One of America's greatest poets ... Don Van Vliet aka Captain Beefheart. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives

There's one Captain Beefheart song that I haven't been able to get out of my head since his death was announced. Sue Egypt (from 1980's Doc at the Radar Station) has many of the Captain's trademarks: sudden rhythmic breaks and twists, otherworldly sounds, a super-killer slide riff and vocal pyrotechnics taken into another dimension.

The whole track explodes with energy, from the opening guitar figure through the saturated mellotron to the way that Beefheart's voice swoops through the phonetic lyrics: "Boats to forever/ Boated ether/ Creep to ether, feather/ Sue Egypt." Despite the dark imagery

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