There’s something horribly prophetic in the lyric of Gil Scott-Heron’s song The Bottle: “Look around on any corner/If you see some brother lookin’ like a goner/It’s gonna be me.”

I only saw him once, in New York in the early 2000s. It wasn’t at a concert (more’s the pity). I was staying in the Royalton Hotel. I’d just come in from an event, and was waiting for the lift to come down to the lobby.

When the elevator doors opened I saw a skinny, scruffy, elderly-looking figure standing inside. He didn’t look well. His legs seemed somehow disconnected from his torso as he shuffled awkwardly past me, rubbing at a scraggy beard.

I assumed it must be a tramp who had wandered into the hotel by mistake, and said as much to one of my better-informed colleagues nearby. One of them gave a sad laugh and said: “That was Gil Scott-Heron.”

Ravaged by years of drug abuse, and shuttling between prison and rehab, he looked terrible. I guess he was staying at the hotel between some of those three spells in jail for cocaine and crack offences around that time.

Throughout his career his politically charged street poetry proved too much for mainstream popularity but was hugely influential – effectively the template for hip hop.

The Bottle, a departure from his usual spoken word polemics like Johannesburg and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised blends its powerful message with a light jazz-funk groove featuring Brian Jackson on the flute.

He wrote it back in 1974 after seeing men lining up daily at a liquor store to bring empties for a discount, and talking to them to discover their stories, which mirrored his own later decline.

“I discovered one of them was an ex-physician, who’d been busted for abortions on young girls,” he said later. “There was an air traffic controller in the military – one day he sent two jets crashing into a mountain. He left work that day and never went back.”