There are advantages to being a big fish in a small pond, but there are inevitable problems, too. Take the case of Hungarian rock and pop artists of the communist era: when there are relatively few people competing for the opportunities to gain national recognition, perhaps your route to the top is, if not easier to navigate, then at least a little simpler than for your contemporaries in the capitalist world. But when your language in effect cuts off your nation from everyone else, and your government largely prevents you from proving your worth in the decadent west, your chances of being recognised for the consistent high quality of your work are automatically reduced.

Never mind her extraordinary music: even Sarolta Zalatnay’s name needs a note of explanation. Hungarian convention is to place the surname and first name in reverse order to how they appear in the English-speaking world. So when you track down references to her online, you’re as likely to find Zalatnay Sarolta as Sarolta Zalatnay. She was born Charlotte Sacher, but her family adopted more traditional Hungarian names during the 1960s, when Hungary’s brand of communism was somewhat liberalised. You’ll also find her referred to as “the Hungarian Janis Joplin”, and not without good reason.

If she’d been born just a few miles to the west, maybe Zalatnay would’ve become an internationally feted superstar. Then again, maybe she’d never have made records that could touch the heights she reached in the 1970s, which seem to depend for their singularity and magnetism on the very particular restrictions that would have faced anyone who was part of a countercultural pop scene while recording for a state-run record label in a nation cut adrift from its continent by a language unrelated to any other on the face of the planet.

In a sense, her career followed a surprisingly contemporary trajectory. Discovered and attaining national prominence as a teenager via a TV talent show, the singer worked with folk-pop-jazz band Bergendy Együttes, acquired the nickname “Cini”, and became a major star. Her first solo album – … Ha Fiú Lehetnék (… If I Could Be a Boy) – arrived in 1970, and found Zalatnay backed by the psych-pop band Metro.

It set a pattern: the singer’s strident yet diffident vocals riding tracks modelled after cutting-edge British or European pop-rock styles of two or three years earlier. Her range, and an aggressive-sounding rasp when really attacking a note, were apparently the result of a tonsillectomy in her mid-teens: her family had to give up their wish to see Sarolta sing opera, but she instead took possession of one of the great rock voices. Her debut album was produced in a way that gave the drums the kind of skittish rattle that probably made them sound thin at the time but which, heard through the lens of hip-hop and four decades of sonic adventurism, seem to today’s ear to retain a crisp perfection and a sense of reined-in aggression.

Hungary’s rock scene was small but the key, formidably talented figures kept reconfiguring themselves in new line-ups, the changing blends helping to push their music forward. Zalatnay’s collaboration with one man in particular – bassist and songwriter Károly Frenreisz – was key. Frenreisz was a co-writer and musician on Zalatnay’s debut and their relationship deepened when he left Metro and co-founded the proggishly inclined Locomotiv GT with former members of another psych-rock outfit, Omega.

Locomotiv GT were the band she used for her second and third LPs, Zalatnay and Álmodj Velem (Dream with Me) – her image changing from the 60s starlet look of the debut to a leather-clad rocker on the cover of the second album and a floaty, hippyish vibe for Álmodj Velem. Somehow, between making these records and a string of non-LP 45s, she also found the time to become a significant Hungarian movie star. Frenreisz departed Locomotiv GT in 1973 and set up the heavier, harder Skorpio – a sort of Hungarian Deep Purple – who worked on Zalatnay’s superb fourth album, Hadd Mondjam El (Let Me Tell You).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarolta Zalatnay’s album Hadd Mondham El

This music – characterised by spare (though never sparse) arrangements, instinctive and inspired incorporation of folk melodies and atmospheres, driven by musicians of great skill and technique adept at reimagining western styles and giving them their own unique spin – was huge in Hungary but remained all but unknown elsewhere. The Pepita label put some of these records out in other communist bloc countries, and a 1975 album released in Czechoslovakia found Zalatnay singing English-language versions of some of her signature songs, alongside covers of I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Janis Joplin’s Move Over. There was even a surprisingly straight Hungarian-language cover of Abba’s Eurovision-winning Waterloo on a 1974 single.

International acclaim had seemed tantalisingly close to falling within her grasp. Hungarian musicians were allowed rather more generous opportunities for international travel than many of their cold war contemporaries in communist countries, and Zalatnay spent two years in Britain at the end of the 60s on scholarship and educational trips. She was introduced to various British musicians and it became part of the Cini legend that she’d turned down a marriage proposal from Maurice Gibb. Yet it wasn’t until British DJ and record-label head Andy Votel released a fine best-of on his Finders Keepers label in 2007 that many music fans in the English-speaking world ever got a chance to hear her classic 70s records.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bee Gee and she … Maurice Gibb with Sarolta Zalatnay in 1969. Photograph: Tony Gale/Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy/Alamy

By the time Votel’s compilation appeared, Zalatnay had acquired a distinctly western tabloid image that had little to do with her music. During her third marriage, to a porn baron, she posed for Hungarian Playboy, showing off newly enlarged breasts. Several salacious autobiographies presaged an appearance on Hungary’s Big Brother, which came just before she served a jail term for tax evasion. Her preoccupations since seem to have been characterised by a determination to set the record straight, and work on animal rights and for charities supporting orphans and the elderly. She continues to perform, but those brilliant 70s albums – all obtainable at almost offensively tiny prices on the online secondhand market – remain stubbornly unknown throughout most of the rest of the world.