Shara Nelson: a rare talent who needs help not condemnation

A friend of mine recently posted a Facebook link to a 90s documentary on former Radio 1 DJ Mike Read's stalker, the intimidating and clearly quite unwell Blue Tulip Rose Read. "The Pete Tong story reminded me of this," he quipped. Unaware of the "Pete Tong story" I Googled his name and read, with my heart sinking into my stomach, that he had put a restraining order on singer Shara Nelson.

My band Saint Etienne worked with Nelson on several records after she left Massive Attack. She was very gentle, quite private, and incredibly talented – give her a backing track and she could ad-lib a fully formed song, and a great one at that, inside 10 minutes. I've never met anyone else who could do that. We wrote a song called One Goodbye in Ten together that I'm really proud of, and she sang on our Tiger Bay album. She even came to my wedding. Also, of course, she wrote (not only sang) the lyrics and melody on Unfinished Sympathy, arguably the greatest single of the 90s.

Something, presumably, has gone terribly wrong in her life in the past few years, but nowhere have I read that she is to receive any help – just a 12-month community order. Mental illness is still more likely to be the butt of jokes than something to invoke compassion or understanding. Aside from my friend's light treatment of the story, the Big Shot blog has suggested throwing Nelson and Tongy into a Big Brother house with Charlie Sheen. Unfinished sympathy indeed.

With male pop stars, odd behaviour is encouraged. Look at Syd Barrett, lost to the real world, with his barely-there solo albums regarded by rock critics as cosmic insights into the acid-soaked mind. Or Sky Saxon, a legend by dint of freaked-out anecdotes that crush the meagre number of decent Seeds songs.

The same rules don't seem to apply to women; when Mariah Carey started crying on TV or Britney Spears shaved her head, people tutted and frowned. As an out-of-condition, lethargic and clearly unwell Britney debuted her new single Gimme More live on TV in 2007, the BBC's David Willis declared it would "go down in the history books as being one of the worst to grace the MTV awards". There was no sympathy; suddenly it was open season. The New York Times dismissed Gimme More as "almost nothing but slithery come-ons and defiant invitations to nightclub decadence". Does that sound like such a bad thing? Sick woman, soft target.

The media likes its safely kookie ladies – Björk, Bat for Lashes, Kate Bush – but confronted with real strangeness, it gets a bit Witchfinder General. Let's hope that Pete Tong can now get some peace and quiet in his life, and that Shara Nelson receives the help she needs to get herself back on track and her voice back on the radio.