Brown Bread: Gil Scott-Heron

(Source: Grauniad)

The musician and poet Gil Scott-Heron – best known for his pioneering rap The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – has died at the age of 62, having fallen ill after a European trip.

Jamie Byng, his UK publisher, announced the news via Twitter: “Just heard the very sad news that my dear friend and one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever met, the great Gil Scott-Heron, died today.”

Scott-Heron’s spoken word recordings helped shape the emerging hip-hop culture. Generations of rappers cite his work as an influence.

He was known as the Godfather of Rap but disapproved of the title, preferring to describe what he did as “bluesology” – a fusion of poetry, soul, blues and jazz, all shot through with a piercing social conscience and strong political messages, tackling issues such as apartheid and nuclear arms.

“If there was any individual initiative that I was responsible for it might have been that there was music in certain poems of mine, with complete progression and repeating ‘hooks’, which made them more like songs than just recitations with percussion,” Scott-Heron wrote in the introduction to his 1990 Now and Then collection of poems.

He was best known for The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, the critically acclaimed recording from his first album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, and for his collaborations with jazz/funk pianist and flautist Brian Jackson.

In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, first recorded in 1970, he issued a fierce critique of the role of race in the mass media and advertising age. “The revolution will not be right back after a message about a white tornado, white lightning or white people,” he sang.

He performed at the No Nukes concerts, held in 1979 at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organised by a group called Musicians United for Safe Energy and protested against the use of nuclear energy following the meltdown at Three Mile Island. The group included singer-songwriters such as Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Bonnie Raitt.

Scott-Heron’s song We Almost Lost Detroit, written about a previous accident at a nuclear power plant, is sampled on rapper Kanye West’s single The People. Scott-Heron’s 2010 album, I’m New Here, was his first new studio release in 16 years and was hailed by critics. The album’s first song, On Coming From a Broken Home, is an ode to his maternal grandmother, Lillie, who raised him in Jackson, Tennessee, until her death when he was 13. He moved to New York after that.

Scott-Heron was HIV positive and battled drug addiction through most of his career. He spent a year and a half in prison for possession. In a 2009 interview he said that his jail term had forced him to confront the reality of his situation.

“When you wake up every day and you’re in the joint, not only do you have a problem but you have a problem with admitting you have a problem.” Yet in spite of some “unhappy moments” in the past few years he still felt the need to challenge rights abuses and “the things that you pay for with your taxes”.

“If the right of free speech is truly what it’s supposed to be, then anything you say is all right.”

Scott-Heron’s friend Doris Nolan said the musician had died at St Luke’s hospital on Friday afternoon. “We’re all sort of shattered,” she told the Associated Press.

The title track from his last album I’m New Here contains the line “I’m hard to get to know, impossible to forget”, which pretty much sums up the man and his music.

An interesting fact is that his father, also called Gil, or more properly Gilbert, played football for Celtic in 1951, becoming the first black player to play for Celtic and I think the second ever black player to play in the Scottish football league.

R.I.P. Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011

English

I often wonder how foreigners cope with all our words ending in ough: enough, cough, bough, though, through, hiccough.

Then you have Worcester, Leicester, Slaithwaite, Knightsbridge, Cholmondeley and Featherstonehaugh.

As to Gaelic, how should I pronounce Dervla Kirwan? I am sure it is not pronounced as spelt.

When I was teaching English in Eastbourne it came as a surprise to me as a native speaker of the language that my students from Poland, Spain and Ukraine, some of whom were completing doctoral theses in English, really fell down when it came to phrasal verbs which are unique to English.

They really got mixed up when it came to using stand up, stand down, sit up, sit down, shut up, shut down, etc., etc.

This reminds me of a Roger McGough poem:

Cousin Angelina owned a yacht
And smoked pacht a lacht.
So when things got haght,
Away sailed Angelina (so regal)
To where the grass was greener (and legal).

Brown Bread: Alan Sillitoe

“Do you know Alan Sillitoe?” aksed Robert [Graves], and added half-seriously, “I invented him. He used to live in Soller in the Fifties, writing I don’t know what you’d call them, fantasies about imaginary countries set in no particular period. I told him, ‘Alan, nobody wants that sort of stuff. Write about the life you know in Nottingham and so on.’ So he wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and made his name.”

(Kingsley Amis, Memoirs)

Arthur took off his coat and sat with his legs stretched out over the mat, smoking cigarette after cigarette. He watched Brenda’s face disintegrating, her features mixing beneath the fire of hot gin and a sea of water. Never again, he kept saying to himself, never again. No more bubble-baths for Brenda. Never again. I’d rather cut my throat.

(Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning)

We’ve lost an inspirational novelist with the death of Alan Sillitoe, one of the Angry Young Men who captured the gritty reality of life for working people in post-war 1950s Britain.

In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the former bicycle factory worker portrayed the struggle of millions without patronising men and women dealt a poor hand. These “kitchen sink” dramas – turned into successful films starring Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay – have stood the test of time and are considered classics.

Sillitoe succeeded despite a squalid childhood. His death, aged 82, is sad if not unexpected, but he will live on through his fine books. Poet Ian McMillan said: “He put somehow forgotten places at centre stage. He made the ordinary life into a kind of poetry.”

Sillitoe, who died at Charing Cross Hospital in West London after falling ill earlier this month, was born into poverty in Nottingham in 1928. His dad was an illiterate labourer who was often jobless. The writer said their home “smelled of leaking gas, stale fat and layers of mouldering wallpaper.”

He left school at 14 and worked in a bicycle factory before serving as a wireless operator in the RAF. After returning from Malaya he contracted tuberculosis and spent 16 months in hospital. It was following this illness that he first put pen to paper.

Sillitoe wrote more than 50 books, including children’s stories, poetry and plays. He was married to American poet Ruth Fainlight, in 1959, and they had a son and daughter. He lived with his family in London but spent time in France, Spain and Tangier.

R.I.P. Alan Sillitoe 1928-2010

Brown Bread: U.A. Fanthorpe

Driving South

Nothing will happen to us all the way.
Counties drop past, known only to our tyres.
The dog sleeps in the back. The engine purrs.
Sun, trees and cooling towers become a dream,
A world we slip through, never see.

A sudden shriek knifes our tranquillity.
Have we run down a rabbit, killed a bird?
Nothing so harmless. We have passed by Towton.
What’s done is quivering here, alive and dying.

The bloody names pursue. York, Selby, Richmond,
Pomfret, where Richard died. History hounds us.
The sign posts stretch like hands, bonefingered, endless,
Pointing us to a sorrow we can’t share,
Scorning our ignorance, compelling knowledge.

Here battle was. Here the king bled to death,
The martyr hung in chains. And once we know
The grand, heraldic cruelties, we sense
Enormous suffering behind each hedge.
Here a whole village was wiped out, and here
Hundreds of peasants slowly starved to death.

We break into the present when we stop
For petrol. But the past intrudes here too.
The man who serves us wears the same grim sign.
Has a child died, or is his wife unfaithful?
At least in his case we aren’t forced to know.

Suffering riddles England. Rubbish bins
Are not enough for even our modest present;
How can they hold the litter of the past?

R.I.P. Ursula Askham Fanthorpe 1929-2009