Most people in Bradford will be on at least nodding terms with Frederick Delius – after all, the district has a pub, a school, an arts centre and a sculpture named for him.

But world-renowned cellist Julian Lloyd Webber is on a mission to get us more intimately acquainted with the man and his music.

Monday, January 30 marked the 150th anniversary of the birth in Bradford of Fritz Theodor Albert Delius – he later took the name Frederick – to a pair of German immigrants who had come to Bradford to set up a wool business... and a family of 14 children.

Perhaps, after that, most of us get a bit muddy in our knowledge of Delius. We may know he left Bradford for Florida at a relatively early age and that he spent much of his later life in Europe. But did you know that the composer lived, as Julian Lloyd Webber enthuses, something of a “rock and roll lifestyle”?

“When he was 22, Delius was sent to Florida to run an orange plantation. Much of his time was spent romancing a mixed-race girl named Chloe who, it has been widely conjectured, bore him a son,” says Lloyd Webber.

“Later on he was no stranger to the brothels of Paris and contracted syphilis, apparently through sharing a mistress with the artist Gauguin.”

While Delius led the sort of life that, today, might find him on the front pages of the tabloids, it is as one of the greatest composers in recent British history rather than as the iconic rebel that Lloyd Webber wants Delius to be known in this anniversary year.

“Delius is a composer who people either love or hate,” he says. “He’s a very controversial composer, and I don’t think he is as widely recognised as the great composer he is as he should be.”

Lloyd Webber’s association with Delius goes back to when he himself first began to learn the cello – indeed, one of his earliest appearances was in Bradford when he performed Delius sonatas in the early 1970s.

So why isn’t Delius’s work more well known?

“It should be,” he says. “His work is gorgeous. Beautiful, beautiful music. I have a theory that Delius is considerably more popular with the public than musicians. This is born out by the number of times that ‘castaways’ on Desert Island Discs have selected his music – a statistic which bears no relation to how often we hear it in the concert hall.

“It isn’t easy music to play, though – an orchestra can’t just turn up, tune up and start playing. It’s complicated, which is perhaps why Delius’s music has been singularly absent from concert programmes in recent years.

“But the 150th anniversary of his birth provides as good a moment as any to reassess Delius’s position in 21st-century musical life.”

It wasn’t Bradford that drove Delius away, says Lloyd Webber, so he has a favour to ask of you.

“He was a lonely person. He followed his own path and as a result had to escape his family. Bradford should be proud of Delius, and this is the time to investigate him, to go deeper into his music and his life.”