mandate, my ass.
Last night I watched Don Lett's documenatary about Gil Scott Heron - The Revolution will not be televised. It was on BBC Four, but is not available on i-player (presumably for rights reasons), but with luck it will be repeated.
Gil was on himself - clearly suffering from his cocaine addition and HIV. His teeth were poor and he looked even more gaunt than usual. But his humour and intelligence shone through. It is tempting to say what a shame it was that this man suffered from such a terrible and debilitating addiction which deprived us his talents for most of the past twenty or twenty five years. But he seemed to accept it, and his story deserves to be about what he did rather than what else he might have done. After all plenty of people never reach his heights in the first place.
As an aside, few people swear as well as Gil - the timing and usage of a poet. Never just for the sake of it, always for judged effect.
I saw him live twice. Both in his missing years in the late 80s and early 90s. I don't know whether the drugs came first, and lead to his decline, or whether as suggested by the programme the music world decided he was old hat and his decline lead to the drugs. Only last night did I realise what a comedown it must have been from touring the world with Stevie Wonder to touring the backrooms that I saw him in.
The first was in Boston, USA. It was my first trip to the USA and I was extending a business trip to take advantage. I have no idea what made me go to Boston, apart from the fact that I could stop there for free on the way from Cincinatti to New York. In the rental car I heard that Gil was playing at a club. I changed my plans immediately.
I'd loved his music since "B-movie" was on an NME tape, starting off with the quote above. Secrets, not one of his best known albums, was one of the soundtracks to my first serious relationship. But he was mythical - not the sort of person who ever toured. It seemed impossible to imagine ever seeing him live.
To give you an idea of how important it was, while waiting to go to the club a perfectly nice attractive young American girl offered to take me back to her place. I turned her down. Just so I could go to see Gil. Seriously, I've never done that for anyone else.
And then he let me down. He bad mouthed Britain, saying what a cold grey place it was. I was probably the only Brit there, and why would he think there was even one. He got big laughs, but it disappointed me.
I still went when he played the Riverside in Newcastle, and I got to meet him backstage when he signed a book of poems for me. He was polite, but clearly keen to get on to other things. But that time it was ok for me. I realised he was a man, not a hero - and indeed he would have laughed at people seeing him as a role model, or any kind of perfect creature.
It must have been tough going from big gigs to the Riverside, which was only about 250 people.
The documentary made me realise that there is music of his out there that I have not heard, and I want to. That is unusual for this sort of programme. Normally you just remember the hits. This made me want to go deeper. So it was a success. The thing about Gil was that the combination of poetry (because he genuinely was a poet, not just a lyric writer), jazz and politics was pretty rare - and still is.
When I was younger I would have thought he had a good innings dying at 62. Now I am creeping up on 50 I realise how young it was, and how young he was when he started doing all this great music. We were practically contemporaries.
RIP Gil Scott Heron.
Oh, and apparently Thor stays there.
And jolly nice it is too. Room is pretty spacious by London standards and quite comfortable. Food is good. No doubt it is staggeringly expensive, but I am not paying so I don't know. The best thing about it is that is about 20m from the British museum on Great Russell Street. This makes it easy to just slip over the road and amble round. Yesterday was the Minoan rooms, which followed on a recent In our Time on Minoan culture. Also got to see more of the "history of the world in 100 objects" - the very first was a hand axe that is 1.5 million years old. 1.5million. Wow. Difficult to think that at that time there even were humans.
The Marriott Victoria and Albert in Manchester. Jolly nice. I really do like Marriotts. In fact I think I would like to live in one.
The really quite pleasant, and reassuringly expensive Park Plaza in Amsterdam. The first hotel you come to when you walk out of Central Station. A sensible internet policy (free for low bandwidth, pay if you want broadband) but a bizarre 15Euro charge to use the gym. Do they want us to be fat? More money than I would pay, but I'm not picking up the bill.
