Pieces of a Man – Gil Scott-Heron (1949 – 2011)

Dublin in the mid-1970′s wasn’t exactly a hotbed (or even a hot water bottle) for music. Punk had yet to make much of an impact and, while the likes of Thin Lizzy had a blazed a trail, the city seemed to be in the grip of  generic, wide-flared soft-rock – Stepaside, Bagatelle, Freebooze (anyone remember them?) – or trad, from the Fureys in the Wexford Inn to the tourist trap diddly of O’Donoghues.

The music we swapped in school (on vinyl, with the cassette tape being the napster of the day) ranged from Led Zeppelin to the cult of Jim Morrison. The guy with the most eclectic musical taste was Larry Comerford, or rather Larry and his two older brothers. From the MC5 to The Band, Dylan to Springsteen (especially The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle and Darkness on the Edge of Town) the Comerfords had good music bleeding out of their ears. But the one artist that I heard in their house that pulled me up short and made me think about the lyrics was Gil Scott-Heron and his album Pieces of a Man.

Scott-Heron was like no-one I had heard before – genuinely angry, words spitting out of him with venom, a ghetto poet with a jazz back-beat (courtesy of Brian Jackson) trying to find justice in a cruel, uncaring world. Tracks like Home is Where the Hatred Is and Winter in America told of his alienation, his pain and his addiction. Scott-Heron made music for the oppressed, the ignored, the scared and the scarred – his people. But his music crossed boundaries and generations, his words spoke a universal truth. This was poetry in action, long before John Cooper Clarke, Billy Bragg or the manufactured anger of The Sex Pistols or the political fury of The Clash. Scott-Heron’s poetry wasn’t lyrical, it didn’t really capture beauty in any classical sense, rather it encapsulated the banality of living in desolate urban landscapes, the casual swinging of a cop’s nightstick, fathers and mothers abandoning their children, living in shooting alleys, crawling in the gutter. The genius of his words was that no matter how bleak they were they made you empathise, made you angry, sitting in a comfortable middle-class suburban armchair. He made you care and for any writer that has to be the highest accolade.

While the albums had a power, it was as a live performer that Scott-Heron really came into his own. He annexed the stage, towering over the audience yet he had such a low speaking voice for all his harsh words that people hushed (mostly) to hear him as he interwove his songs with anecdotes about his life, his day or just riffed on the months of the year being in the wrong place. I first saw him live in Band on The Wall in Manchester sometime in the mid-1980s, a mainly reggae club on the edgier side of town in those days (now part of the gentrified Northern Quarter, whatever the fuck that is). Walking in the door there was no mistaking the kind of smoking going on. Beer was served strictly in pint bottles and coke only came with Jack Daniels or a rolled up pound note. and through the fog, Gil Scott-Heron strode, totally self-contained and played a set blistering in its political integrity. Even the most blissed out stoner stood up and shook the fog out of their brains that night, it was one of the most enegising performances I’ve had the pleasure of seeing.

I’ve seen Scott-Heron live a few times since then, some good and some not so good. His battles with addiction have been well documented and affected him for a long time in the 1990s and into the new millenium. But he was back to his biting, scathing best with his latest release I’m New Here with an added mellowness befitting his maturity and his gig in the Pod in May was possibly the best I’ve seen him play since that first time in Manchester. Its just a shame he didn’t get a chance to enjoy his renaissance. Go softly Gil, and know that you’ve left behind a righteous anger.