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Speaking With Gil Scott-Heron in 1986

by Len Brown
15 January 2015 16 Comments

An interview in a hazy west London hotel room with the man himself proved that the legend of Gil Scott-Heron will always live on...

Some men are born great.  Some have greatness thrust upon them.  Some are just lucky bastards, in the right place at the right time, to bear witness to the words and works of great men.

Gil Scott-Heron played an important part in my political education.  As a middle class teenager brought up in the predominantly-white North East of England – where racism flourished in the early Seventies – my knowledge of black African and black American politics was sketchy to say the least. In truth, I had a slim grasp of non-white, non-European, even non-British politics until I got a copy of Gil’s ‘From South Africa To South Carolina’ in 1976.

As you do, when you’re young and you fall in love with extraordinary voices making extraordinary music, I went back and gorged on his earlier work.  Mind-blowing jazz-meets-soul-meets-blues-meets-poetry (Bluesology, he called it) such as ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, ‘Winter In America’ and, best of all, ‘Lady Day And John Coltrane’ which beautifully articulated the sustaining power of great art.

Later I’d treasure a copy of ‘Small Talk At 125th And Lenox’, his fiery breakthrough recording from 1970, ferociously attacking inequality, prejudice, military aggression in Vietnam and poor government (eg. ‘Whitey On The Moon’ and ‘The Subject Was Faggots’).  As a result, because of Gil, I first began to understand what really was going on. He led me to the Last Poets and Sweet Honey In The Rock, made me listen to Billie Holiday and John Coltrane and Nina Simone, and taught me to read Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin and Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like.

Later I’d treasure a copy of ‘Small Talk At 125th And Lenox’, his fiery breakthrough recording from 1970, ferociously attacking inequality, prejudice, military aggression in Vietnam and poor government.

And so it came to pass, in the summer of 1986, that I spent a memorable afternoon in the company of Gil Scott-Heron.

He’d landed in London a few hours earlier, en route to Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD festival.  He was jet-lagged, burnt out, struggling to sleep, when this young NME journalist knocked on his hotel room door, humbly seeking an interview.

Sat up on his bed, bare-chested like a warrior, drawing power from a smoking spliff, Gil was soon in full flight; at his most articulate, opinionated and finger-pointing best; a scene perfectly reflected by photographer A.J. Barratt.

Gil was only 37 then, and had been on the radical road for 16 years; a mobile pioneer of pop with a conscience; a man whose portentous songs and crusades against inhumanity had elevated him, in my eyes, to the status of prophet.

Since the early 70s he’d spoken out against the horrors of heroin (‘Home is Where The Hatred Is’); warned of the energy-sapping, brain-numbing goggle box (‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’); and called for solidarity with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa (‘Johannesburg’).   ‘Angel Dust’ had alerted the American media to the growing PCP abuse among the young; ‘H2O Blues’ tackled Nixon’s entanglement in Watergate; while ‘The Bottle’ fired the campaign to combat alcohol abuse.

Back in 1977, on the ‘Bridges’ album, Gil had penned ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’ about the death of the nuclear dream and Karen Silkwood :  “One brother asked me, ‘Hey, why you writing them songs, Gil? Nuclear power ain’t a black problem’.”   ‘Detroit’ forewarned of Chernobyl, as did another anti-nuclear anthem, ‘Shut Em Down’ on ‘Gil Scott-Heron And Brian Jackson’ 1980.

These were just the hot songs, the issue songs, for which Gil had rightly been hailed.  Check through the extensive back catalogue and you’ll find a whole host of fine compositions – some political, some danceable, many passionate, all emotional – to match your every mood.  (If you haven’t already tried, the ‘Glory’ collection, 1990, would be the perfect place to start.)

Our meeting took place years before Nelson Mandela’s release and the birth of the Rainbow Nation, and Gil was always keen to talk about the situation in South Africa.  His track ‘Johannesburg’ had demanded increased economic pressure on the apartheid regime as far back as 1975, and he clearly felt political progress was too damn slow.

“It looked as if the sanctions question would never even come to the attention of the political powers-that-be.  Even when limited sanctions came I thought it was a great step from no recognition, no acknowledgement of the problem. Hell, I thought it should have happened ten years ago, but often it takes as long to get straight as it did to get crooked.  Now it’s our responsibility to keep the pressure on.

“Often even if we think we’re right, if it’s moving too slowly we abandon it, and politicians play on that. They think if they bat an issue around in the back room, eventually that issue will leave the front pages and the constituencies will cool out.  Let’s make it as hard for them to deal with it, as it is for us.  It’s very hard for me to look at South Africa and feel that, as an American, some of my money is being used to sustain that.”

In 1986, the South African was the focus of his attention; he’d recently contributed to the ‘Sun City’ album and made regular appearances with the growing ranks of Artists Against Apartheid.

“They’ll either see it because it’s real and it’s necessary or they’ll see it goddamnit because it’s a bloodbath and their fellow men are getting killed all around them!”

“I’m always pleased when I see members of our family – artists, athletes, entertainers – take some sort of stand that brings them back into the world.  In general it’s as if we live on some other fucking planet and just come down for shows.  Artists are always claiming they’re so fucking sensitive, but we aren’t if we cut ourselves off because of record sales or the number of tickets we might sell.”

One of the familiar media jibes made at Artists Against Apartheid, I reminded him, was that audience at gigs seemed to be predominantly white.  He took a deep, self-controlling breath before answering me.

“Okay, but there’s some black people over here with problems that nobody’s attending to.  Maybe they looked at the problems they had and said, ‘Yes, South Africa’s one but also getting these groceries for tomorrow is a problem, maybe I better save the ticket money ‘cause the kid needs some milk’. There’s economics between them and getting to the gig, and it has a lot to do with how well educated, or well informed you are.

If you don’t have a telly or a radio, if you don’t have the money to buy the newspaper then perhaps you are a little cut off.  This may make you look insensitive but what it really makes you look is poor. And they’re part of the people we would hope to help.  South Africa has become a priority because it’s actually reached the stage of people killing one another.  I would obviously go and try and plug up the dyke where it’s leaking before I go and work on the place where it looks like it’s gonna leak.”

Many of Gil Scott-Heron’s songs had promoted “The Change”, the bloodless revolution, in America and South Africa.  I bravely suggested that, although we all wanted apartheid to be dismantled with limited bloodshed, under Afrikaan ideology, sadly many white South Africans would never see the black man as their equal.

“Well they’ll see it goddamnit before this is over,” he replied angrily.  “They’ll either see it because it’s real and it’s necessary or they’ll see it goddamnit because it’s a bloodbath and their fellow men are getting killed all around them.”

His uncompromising reluctance to play it safe would always make it difficult to classify Gil Scott-Heron.  Songwriter?  Poet?  Singer?  Musician? Novelist (The Vulture and Nigger Factory)?  Categories and pigeonholes never conveyed the simplicity of the man’s objectives or the diversity of his talent. Just try and find his work in record stores: “Fifteen years to be misce-fucking-llaneous!” he laughed.

“I like to write songs about issue not because they became headlines but because they could become headlines. I don’t write them after a crisis and say, ‘Damn wasn’t that something about South Africa’. The idea’s not that everyone who heard my song would decide the way that I have but that, at least, they’ve got another way of looking at that problem. We just make suggestions, other people make laws.”

Gil would certainly sidestep the radical/militant/extremist presentation, arguing that his politics were really just common sense. It’s something he picked up from his grandmother, who brought him up and who featured in his early songs.

Categories and pigeonholes never conveyed the simplicity of the man’s objectives or the diversity of his talent. Just try and find his work in record stores: “Fifteen years to be misce-fucking-llaneous!” he laughed.

“She was an issues woman, looking at things in terms of what’s fair and not fair. It’s a question of looking in your heart for the truth and not seeing whether your favourite politician goes for a particular issue. On a right and wrong type of basis, this is how my grandmother raised me, to not sit around and wait for people to guess what’s on my mind, I was gonna have to say it.”  (He would return to Lillie Scott fourteen years later, on his final collection, ‘I’m New Here’, most memorably ‘On Coming From A Broken Home’.  Her death, when he was only 12, had a huge impact on his life.)

But if the sensitive streak came from the maternal Scott side then the tough talking, the uncompromising stance, some called it stubbornness, came from his Dad’s.

“My father’s family, the Heron’s, they were known for two things down in Jamaica – fighting and football.”  Gil’s dad played for Celtic; the first black footballer to grace the Scottish game.

Must’ve been hard, I suggested, for a black player in 1950’s Glasgow?

“Not really.  Then it was just like now. If you kicked a ball in the net fuck what colour you are!”

The Scott-Herons often appeared in Gil’s early melancholic moments, and personally I’ve got a soft spot between the ribs for songs like ‘Save The Children’ or ‘Did You Hear What They Said’ or the shattering ‘Pieces of A Man’.  And, rising high and proud thanks to Brian Jackson’s uplifting flute, there’s ‘Winter In America’; Gil’s coldest, sharpest demolition of the American Dream.

Sadly, this istoo easy to say with hindsight, but at the time of our meeting in July 1986, Gil Scott-Heron was already struggling against other enemies, much closer to home.  A proud principled man, he had been in dispute with Arista America since 1982’s ‘Moving Targets’ album, and apart from ‘Sun City’, work on Richie Havens’ A Matter Of Struggle movie and POW (a film about black Vietnam vets), his only recent vinyl output had been the anti-Reagan rap hit ‘Re-Ron’ (’84) produced by Bill Laswell.

“There’s now a question over who’s going to be in charge of my projects,” he told me, with a sad deep, Old Testament growl.  “I say I am and they say someone else is. So there won’t be any work done on projects of mine until I’m placed back in charge.  ‘Re-Ron’ sounded like Bill Laswell, which is fine for Bill Laswell, but not for Gil Scott-Heron.  Everything else they can have – the money, the executive producer credits, the album cover, all that shit’s up for grabs.  But what the music sounds like – I gotta have that.”

He would always argue against going back and recreating past glories. He constantly updated his sound, moved towards the next audience, and looked towards the next generation. Hence the ground-breaking rap (first used by Gil in ’74 on ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’) of ‘B-Movie’ and ‘Re-Ron’. Even ‘Whitey On The Moon’, his grim contrast between ghetto poverty and the costly space programme, had been modernised into ‘Space Shuttle’, “putting the fear back in atmosphere”.

Typically, he would only be creative on his own terms; on his own terms or not at all.

“It’s really between me and the marketing people, because they have a history of being wrong about my music, they never anticipated any of my songs being hits. In America the mentality is that if you have a hit like ‘B-Movie’ (off 1981’s ‘Reflections’) they expect you to do the same thing again, repeating the formula.  But my style has been to explore the different aspects of black music, to continually explore and develop.

“When Leonardo da Vinci did the Mona Lisa, did he go right back and do the Mona Lucy, just ‘cos he had a hit?”

Following his death last May, at the age of only 62, it’s hard not to feel cheated.  I caught him live in London several times in the late Eighties and Nineties, notably at the Town & Country Club and the Jazz Café, but he seemed to be ageing fast and the voice became less sure, more slurred. Sometimes he didn’t show at all. Despite his strength of character, he struggled with drink problems, became addicted to cocaine and spent years checking in and out of prisons and rehab centres. In 2008 he confirmed he was HIV positive, which made him more vulnerable to the pneumonia that probably killed him.

I dared suggest that he was some sort of prophet. “I don’t get into any of that ‘Behold the world of Gil Scott-Heron shit’,” he replied firmly.

Despite having produced thirteen studio albums in the first twelve years of his recording career up to 1982, he released only two more in the remaining 29 years of his life. These both contain glorious, moving moments, notably ‘Message To The Messengers’ on 1994’s ‘Spirits’, and ‘Me And The Devil’ on XL Recording’s ‘I’m New Here’ in 2010. Perhaps with better management or guidance, or more luck, he’d have continued to be prolific; an influential poet, commentator and force of nature. ‘I’m New Here’ will now have to serve, musically, as his last will and testament, but thankfully Canongate are bringing out his long-delayed memoir The Last Holiday in early 2012.

My final memory of Gil Scott-Heron takes me back to that West London hotel room in July 1986. He’d talked for hours about the state of the world, American poetry, the running of record companies, Scottish football and South African politics. But, in the end, I made the mistake of confusing the man with the message and – in an awkward expression of affection and admiration – I dared suggest that he was some sort of prophet. Flattery got me nowhere.

“I don’t get into any of that ‘Behold the world of Gil Scott-Heron shit’,” he replied firmly.  “I’m just saying, ‘Here’s some things that have been bothering me, they may have been bothering you too’. It’s just a sensitivity. If I had second sight I’d be doing better than I am now, hell I’d have had a thousand dollars on the World Cup, on the Derby, I’d be checking the steeplechasers everybody…”

Prophet or not, some might argue that tragically the bastards eventually ground Gil Scott-Heron down.  But they didn’t win, they couldn’t win.  He lived to see the end of apartheid, he lived to see a black man in the White House, and his creativity and music will last as long as this planet does.   Wherever you are Gil Scott-Heron, may your gods be good to you and your demons finally defeated. What a man and, Jesus, what a life; lived with passion, poetry and controlled rage.

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Who cares? 1:48 pm, 27-Dec-2011

Gil Gil Gil , was there anyone better ? Ive got a lot of faves but always go back to Gil, was listening to Im new here driving to a Supermarche when a mate texted me to say he had passed away ,sounds w..k but bought a tear to my eye.

jimmy jinx 8:22 pm, 27-Dec-2011

Really enjoyed the piece. Cheers. Off to dig out my Gil records...

Y 10:49 pm, 27-Dec-2011

Lovely piece. Thank you-lots of digging to be done on the back of the influences you discussed.

blackmoses 10:23 am, 28-Dec-2011

Gil committed slow suicide and it was tragic to watch. He refused the help that was offered, or attempted. At least we dont have to see him torturing himself anymore. Look for the book by leslie goffe to understand gils demons better. Gil's own memoir was unfortunately written in a haze over the past twenty years. He knew that and it is why he didnt allow it to be published for so long. Interesting that it is coming out only now that he is dead. Wonder who signed off on it...

jez 1:22 pm, 28-Dec-2011

Great article Len. Reminds me to dust off the older choones. I was sitting on the floor talking, waiting to see him play in Chicago, small club, 1987, and he walked into me! Reached down, shook my hand then stormed the place.

logicalthought 1:10 pm, 29-Dec-2011

Gil was one of the FUNNIEST performers I've ever seen-- he could have been another Pryor if he'd decided to make stand-up his primary focus, rather than music. (I guess, ironically, in some very bad ways he WAS "another Pryor.") I saw him do a terrific live show in Central Park here in New York two summers ago (2010) shortly after he'd been released from jail, and the jokes he made about his prison experience were hilarious. The other time I'd seen him live was in a small cafe in Washington D.C. back in 1989 or 1990 and, again, the thing that stood out for me from that performance was his sense of humor.

Jamie Byng 7:30 am, 30-Dec-2011

Thnaks to the joys of google alert I came across this great piece and first off just wanted to say thanks to you Len for sharing your experiences of Gil and this vividly described encounter. It's a superb piece not least because it really captures Gil so well. He was clearly on great form as he so often was in my experience, despite a lot of the nonsense that gets written about him. We also have finished copies in of The Last Holiday and I would love to send you one. An extract is running in the New York Times this Sunday and despite what Black Moses writes above (knowing next to nothing about the genesis of this memoir or its contents) the book is damn good and very much as Gil wanted it to be. I'm just sad that he is not around to see it being published. We have also organised this night on the 19th January in partnership with Bookslam at which we will be launching The Last Holiday and showing unseen clips and playing unheard recordings of Gil. Giles Peterson and Jamie XX are both deejaying. it's at Wilton's Music Hall and promises to be a great evening. Maybe see you there? Thanks again for the piece. great photo by AJ Barratt too. Jamie

Len Brown 4:37 pm, 30-Dec-2011

Thanks for all the positive responses, really appreciate this. Great to hear from you, Jamie. Look forward to the book. Really good to hear Gil reading from it on the Canongate website. Cheers! http://www.canongate.tv/gil-audio

David B 5:24 pm, 5-Jan-2012

Nice piece Len. One thing, and I'm genuinely asking the question because I'm not sure... I'd thought that his HIV status was a myth which gathered speed because he was illicitly acquiring HIV treatment drugs for "recreational" or at least alternative purposes in his latter years. Thankfully I don't have enough knowledge of those particular drugs to form a decent view of that scenario and how likely or unlikely it would be. Was it reported that he was in fact HIV positive?

Len Brown 5:50 pm, 5-Jan-2012

Thanks David. I hope I'm right in saying that he stated he was HIV positive in an interview in 2008. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I should also have mentioned Don Letts' excellent documentary about Gil which was screened again on BBC Four recently.

David B 10:09 am, 6-Jan-2012

No, I'd genuinely no idea if he was HIV positive or not. I did a bit of googling after posting and it seems that he was in fact.

JonnyAtomic 2:45 am, 11-Jan-2012

Thanks for that article man really enjoyed it.

Russ 7:56 pm, 28-Jul-2014

Superb tribute to a very special human being. Cheers Len.

Simon 8:57 pm, 28-Jul-2014

I sang on stage with Gil at the Jazz Cafe. From the audience - he asked for help with Lady Day john Coltrane - like he needed help! I was up on stage before he finished the sentence, and spent the next 10 minutes in the middle of the magic. First joining in with the second part of the verse and chorus, I was in my element. After the solos, Gil told me to take the last verse, and I performed like my life depended on it. Unforgettable. One of the best moments of my life. I miss him so much.

Peter Mason 8:29 am, 30-Jul-2014

I saw him on his last tour, at the Gent Jazz Festival. I'm not a musical sophisticate: I was there to see Madness and was barely aware of him before this, but he made the night. I bought his last album (I'm New Here) when I got home and it has been in the tip play list of my music player for the last couple of years. I can't say what it is I like about it, because I usuall go for hummable tunes and simple lyrics, but it is an absorbing and beautiful album; slightly theatrical and art schooly without being false or snooty.

Ant 7:17 pm, 30-Jul-2014

Brilliant article

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