One of the most moving songs on Gil Scott-Heron's long-awaited new album, I'm New Here, is called "Where Did the Night Go". Over the most minimal electronic pulse, his familiar deep drawl, now more ragged and reflective than ever, intones the lines:
"Long ago, the clock washed midnight away, bringing the dawn,
Oh God, I must be dreaming,
Time to get up again, time to start up again,
Pulling on my socks again
Where did the night go?"
For those of us who have kept an ever-hopeful eye on Gil Scott-Heron's faltering musical and personal journey over the past three decades, the song has an added resonance. Where, I wondered on first hearing it, did the years go? Where, to be more precise, did Gil Scott-Heron go in the long silence that began in 1982 after the release of his last album for Arista Records, Moving Target, and was broken only briefly by the appearance of Spirits, in 1994.
"People keep saying I disappeared," the singer tells me, laughing heartily, when I speak to him. "Well, that's a gift I didn't know I had. You ever see someone disappear? That makes me a superhero, right?"
The humour, though, conceals a great deal of heartbreak and an epic struggle with addiction, both of which are referred to obliquely on his raggedly brilliant version of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" on the new album. "Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door", he sings, "And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go."
Though Gil Scott-Heron insists he did not disappear, that he kept playing club gigs in America and did the occasional tour, that he was writing, if not recording, the news that kept on filtering back from his long winter in America was always bleak. It seemed at times as if the most astute musical social commentator of the 70s and 80s had metamorphosed into a character from one of his own sad songs of suffering and struggle. On the sombre and still-startling "Home Is Where The Hatred Is", recorded in 1971, he described a junkie trapped in a blighted inner-city ghetto who lived inside "white powder dreams". Thirty-odd years later, he seemed to be living those lyrics.
Gil Scott-Heron's creative trajectory has, in many ways, run counter to that of the traditional troubled artist insofar as he fell into hard drug use at a time in his life when most of his peers had either sorted out their addictions or succumbed to them. What we can say for certain is that sometime in the mid-to-late 80s, the man the critics were by then calling "the godfather of rap" and "the black Bob Dylan" developed a cocaine habit that, if his ex-partner, Monique de Latour, is to believed, spiralled out of control into full-blown addiction to crack.
By then, like Sly Stone before him, Scott-Heron had a reputation for showing up hours late for concerts or not showing up at all. It seemed scarcely believable that the lithe, loose-limbed performer who sang "The Bottle" – about the alcoholics he observed queuing at a local liquor store every morning – and "Angel Dust" – about the mind-destroying drug of the same name that brought down the great James Brown – had fallen so low.
"I've had bad times in my life when I'd rather be somewhere else doing something else, for sure," he tells me when I ask about his troubles. "But you get to my age, that shit happens. You get in trouble; you maybe lose some folks – a parent or a friend. Maybe your marriage breaks up, you lose your wife, lose touch with your kid. But what life does not have those things in it?"
Again, the resilience, the bluff optimism disguises the true extent of those troubles. In 2001, he was sentenced to one-to-three years in prison for possession of cocaine and two crack pipes. He could have avoided the sentence had he undergone a rehabilitation programme, but he didn't even turn up for the relevant court hearing. "You've had all these opportunities to help yourself," the judge declared, "and you just don't seem to care." As subsequent events would show, that did seem to be the case.
In October 2003, on the way to a show in Chicago, he was arrested again at New York's La Guardia airport and charged with possession of a controlled substance. In 2006, he was sentenced to two-to-four years for violating the terms of his parole by leaving a drug rehabilitation centre. The great pioneer of socially conscious soul and rap, looking gaunt and old before his time, was taken to Rikers Island to serve another jail sentence. His life was in shreds, his musical career seemed over, but it was there, against the odds, that his rehabilitation as a recording artist began.
The story of how Gil Scott-Heron's new album came to be made is a long and convoluted one. It is, among other things, a testament to the abiding power of great music outside the mainstream to spread like a virus across cultures, across decades. It begins back in 1987 in a rented house in Edinburgh when a young student is mesmerised by his friend's collection of soul and funk music from the halcyon days of the early 70s – albums by the likes of Curtis Mayfield, Sly and the Family Stone, the JBs, the Meters, Bill Withers and, most mesmerising of all, Gil Scott-Heron. The first Gil Scott-Heron song the young student heard was called "H20 Gate Blues", one of the singer's great spoken-word monologues that would later earn him the soubriquet the godfather of rap. It was ostensibly about President Nixon and the Watergate phone-tapping scandal, but it was also about wider issues of power, corruption and injustice and the great divide that is race in America.
"I was just taken aback by the voice, the words, the poetry," remembers Jamie Byng who, 22 years on, is the director of Canongate Books and still a fervent soul fan. "I had been raised on rock but this was just breathtaking. The seasoned voice, the wryness of the delivery, the level of irony and satire in the lyrics, the whole thing just blew me away. Discovering those songs was an epiphanic moment for me."
Those songs range from the reflective – "Winter In America", "Lady Day & John Coltrane", "I Think I'll Call It Morning" – through the socially aware – "Home Is Where the Hatred Is", "Pieces of a Man", "The Bottle" – to the wry and satirical – "H20 Gate Blues", "Whitey on the Moon" and "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised", whose title has now entered the pop cultural lexicon.
So taken was Byng by those songs that, having bought and rebranded Canongate, he tracked down his hero and, in 1996, republished his two long-out-of-print novels, The Vulture and The Nigger Factory. An unlikely friendship was forged that lasts to this day. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for Jamie," Scott-Heron, who is the godfather of one of Byng's sons, told me last week, before adding, "That's why I agreed to this interview, bro'. You come with good references."
Back in 2006, those good references also paved the way for British music business maverick Richard Russell to meet Gil Scott-Heron. Russell, too, was a long-time fan. He had worked as a hip-hop DJ before forming XL Recordings, home to Radiohead, the White Stripes and Vampire Weekend. It was Jamie Byng that Russell first called with his proposal to produce a new record by Gil Scott-Heron, and Jamie Byng who facilitated their first meeting in Rikers Island in June 2006.
In his diary of the making of the album, Russell recorded his impressions of that prison visit:
"Rikers tries to intimidate you when you visit… The various body searches and waiting around in various holding areas feel designed to discourage people from visiting… By the time you get to see the person you've come to visit, all your possessions have been stored in various lockers, and contact with the outside world seems like a memory… The contrast of Gil's spirit – intact and inspiring – with the bleakness of the surroundings was inspirational. It's hard to appreciate something as fundamental as freedom when you have it. Gil was peaceful, while surrounded by misery and tension. It confirmed my hunch that he still has a lot to give to people." I'm New Here confirms that hunch.
The first surprise is the album's ironic title and the fact that the title song itself was not written by Gil Scott-Heron but by Bill Callahan of the American indie group Smog. Like the covers that producer Rick Rubin chose for the late Johnny Cash on his valedictory American Recordings series of albums, "I'm New Here" sounds like a song tailor-made for Gil Scott-Heron, the great survivor: "No matter how far wrong you've gone," he sings, "you can always turn around." My instinct, on first hearing it, was to cross my fingers tightly.
Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago in 1949. His mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, was a librarian and an accomplished singer, his father, Giles Heron, from Jamaica, was an athlete who would later earn the nickname the "Black Arrow" when, in the 1950s, he became the first black man to play for Celtic FC. "I'm used to white British guys getting in touch with me," says Gil, laughing. "There's this guy, Gerry, who keeps me informed about the Celtics. He brings me a new shirt every time he's in New York."
As a child, Scott-Heron lived with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee, before moving to New York, aged 13, when she died. The first song on I'm New Here is the ironically titled, "On Coming from a Broken Home", which is an ode to Lillie. "Womenfolk raised me," he attests, "and I was full-grown before knew I came from a broken home."
As a teenager, his writing skills earned him a scholarship to the Fieldston School in New York and, from there, he went on to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, chosen, he later said, because it was where his hero, Langston Hughes, had studied. It was there he met Brian Jackson, his musical collaborator on many of the great songs that would follow.
"I was playing keyboards back then and I was having awful trouble with the sheet music for 'God Bless the Child'", he remembers, laughing some more. "Brian could play that stuff like it was easy. We hooked up in the music room, then he showed me some music of his own and I started writing lyrics for it. That's how it began really. I made three records and wrote two books but I never thought of any of it as a career. Far as I was concerned, I was still a student. Still am, in some ways."
Together throughout the 1970s, Scott-Heron and Jackson made music that reflected the turbulence, uncertainty and increasing pessimism of the times, merging the soul and jazz traditions and drawing on an oral poetry tradition that reached back to the blues and forward to hip-hop. The music sounded by turns angry, defiant and regretful while Scott-Heron's lyrics possessed a satirical edge that set them apart from the militant soul of contemporaries such as Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.
"I still can't think of too many performers who have the intellectual range in their songwriting that takes in satire and social commentary apart from the early Bob Dylan and maybe the young Randy Newman," says Jamie Byng. "But there's also a great empathy there. Gil writes about the state of the world, but also about community, family, and the plight of the individual. And, he has never compromised. That's maybe a big part of the reason why his music never really crossed over. What he was saying was too raw, too truthful."
In more ways than one, then, Gil Scott Heron was, and remains, the great outsider, exalted by his devoted faithful, overlooked by the mainstream. His influence, though, is pervasive, though few and far between are the rappers that can make their lyrical gift, or its delivery, seem so effortless. "I work hard at it," he says, "just like I worked hard at getting my masters degree. It's not just something I sit down and do. You have to learn and keep learning."
I'm New Here would seem to bear that out. It is a new kind of Gil Scott-Heron record insofar as it relocates his old and now seasoned voice at the very heart of contemporary electronic music culture – one track features overdubs by film-maker and producer Chris Cunningham, another a soundscape sculpted by the ubiquitous Damon Albarn. It is an album of dark and brooding songs intercut with spoken-word pieces that tend towards the reflective if not outright regretful. As always it is that lived-in voice, now cracked and parched from the hard times, that pulls you in.
"He sees himself as a live performer and a story teller," the album's producer Richard Russell told me last week. "Even in the studio, he brings this extraordinary energy with him, this natural, god-given ability to perform, to tell it like it is. The words just seem to flow though him. In that sense, it was an easy album to make even though we did it in fits and starts."
What, I ask, were the difficulties? "Well, you have to accept that Gil does not operate on any clock known to man. He may turn up late, he may not turn up at all some days, but when he does, it tends to be incredible. He's a genuine artist in a way that most performers aren't anymore. He has no conception of time, no regard for money. He seems utterly free from the normal everyday burdens people carry. In that way, too, it was an extraordinary and unique experience." (I found this out to my cost last November, when I spent four days in New York waiting for him to show up for a face-to-face interview. He blew out three prearranged appointments and a photo session. Then he switched off his phone altogether. )
I'm New Here, then, may well bring Gil Scott-Heron's music to a new audience who will hopefully seek out the songs that made his name. Whether or not it will bring a new stability or focus to the man's own troubled life remains to be seen. Whether he even wants that is another question. Right now, if our exchange was anything to go by, he seems pretty together, though his conversation does tend towards the lateral.
"If you believe half the stuff you read about me in the press or on the internet, then I'm a strung-out junkie, but I never touched a goddam needle in my life," he says at one point, laughing uproariously. "I'm afraid of needles, man. So, when I heard that, I'm thinking, 'Who the hell they talking about? Must be some other Gil. Sure as hell ain't this one.'"
When he finally stops laughing, he quotes Robert Louis Stevenson at me: "There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, that it behoves all of us not to talk about the rest of us." Right on cue, the line starts crackling and I lose him for a moment. "Don't worry, bro," he shouts. "That's just me disappearing again."
I'm New Here is released on XL Recordings on 9 February. Canongate reissues The Vulture and the Nigger Factory on the same date. Gil Scott-Heron plays the Royal Festival Hall on 20 April as part of the Ether Festival.
Hear the new album online
Listen to an exclusive whole-album stream of Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here at guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2010/feb/02/gil-scott-heron-new-here
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