parlez. That turned out to be the work of Pino Palladino, who became ubiquitous through the 80s in the same way as Afrodiziak did. I discovered that the gurgling sound was the result of him playing a fretless bass, and I started to notice it on other records, and realise: that’s Palladino again. And there he would be, too, on Top of the Pops.

The more obsessed you become with music, the more likely you are to look out for the names below the headlines. You start to recognise the kinds of records they will be associated with, and be able to take an educated guess about whether you’ll like their music. So, as an indie fan in the mid to late 80s, I could be pretty sure that, even if I had never heard of the group concerned, a single produced by John A Rivers and recorded in Leamington Spa would interest me. Indeed, so associated did Rivers and Woodbine Street studios become with a certain strain of lo-fi, 60s-inflected jangly pop, that the unknown groups of that era have been commemorated in a series of Nuggets-like compilations called The Sound of Leamington Spa, which has just reached its eighth volume.

I still do it, too. My knowledge of dance music is minimal to the point of nonexistence, but if I am sent an album with a note that it’s been produced by the sometime DJ and remixer Ewan Pearson, I put it straight on, because he seems to have worked on so many of my favourite records over the last few years.

The people in the background – low down the credits on the back cover; in the edge of frame on the TV appearance; getting on stage for just two songs of the gig – are never going to be pop’s heroes. But the peculiar ecosystem of British pop in the 80s, with its wealth of televisual opportunities, means Claudia Fontaine was one of its most recognisable faces. And this week she’s being mourned even by those of us who never knew her name.

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