Not wanting to stumble into that trap Private Eye satirises so mercilessly of journalists writing obituaries just to demonstrate their ‘about town’ intimacy with the great-and-good, I had two brief encounters with the film director Ken Russell, who has died aged 84.

About ten years ago, in a Soho establishment called Cheapo Cheapo Records, I spotted Russell flicking through a tray of CDs to search out, I overheard him tell his companion, a second-hand copy of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie. I plucked up sufficient courage to tell him how much I’d enjoyed his recent South Bank Show documentary Classic Widows. He thanked me and we started talking about Humphrey Searle. And then, like he’d set it up, a Soho cabaret transvestite trotted past, all high heels and silicon. The juxtaposition was so Ken Russell I thought. The second sighting, a couple of years ago, was far sadder: an obviously frail Russell was stumbling up the stairs at Notting Hill tube station on his way, perhaps, to visit the nearby Music and Video Exchange.

For his Composer Widows documentary Russell interviewed the surviving wives of William Walton, Humphrey Searle, Bernard Stevens and Benjamin Frankel. There were, of course, characteristic Russell ‘moments’. I remember him dancing with (I think) Fiona Searle through her garden, and the programme mounted a typically trenchant defence of British music. Did Russell overplay the worth of some of these composers? Probably. But never his genuine enthusiasm. We should be appreciative that Russell still had enough muscle to shoehorn this niche documentary into the ITV schedules, albeit a pre-Simon Cowell ITV.

Then again, his whole career was perched somewhat carelessly between serious concerns and trash celebrity. Mid-period Russell films like the enjoyably daft Lair of The White Worm and the awful Crimes of Passion sit uneasily alongside early masterpieces like Women in Love and Dante’s Inferno. And how to square the circle that the man who directed that much adored film Song of Summer – about Delius’ relationship with Eric Fenby – ended up on the 2007 edition of Celebrity Big Brother arguing the toss with Jade Goody?

Looking at it from the outside, Russell comprehensively miring himself in celebrity nonsense feels unbecoming for a man of his standing and idiosyncratic talent, although he obviously thought otherwise. But the sort of boundaries of taste he questioned, and then poleaxed, in The Devils and The Boyfriend (with music by Peter Maxwell Davies) needed to coexist with this far less ingratiating underside because they were part of the same impulse. The Devils in particular remains bold and itchily imaginative – fearless in its exploration of desires normally kept buttoned-down, and a perfect visual rhyme for the kink of Maxwell Davies’ high camp score.

As for Russell’s other music films, Lisztomania imagines a brilliant modern allegory for Liszt’s apparent rock star-like vanity, The Who’s Roger Daltrey as Liszt completing the conceptual circle. But Mahler, starring Robert Powell, doesn’t do the historical Mahler many favours.

Any Ken Russell film about music, or whatever subject he sucked into his orbit, attempted to find deeper truths by stripping away pomp, deference and creative restrictions. And whatever you think about Russell’s exhibitionist tendencies, his films about Elgar, Delius, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Bruckner, Holst and Bax show a dogged devotion to the cause of music.

Philip Clark