Playing in the background as I'm writing is "The Bottle", Gil Scott-Heron's incantatory prose poem and his warning to Black America, to the wider America in fact, of the easy danger of drinking.

Without hypno-therapy, or whatever it is that allegedly resurfaces memories, I'll never be able to say how I first heard of him. Perhaps, it was Charlie Gillett's world music show on Capital that opened the door. I don't know, I can't remember,

But that loping jazz, that piercing flute, those soft, delicate, perfectly weighted keyboards, that honeyed voice, every beat balanced, stories half sung, half spoken, took me by the shoulders, swept into my soul, into deep places, into thinking.

This is night-time music of intelligence and caught me a scant few years after I'd graduated in American Literature, and every note, every line, every mood chimed.

I saw Gil twice, and on consecutive days, in mid 1986. First occasion was at Hammersmith Odeon, where I was so obviously smitten that the next day when I should have been working, I pleaded a bad back - a back spasm I think - and skived off to see him again at a free concert in Clapham Common, where yet again, his magic threaded through me. Still there twenty five years on as well. The bonds are like steel hawsers.