My favourite album: Caught Up by Millie Jackson

If loving you is wrong, as the opening track on Millie Jackson's fourth album states, then I don't want to be right. I could have picked an album that more people listen to, that is less schlocky, a lot more cool. But I didn't want to be right and I love Millie Jackson's Caught Up as much now as I did in the mid-70s. The cover: three people trapped in a spider's web of "lurve" may be of its time. But back then Jackson was singing about sexual relationships in a complicated and grown up way that, for me, signalled a world to come.

I just love her voice. Raw power indeed: world weary, swooping from tender-sweet to a licentious roar. Caught Up is a concept album. The concept, however, wasn't the "state of the universe", as was then fashionable. No, it was the everyday concept of a love triangle. Jackson tells us how it is to be the mistress, how it is to be the wife, how it is to know a relationship is over, how desire waxes and wanes as domesticity takes over, how to leave a lover.

We used to play this album in my friend Val's bedroom, which was the coolest room I had ever seen as it was painted in black and purple stripes. Alongside Jackson we played Sly Stone and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The boys at the time lectured us on the brilliance of Cream.

The ones that did know, knew that if you wanted to seduce a girl, Millie Jackson was your woman. She made sex sound forbidden but inevitable. Wrong but very right. The irresistible combination. The epic opening track has Millie the mistress about to make her married lover go home, a big production builds around her big voice, she is watching the time, remaining in control and then … bang. "Forget about the clock on the wall," she sings. He stays.

She then turns it all around in The Rap (I don't think I knew what rapping was in 1974). She lets us know that though it's hard to be with a guy who is with someone else, it also has its advantages: "You don't have to wash no one's funky drawers but your own." We go on to hear about the sadness of the wife and the futility of fighting.

The last track where she reworks Bobby Goldsboro's cheesy Summer is genius. A couple of years later Patti Smith was to blow away the need to change the gender in a lyric with Gloria. But what Jackson does here remains extraordinary. Sure I can retrospectively deconstruct it, but at the time I simply knew she was singing about what it feels like to be a young girl who knows and doesn't know quite what she is doing when she decides to lose her virginity: "The sweat trickled down the front of my gown/ I thought it would melt me."

Years ago, the late great Charlie Gillett asked me on his show about my favourite music, and he seemed a little confused by my choices. I don't think Ciccone Youth were up his street and when I played Millie Jackson he listed some older soul singers I needed to listen to. I am well aware of the history of funk and absolute filth that proceeded Jackson, but men always do need to try and "educate" women about music. They never stop trying. Bless them.

But listen to Millie. Let her be in charge. "I threw back my hair/ Like you were not there." Her shoulders are bare. He tries not to stare. Jackson is wanting to be wanted. It's working.

Caught Up is not pop S&M or focus-group sexiness. It's earthy, messy emotional stuff. Sublime, destructive, healing, hating, loving. At the time it was different to guys singing about doing it all night long that, as any teenage girl knows, teenage boys are indeed capable of – impressive only if you want relentless pounding.

So back then Caught Up offered a different vision, a series of climaxes of lust and laughter and loss. I didn't understand it all then. I don't now. I just fell in love with the way this woman owns her own desire and her own mistakes. She oozes passion and power from every pore. Caught Up is the soundtrack of letting go.

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