← Quillette Narrated
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Welcome to Quillette Narrated Beautiful Visions van Morrison turns 80 Written by David Cohen, Read by William Lange I first saw Van Morrison in concert a few years ago on a graceful lull of a summer evening in Limerick, Ireland, watching the singer songwriter make out with his beloved gold saxophone as an eight piece band backed him in the courtyard of the King John's castle, where was a revelation of sorts. A mere slip of a lad of 76 at the time, Morrison was unfashionably decked out in a raffish hat, reflecting shades and an ill fitting blue suit. That night he had not only attracted the nostalgia vote of the older Vanatics, the audience was also full of young people who were not born when his best known releases first saw the light of day in 2025. The same is probably true of the critics who showered his latest album, Remembering now, with boisterous acclaim. The fact is, Van Morrison never went away. As well as a formidable body of work recorded before the early 80s, including one record with a reasonable claim to be among the greatest of all rock moments, his durable reputation endures on at least three other the genre busting, strength of his live shows, the controversy he has occasionally courted outside of his music and his prominent position in the canon of Irish songwriting. Still, it must be daunting to discover Morrison now. Where does one begin in a back catalogue of 45 studio albums, nearly 400 songs and God knows how many existential swerves? The grumpy romantic's 80th birthday this month merits a career recap. George Ivan Morrison was born on 31 August 1945, dropped out of high school at the age of 15, and then quit his first day job cleaning windows to pursue a career in music as a songwriter and musician. Morrison wasn't so much ahead of his time as behind it. Lyrically, he was steeped in the older byways of his native Belfast. Musically, he belonged to the even older folkways of the American recordings, to which his parents introduced him and from which he liberally borrowed from the get go. He knew all the stations along the line. Between 1964 and 66, Morrison was the rough and tumble singer and principal songwriter for an aggressive rhythm and blues outfit called Them, and he came on like a hooligan mystic. In the photograph on the front of the band's first album, the Angry Young Them, he's sporting a black eye, but the band's early records also showcased his antique ear for musical influence. Their sound was terraced with blues and skiffle, jazz and pop and and even a pinch of regenerated gospel music. Caledonian soul, he still calls it, but I prefer to think of it as a Caledonian stroll, rather like the three and a half kilometre walk I took one drizzly morning through the Belfast streets that first put the wind in Morrison's artistic sails. A tour of Morrison's old haunt starts in downtown Belfast and meanders past the rowdy blues clubs that still do a thriving after hours business. The influence of establishments like these helped to define them's punchy sound on evergreen hits like Here Comes the Night and Baby Please Don't Go. Heading past Morrison's childhood digs in East Belfast, one finds the old family home, a small red brick house at 125 Hindford street, along with St. Donald's Parish Church in Bloomfield Road, where the family attended services. Morrison has always downplayed the religious aspect of his Protestant upbringing. A little less Gloria in Excelsis Deo and a little more Glooria. We didn't go to church all the time, but it was a very churchy atmosphere in the sense that that's the way it is in Northern Ireland, he once explained. Belfast jazz scene offered a kind of transcendence, though, inspiring Morrison's early love affair with the saxophone and the distinct instrumentalisation of his voice, those now familiar vocal ticks, rushed repeats, half syllables, shouting, stuttered phrases, whispers and abrupt silences that he uses to fill the spaces on his tracks. The walk ends at Cypress Avenue, a tree softened upscale residential street near Morrison's old working class neighborhood, which inspired the title for the centerpiece track on his breakthrough solo album, Astral Weeks in 1968. Astral Weeks is a dreamy song cycle, most of which was composed while Morrison was holed up in the family home a few blocks away and then recorded over a couple of nights at Century Sound Studios in New York. Unlike most of the releases of the day, the music relies almost entirely on jazzmen, including the bassist Richard Davis and the guitarist Jay Berliner, who once noodled with Charlie Mingus. Jazz was about 80 years old at this point, and its perceived standards kept most rock musicians away. But Morrison was unfazed. No one else could have pulled it off like they did, he later said of these sessions to the LA Times. Well, sort of. According to John Cale, who happened to be recording in the adjoining studio, Morrison couldn't work with anyone else. So finally they just shut him up in a studio and overdubbed the rest of the record around his tapes. Whether that story is true or false and nobody really knows or cares, the alchemy of the recording succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Astral Weeks remains Morrison's most yearning celebration of his hometown, a cinematic parade of rainbow ribboned girls, youthful ballerinas and their tongue tied suitors, all unpredictably arranged and gorgeously orchestrated. It made me trust in beauty, marvelled Bruce Springsteen, who promptly hired the album's bassist, Richard Davis, to play on his own debut album, Greetings from Asbury park, and on the Meeting across the river track from the Born to Run sessions. At least part of Astral Week's incongruous appeal has to do with the precociousness of a singer barely out of his teens, meditating on a long lost golden age. Astral Weeks initially attracted mixed notices from critics who struggled to find a place for it in the era of the Dawes and the Beatles. These days, it reliably finds itself in the upper ranks of any insider's lists of the best albums of all time, including a recent survey of Irish musicians who named it their country's greatest ever recording. The actor Liam Neeson, who grew up in nearby Ballymena, has said that he still listens to Astral Weeks at least once a week. Every fucking week. It still kind of surprises me with its beauty. Every song is a fucking classic. It's still breathtaking in its originality, its composition, its poetry. And there he is, essentially singing a lot of songs about Belfast. For all its existential noise, the LP was also a love letter from Morrison to a pretty young American model named Janet Rigsby, better known as Janet Planet, which was the pet name her suitor gave her. Her tarot card reading presence hovers above most of the records, nine selections and indeed over the half dozen albums that followed. The couple married that same year and moved in together in Boston. Rigsby's inspiration also points to another enduring feature of Morrison's songwriting style. Almost all the romantic tunes for which he is celebrated circle around the first moment of sensual recognition. It's always that fleeting instant when the grass suddenly looks greener, the skies look bluer, the scent of perfume is stronger, and the first kiss makes you feel drunk, even as the songwriter seems to be aware that it could all slip away. Moondance, the album Morrison released a couple of years later, is a less adventurous collection of highly crafted folk soul numbers, but it continues in much the same romantic vein. The album's earworm title track gave Morrison a radio hit, and into the mystic became a concert showstopper. Tupelo Honey and Hard Nose the highway followed in 1971 and 1973, respectively, collections of brief songs that used the same blueprint without yielding anything especially memorable. Morrison's standout work from this period was the darker Saint Dominick's Preview, 1972, recorded in San Francisco near where he was living in Marin county with Rigsby and their daughter Shanna, who is now a singer songwriter in her own right. Of particular note are St. Dominic's two lengthier listen to the lion and Almost Independence Day. The former offers a trance like vocal workout, growling a near death rattle, feral grunts and roars as one English critic put it, while the latter is a performance of extraordinary nakedness. By this point, Morrison's marriage was nearly over and he had taken up with another woman named Carol Guida. He made his first lengthy trip back to Ireland in 1973, where he worked on a romantically frothy set of new songs released the following year as Wieden Fleece. Contrary to expectations, the record sold poorly. Critically, it fared even worse, shamelessly cathartic, sniffed the self described dean of American rock critics, Robert Christgau, and nobody, including Morrison, seemed to know what the title meant. The singer was said to be sufficiently stung by the album's lacklustre reception that he struck much of its material from his concert set lists. But over the decades, Wieden Fleece has benefited from something of a critical re evaluation. The oh so restrained strength of its reveries and intricate pastoral sounds are now more likely to draw favourable comparisons with Astral Weeks. Re Listening to it a few months ago as I drove from Carlow Town to Dublin, I was forced to agree. The songs flashed by like highway signs, and the album's jazzy musical landscapes perfectly complemented the emerald scenery outside the Window. Another couple of releases from the same period continue to shimmer. Beautiful Vision, an album of elegant little pop songs from 1982, has held up particularly well. Likewise, into the Music is an erotically high voltage song cycle that includes tracks like Angelou and a radical reworking of a 1911American show tune originally composed by former vice president John Dawes and titled it's all in the Game. Also of note on this album, thanks in part to the haunting violin and viola of Tony Marcus, is the backstreet jelly roll of and the Healing Has Begun, in which Morrison's affinity with the first moments of romance gets swapped out for the first moments of sexual intercourse. In 2021, the song would find another new audience after it appeared in the Kenneth Branagh directed movie Belfast. During this period, Morrison's focus was shifting across the Irish Sea. Summertime in England is by far the longest track on his 1980 release Common One, and it almost does for the English Lake District what he once did for Ulster. Clocking in at more than 15 minutes, the song slams together stately organs, swooping orchestration and and hot buttered jazz in a textured piehan to all things ancient. If Douglas Murray ever decides to turn his book the Strange Death of Europe into a documentary, he need look no further for a theme song. Dozens of other album releases followed in subsequent decades, but with the exception of Morrison's enjoyable jigs with the Chieftains on Irish Heartbeat, 1988, all these recordings draw from the template he created in his first burst of solo work. Sometimes he emphasized one part of the style, sometimes another, before he settled into a long stretch of releases mining the blues. At this point, the newcomer to Morrison d', Uruf, might be inclined to shift their focus to his live work. The best description of Morrison in concert I ever read was by the veteran critic cum manager John Landau when he wrote about a moment from the tour preserved on the first and best of Morrison's seven live releases to date, Landau said, working his way up to a ferocious conclusion, he stood before the audience shaking his head back and forth, hair falling about him, looking like a man insane. Finally, with tension mounting, he ran across the stage, ran back again, jumped over a microphone cord, held the mic up to his face and screamed, it's too late to stop now. And was gone. Working on stage with Morrison can be tough, the performer's gifted baritone saxophonist and arranger Christopher White recently told me, but he will give you chances. If you make the most of it and deliver, then there is a certain amount of stability. White has worked with Morrison for the past 15 years and says that in the studio or especially on stage, the challenge is seeing the world through the singer's prism. It's fascinating going through all his recordings, as we all have to do when we come into the band and listening to the imperfections in the performances, unexpected odd time signatures and strange form structures. Having now recorded on quite a few albums of his, it's clear now that none of those things really matter. He has had a long career, so he likes to keep things fresh and us on our toes. During the COVID pandemic, Morrison's love of performing also provided the context of for his only brush with political controversy. After governments around the world began to cancel concerts, most performing artists responded to non pharmaceutical interventions designed to control the spread of the virus with quiet resignation or muted anger. But Morrison publicly hit the roof. This should not have been a surprise, even Though his influence on fellow musicians is huge, Morrison has never sold vast numbers of albums, so his live shows have always been acts of financial necessity as well as labours of love, and the idea that art of any kind could be deemed non essential plainly rankled him. So he put pen to paper, voice to microphone and recorded three protest songs with Eric Clapton. No More Lockdown opens with this no more lockdown, no more government overreach, no more fascist bullies disturbing our peace, no more taking of our freedom and our God given rights, pretending it's for our safety when it's really to enslave. Three other tracks from these sessions, Stand and Deliver the Rebels and this Has Got a Stop, would later turn up on Clapton's 2024 album. Meanwhile, the first of these songs is not too bad as blues shuffles go, a confidently delivered sermon decorated with an OK guitar riff. This material was not exactly subtle, but it was not intended to be. Now it was everybody else's turn to hit the roof. Northern Ireland Health Minister Robin Swan described Morrison's stance as a smear on all those involved in the public health response to a virus that has taken lives on a massive scale. His words would only give great comfort to the conspiracy theorists, the tinfoil hat brigade who crusade against masks and vaccines and think this is all a huge global plot to remove freedom, he said. Morrison responded with a full album of anti lockdown songs titled what's it gonna take 2022, described by one MD who has been involved in the public health response in Northern Ireland as a stew of hateful and paranoid rats. Needless to say, one's view of all these uncharacteristically political fulminations boiled down to what one made of the COVID response, all of that was just a memory. Thankfully, by the time I finally got to see Van Morrison for myself on Irish soil, catching him on Hometurth has less to do with my own ties to the Republic than the fact that he gave up touring Down Under a long time ago. He last performed in Australia in 1985 and he has never performed in New Zealand at all, much as I enjoyed some of his new material and and disinclined, as I usually am to cast a nostalgia vote, the highlights of the set were the reworked classics, including a gospel like reading of have I Told you Lately and a delicately piano based reading of Carrying a Torch, a supple ballad from the early 1990s. Best of all was a reconstituted packaging of the lyrically rich Celtic rocker Full Force Gale, a standout originally recorded with Ry Kuda on Into the Music, the band played like a full force gale, too, and Morrison's voice was still equal to the task nearly five decades after he wrote the song. Another twist came from the end, when Morrison offered a couple of verses from Gloria. Give it up for the band. He yelled, the only words spoken to the audience that night as the instrumentalist rocked away and Morrison scooped up his saxophone and vanished into the wings. The group remained on stage for a full quarter hour, during which they ripped Gloria to pieces, dynamiting it with new twists and turns, including a gospel y performance by one of the backing vocalists and a weird but transfixing drum piece that sounded like reggae but was actually an unexpectedly springy reworking of Moondance. Members of the crowd, particularly the younger ones, began stomping as they waited for the singer to return. But Morrison, who famously hates doing encores almost as much as he hates stage patter, was having none of it. Ireland's most famous musical son was already en route back to his hotel to plot his next musical move. And why not? Quitting while he's ahead has always been Morrison style, and as he enters his ninth decade, there's no reason to suppose he won't continue in this vein. It's too late to stop now. That was Beautiful Visions van Morrison at 80, written by David Cohen and read for Quillette, narrated by me, William Lang. Thank you for listening.