POP / The lost years of Marvin Gaye: Did anybody here see our good friend Marvin between 1980 and 1984? Not unless they were in Ostend, they didn't. Robert Hanks reports

How many Caesars and Pompeys, he would say, by mere inspiration of the names, have been rendered worthy of them? And how many, he would add, are there who might have done exceeding well in the world, had not their characters and spirits been totally depressed and nicodemused into nothing?' - Tristram Shandy.

'He was troubled, even from the name 'Gay', you know . . . people are cruel. From childhood on you'll find them saying all kind of stuff, man, and picking you apart, and he added the 'e' to his name to change the outlook of Gay' - Thomas 'Beans' Bowles.

THERE is, as it happens, quite a lot in a name if you have the wrong one. In the case of Marvin Gay Jnr, you wouldn't expect a slightly effeminate handle to be much of a problem. Long before Barry White, Marvin Gaye, as he became, was the original love machine - and a slimmer, better looking version at that. Looking at footage of Gaye in the Sixties when he was Motown's most successful male star, the striking thing about him isn't his voice - though he had a superb tenor topped by a rich falsetto. What's striking is that he's just so damned cool: smiling calmly into the camera just barely twitching in time to the music, a tall beautiful man in a white suit, unruffled by the crowds of screaming women.

Even in the late Seventies, when he was hitting 40 and getting a little thicker around the middle, you could hear female fans at his concerts yelling abuse at the pretenders to his throne: 'Kiss my ass, Teddy Pendergrass] I love you, Marvin] I love only you]'

By any normal measure, Gaye was a success: he made millions of dollars, even if he always lost them again, he was pursued by beautiful women, he was a tremendously talented songwriter - not just Motown singalongs like 'I Heard It through the Grapevine' or 'How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You)', but lengthy, complex works like the album Here My Dear, a brutally personal view of the break-up of his marriage to Anna Gordy, sister of Berry, the Motown supremo. But names go deeper than you think. In 'Trouble Man', an Arena documentary broadcast this weekend to mark the 10th anniversary of Gaye's death (shot by his father the day before his 45th birthday), you hear Gaye's brother Frankie talk about the way Marvin used to get teased as a child, in the black suburb of Washington DC where they lived. 'We went to church on Saturday, our last name was Gay - you can imagine - we didn't eat pork in a neighbourhood where everybody ate pork, because it wasn't kosher.'

The Sabbath and the diet have nothing to do with Jewishness, at least not directly: Marvin Gay Snr was a pastor of the Hebrew Pentecostal Church, a small, tight-knit sect that managed to combine the New Testament practice of speaking in tongues with a decidedly Old Testament attitude to religious festivals and dietary laws.

The family was heavily involved with the church; and everybody concurs that Gay Snr was especially strict with Gay Jnr. But it would be wrong to suggest that Marvin's childhood was a blank wall of repression. Gay Snr, for instance, liked to let his hair down by dressing up in his wife's clothes; and this, too, it seems, caused much comment among the boyz 'n' the hood.

This confusing early experience with male role models helps, along with that problematic name, to account for the difficulties with girls that plagued Gaye. His two marriages, one to a woman 17 years his senior, one to a woman 17 years his junior, both ended in acrimony, presumably not helped by his constant fantasising about other women. In Divided Soul, his biography of Gaye, David Ritz records Gaye's beliefs that Mary Wilson was madly in love with him (Ritz thinks this may have been true) and that Diana Ross was going to propose marriage to him (which is at least healthier than believing you are Diana Ross).

On the other hand, he also had plenty of difficulties with men, where sex didn't come into it at all. There were a few he didn't fall out with - Curtis Shaw, his attorney, never once had a quarrel with him; just a letter telling him he was sacked. But by the end of his life, Gaye had sued or been sued by almost everybody else, including Ritz, who ended up taking him to court for dollars 15m to prove co-authorship of 'Sexual Healing'.

All of which goes some way to explaining the bizarre account of his final years that is given in Trouble Man. The story begins ordinarily enough: after a European tour in 1980, Gaye decided to stay on in London to avoid tax and marital problems - well, that's rock'n'roll. In spring 1981 he ended up, more or less broke, freebasing cocaine with a bunch of punks in a dingy flat off the Edgware Road - which also seems pretty much par for the rock'n'roll course.

Where things become really odd is with the arrival of Freddy Cousaert, a small-time promoter from Ostend, who took Gaye home and helped him to kick drugs and get fit again.

It's hard to think of a metaphor that adequately conveys the incongruity of this 18-month phase in Gaye's life: a wolf among a flock of sheep? A panther let loose in a cattle pen? In the end, you have to admit that the situation is its own best metaphor: Marvin Gaye in Ostend. James Marsh's Arena film includes archive footage of Gaye performing at the Ostend Casino, singing his heart out happily while a nonplussed Belgian crowd claps uncertainly and exchanges worried glances. They look as though they can't understand what Gaye is doing there; and they weren't alone in that. Gaye's friends in America shared their bafflement. In the film, Curtis Shaw recalls going over from LA to visit Gaye in Ostend and asking what they were going to do for the evening. Gaye said, 'Go to the pub'; and Shaw said: 'What we gonna do?', utterly confounded.

The peculiar thing, though, isn't so much that Gaye went to Ostend and liked it - after all, his time there enabled him to write and record 'Sexual Healing', his biggest hit for years, so it was a sensible move. The stupid move was going back to Los Angeles, to get back on cocaine, get paranoid and get shot by his father.

What's odd is the way everybody talks about him, and about each other. Gaye had a talent for instant intimacy, a way of making everybody he met feel that they were the most important person in his life. Ten years on from his death, in Trouble Man, they are still sparring - Freddy Cousaert talking about his instinctive dislike of David Ritz, David Ritz suggesting that Freddy Cousaert was absurdly possessive and jealous of Gaye, nobody willing to admit that anybody else was really Marvin's friend.

At least this shows that people did at last take him seriously; but this squabbling over emotional scraps, and the drug-hazed, crazy way his life ended, aren't pretty to contemplate. He was right about one thing: Gay wasn't the right name for him.

The Arena film 'Trouble Man', produced by James Marsh, is broadcast this Saturday at 9.05pm on BBC 2

'The Very Best of Marvin Gaye' has just been released on CD (Motown 530 2922); 'Here, My Dear' has been re-released (Motown 530 253-2)

(Photograph omitted)