Bill Withers grew tired of people telling him “We thought you were dead”, but as the superstar who walked away at the height of his success and opted for 35 years of self-imposed silence, it was an easy mistake to make. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder myself,” he joked.
After a stream of memorable hits in the 1970s that stand among the best-loved in the canon of popular music, he stopped making records and performing in 1985. There were no comebacks and no desire to put himself back in the spotlight. Even when a tribute concert was arranged in his honour at Carnegie Hall in 2015, he declined to sing with Ed Sheeran and the other stars who had gathered to pay homage.