Gil Scott-Heron

The son of a Jamaican soccer player (who once played for Glasgow Celtic), Gil Scott-Heron was mostly raised in Jackson, Tennessee before moving with his mother to The Bronx in New York. At university in Pennsylvania, he met long-time collaborator Brian Jackson, forming the band Black and Blues and started writing novels, with his first book The Vulture published in 1970. The same year Scott-Heron released his first album Small Talk at 125th and Lenox, with a loose, spoken-word format addressing issues of homophobia, consumerism and black revolutionaries that included his hugely influential track The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Blending jazz, blues, rock and poetry, second album Pieces Of Man established his reputation as a challenging trailblazer, climaxing in 1974 with the album Winter In America (which included another classic, The Bottle). In 1975 he had a hit single with Johannesburg, a loaded diatribe about South Africa, reflecting his involvement in various social and political issues while his rapid speech patterns and satirical edge helped inspire hip hop and earned him the title "the godfather of rap". Drug-related problems subsequently curbed his output and he was imprisoned in the 2000s on drug charges, but was back in 2010 with a highly-acclaimed new album I'm New Here, his first for 16 years.