In the 70s and 80s, Gil Scott-Heron's music was a mesmerising mix of wry poetry and politics and he became known as 'the godfather of rap' and 'the black Bob Dylan'. But then he got into drugs and, not so long ago, it looked like he was finished. Now the great outsider is back, he's made a new album and he's here on tour. He tells Sean O'Hagan his extraordinary story

One of the most moving songs on Gil Scott-Heron's long-awaited new album, I'm New Here, is called "Where Did the Night Go". Over the most minimal electronic pulse, his familiar deep drawl, now more ragged and reflective than ever, intones the lines:

"Long ago, the clock washed midnight away, bringing the dawn,

Oh God, I must be dreaming,

Time to get up again, time to start up again,

Pulling on my socks again

Where did the night go?"

For those of us who have kept an ever-hopeful eye on Gil Scott-Heron's faltering musical and personal journey over the past three decades, the song has an added resonance. Where, I wondered on first hearing it, did the years go? Where, to be more precise, did Gil Scott-Heron go in the long silence that began in 1982 after the release of his last album for Arista Records, Moving Target, and was broken only briefly by the appearance of Spirits, in 1994.

"People keep saying I disappeared," the singer tells me, laughing heartily, when I speak to him. "Well, that's a gift I didn't know I had. You ever see someone disappear? That makes me a superhero, right?"

The humour, though, conceals a great deal of heartbreak and an epic struggle with addiction, both of which are referred to obliquely on his raggedly brilliant version of Robert Johnson's "Me and the Devil" on the new album. "Early this mornin', when you knocked upon my door", he sings, "And I said, "Hello, Satan, I believe it's time to go."

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