Let The Man Speak

The Pod, Sunday night wasn’t so much a concert as an intimate conversation. Gil Scott Heron wandered on stage, picked up the mike and began telling jokes and stories and playing songs. He has a theory on the months of the year being in the wrong place – September, October, November and December should, linguistically speaking, occur two months before they actually do. And there is no way February should be Black History Month. Not because its a tokenistic sop from white America but because no fucker can pronounce it, no brother can spell it and, according to Heron’s theory, it’s last month of the year.

What followed was a virtuoso performance from a man, comfortable in his ability to lead a band – The Amnesia Express – and the audience on a journey through some of his most poetic and meaningful songs while not taking himself too seriously. ‘Winter in America’ followed a discourse on how the seasons were structured and what happened when one of them got too uppity. There were some beautiful medleys, ‘Peace go with you Brothers’ beautifully surrounded ‘The Bottle’. There was also a wonderfully poignant version of ‘Home is Where the Hatred is’. And if the Greens want an anthem to bring them into the next election they could do worse than ‘We Almost Lost Detroit’.

Above all else, a Heron gig is a performance. Words and music come together in a way that seems effortless and seamless but is all about craft, knowledge and experience. If you didn’t catch him and the band here be sure to see him at the Electric Picnic in September.

The one downside to the gig? The idiots at the bar who talked non-stop through the show. Why bother to go if you’re not going to listen? This is something the Pod management need to address – the least a performer needs is a bit of quiet to do his thing.

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