★★★★★

In the 1990s, when there was an appetite for dramatic, heart-on-sleeve songwriters with access to a piano, Fiona Apple was up there with the best of them. Her debut album, Tidal, released when she was 18, sold 2.9 million copies. You could have almost mistaken her for a mainstream pop-rock sensation.

Apple soon put paid to that misconception. She grew up in New York as the child of the “other woman” to the American actor Brandon Maggart and disclosed in a Rolling Stone interview that she had been raped aged 12, this at a time when revelations on trauma were yet to become standard interview fare. Lauded and pilloried for being unguarded bordering on unhinged, she stated in a speech at an MTV