THERE was something very likeable about Steve Strange.

A sort of vulnerability which most people who met him found endearing. As I did during a number of interviews and phone conversations with him, as did a number of other journalists.

He had a longstanding professional relationship with one of my former colleagues.

For years, when I worked on another newspaper, the phone on her desk would ring at least once a week and Strange would be on the other end of the line with a story: "Is Sar' there?"

There was, on one occasion, a memorable conversation when they discussed the potential benefits of a recuperating holiday to Goa, a place which she had just visited.

At the end of the call, she smiled: "He's going now, I've persuaded him."

Good, we all thought. Let's hope against hope it helps him stay away from drugs.

One of the tributes to him last week called him "wonderfully bonkers in the best possible way". It's a good description.

What a contrast to some of the people in the music business we met in the 1990s, who were arrogant or defensive or downright horrible.

Whatever his problems - and there were some very public battles with drugs and issues with the law - Steve Strange would always talk to you.

There was never any slamming down of the phone, even during his darkest times, even after the deaths of his friends Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence.

He was a social butterfly who moved in all sorts of circles, from the likes of sleeping on the sofa of Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols when he moved to London, to rubbing shoulder pads with Joan Collins and meeting Jack Nicholson.

People liked Strange. He had that knack.

It's an underrated thing, as was his deeply-held desire to express himself, without the need to fit into the Valleys town where he grew up.

In his autobiography, Blitzed!, there are tales of him getting into a little hot water at school in Newbridge for personalising his school uniform. And, later, when the then Steve Harrington became a punk, being chased down Newport High Street by local lads who disapproved of his fashion choices.

He was never going to be one of the mass of men who led a life of quiet desperation. Strange was always going to stand out, and was cruelly dubbed the "village weirdo".

In Blitzed! he wrote of the 1970s in Newbridge: "It seemed that the only way I could successfully emulate David Bowie was by copying his hair. It was pretty unusual for a boy to dye his hair back in those days, but as David Bowie unveiled each new look I had to be the first one in Newbridge to copy him."

What a shame it was that drugs came into his life - first amphetamines in his Wigan Casino Northern Soul era, then later, in the 1980s, heroin.

He wrote in a chapter called Into The Abyss: "I knew people who took heroin but I had always tried to resist it. By the release of The Anvil, however, I had taken heroin a few times..."

He called taking heroin the "biggest mistake of my life". Anyone who wants to understand its huge physical and emotional toll on a person should read his chapter Cold Turkey.

Then, there were the thousands of pounds he spent on luxuries, £10,000 for a coat, spending £80,000 on clothes in six months, regularly picking up the restaurant tabs at Langans and Le Caprice for his entourage.

Most of us could not imagine having a spare £80,000 to spend on a house today, 30 years later.

He lived rock and roll excess to its extreme, a typical 1980s pop star, and saw its ugly side when things went wrong for him financially.

Other pop stars might have caused people to dislike them for those excesses, particularly when the area where he grew up was suffering so badly because of government cuts and the miners' strike.

But, how could anyone really dislike Steve Strange?

There was always that protective bubble of innate likeability, whether he was on top of the club business raking in money from celebrity clients, or during the times when he was scraping up enough cash to pay the bills.

That likeability prompted so many people to pay tribute to him last week.

It was his restless energy which made him creative that also led him into those extremes.

It was always unlikely that Steve Strange would simply Fade to Grey - but it's such a crying shame that Steve John Harrington, or anyone else for that matter, should die at 55.