Into The Mystic
by Jon Wilde (Published in July 2005)
For 40 years, his music has inspired and astonished. Yet he has remained a silent, enigmatic figure, shunning the media. Now, at long last, Van Morrison speaks exclusively and candidly to Uncut about his work, his battles with the music industry, and the making of his eternal masterpiece Astral Weeks.
April 2005. Van Morrison OBE is sat in the lounge of the Thistle Aberdeen Caledonian hotel, explaining to Uncut why his relentless need to make music has, for more than 40 years, been as much of a curse as a blessing. "Everything is a curse and a blessing," he argues with some vehemence. "There's two sides to everything in this life. Music is no different. Don't think I haven't tried to walk away from it all. I've made a few concerted efforts at walking away. But it's pointless. You have to understand that I don't choose the music; it chooses me. My love for the music is the core of it for me. Maybe there's people who do music for different reasons. Financial reasons or ego reasons. Maybe they can walk away from it. But I can't. Because my connection to the music can't be broken. This is a need. Let's be clear about this - there is no fucking choice."
This is an ideal time for Uncut to be talking to the legend that is Van Morrison. His latest album, Magic Time, has been hailed as his most consistent and powerful for many years. Then there are two landmark anniversaries worth noting: January has already discreetly marked the 40th year since his first-ever chart hit (Them's uproarious "Baby Please Don't Go"); August brings his 60th birthday.
Morrison grants precious few interviews. His last with an English publication was almost 10 years ago. Not since the early '80s has he been willing to talk extensively about all phases of his career, preferring to limit the agenda to his current work or his early influences. Those few interviews that he consents to give are, more often than not, fractious affairs. He generally refuses to talk about anything but music, and has a tendency to interpret any question about his music as "too personal". It can safely be said that playing the part of the acquiescent pop star has never been Van's forte. As far back as 1965, around the time of Them's debut album, one unfortunate gentleman of the press arrived at a London rehearsal studio to conduct the first ever music paper interview with Morrison. After being kept waiting for some considerable time, the journalist approached Van and gently enquired, "Will you be able to do the interview now?" "Fuck off," Morrison replied, "can't you see I'm busy?"
On another occasion, he startled an NME journalist minutes before the conversation was due to commence by announcing that a camera crew would film proceedings so as to secure evidence of its pointlessness. Then there was the Rolling Stone reporter who claimed to have trailed Morrison through the streets of Massachusetts in 1990 after the singer stormed out of an interview midway through the first question. As one biographer noted, Van generally takes to interviews "like a duck to tarmac".
The months that pass between suggesting and securing the interview you are about to read permit ample time to ponder the conundrum that is Van Morrison. About whom there are two things that just about everybody accepts without question. Firstly, that he is The World's Most Difficult Musician or, in tabloid terms, "Rock's Mr Grumpy". Whether deserving of such epithets or not, Morrison is almost as renowned for his truculence as he is for his music.
Though there are many who will attest to his generosity, affability and ready humour, almost everyone connected with the music business has a favourite Van Morrison anecdote to illustrate his unpredictable, often volatile nature. Biographies are filled with the testimonies of former friends, managers and fellow musicians, and portray a man seemingly at war with himself and with the world at large.
Examples of his contrary behaviour are myriad. Like the long-term associate who claims that, during a quiet restaurant meal, Morrison erupted with rage and threatened him with physical violence after he made the mistake of amiably referring to the singer as "my son". Or the record company executive who resorted to slamming Morrison's head against a boardroom table after Van stomped unannounced into his office on Christmas Eve and launched into an extended rant about how the music industry had ripped him off. Or the occasion when Morrison pleaded invasion of privacy and threatened legal action after the Belfast Blues Appreciation Society had the temerity to erect a plaque at his childhood home to show appreciation of his contribution to Irish music.
Countless biographies have tried and failed to solve the contradiction of how such an apparently insensitive man can be responsible for creating such sublimely sensitive music. "As an artist he's clearly a genius" says a press officer who worked with Van in the '80s. "As a man, he's impossible. He used to drop into the record company office, usually to harangue somebody about some imagined slight, and people would literally hide in the cupboards so as not to have to confront him. It was never a case of, 'Wow, it's Van Morrison.' People were actually terrified of him."
The sleevenote to Them's second album (1966) bluntly describes him as "moody, unpredictable, perverse, often downright willful - but always creative." Creative he might be, supernaturally so, but rarely has an individual appeared to be so uncomfortable under fame's spotlight, or so averse to accepting the attention that stardom engenders. Indeed, he might just be the world's most reluctant celebrity.
Back in the '70s, before celebrity obsession became the dominant hum of the age, his divorce from Janet Planet could pass almost without mention, despite the fact that his wife had been the sole inspiration for celebrated songs such as "Crazy Love", "Moondance" and "You're My Woman". By the '90s, however, even such an unlikely subject for newspaper gossip as Morrison could expect to find his private life picked over in the press. In 1996, his dalliance with a pair of divorcees in a hotel room led to improbable headlines such as "Sex Shame Of Van The Three-In-A-Bed Man".
Through the '90s, both tabloids and broadsheets ran regular bulletins detailing the latest developments in his on-off romance with former Miss Ireland Michelle Rocca. Morrison's reaction to all this was succinctly expressed in his 2003 song "Goldfish Bowl" (from Whats Wrong With This Picture). With a mix of fury and weary despair, he sings: "What will it take for them to leave me alone / Don't they know I'm just a guy who sings songs?"
The other thing that nearly everybody accepts about Van Morrison is that he is one of the most accomplished musical artists of our time, the one figure who not only ranks alongside Bob Dylan as a songwriter of transcendent capacity, but also stands comparison with Smokey Robinson and Sam Cooke as a vocalist. Many of his albums are commonly regarded as classics. For the past 20 years, his undoubted masterpiece, Astral Weeks, has taken it in turns with Pet Sounds, Blonde On Blonde and Revolver to top the "Best Album Ever" polls. With the exception of Dylan, there is no other artist who inspires such blind devotion in his followers. Morrison's most zealous fans claim that his music has not just enhanced but actually transformed their lives. Not for nothing is he known to his legions of fans as Van The Man.
He was born George Ivan Morrison on August 31, 1945 in a small terraced house on Hyndford Street, East Belfast. An introspective only child, music was his entire world almost from the time he was able to walk. As his mother later put it: "One time Van said to me that he didn't want to talk, but music was running through his head all the time. He said he didn't know whether he'd been blessed or cursed because the words and music wouldn't leave him."
Barely into his teens, having already mastered guitar/sax/harmonica and found his singing voice, he graduated through skiffle bands and showbands. Eventually he formed Them, who took on the world with a style of R&B suffused with urgent sexual menace, making most other emerging blues-influenced bands of the era (Stones, Animals, Yardbirds) sound like mere pop confections. By 1967, having signed to Bang Records in New York, he'd scored his first solo chart hit with "Brown-Eyed Girl" and, by this time, was already beginning to assemble the songs that would slowly gestate into 1968's epochal Astral Weeks.
Through the '70s, by now settled in the US, he delivered album after album of inspired self-revelation that veered further and further away from the rock framework. By now, he was established as one of modern music's superstar elite. But the bigger he became, so his relationship with the record industry, the media and with fame became more combative.
In the '80s he relocated to Britain and began to absorb himself in religious study on an almost full-time basis. Christian mysticism, the teachings of Gurdjieff, Zen Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, Scientology, Hinduism... as one biographer noted, he seemed at times to resemble a "football fanatic determined to visit every ground". His profound sense of spiritual unrest would inform and inspire his most outstanding albums of that decade.
Through the '90s to the present, his relentless spiritual search seemed to be on tentative hold. No longer could he be expected to pop up at weekend conferences devoted to Christian mysticism. Refashioning himself as an unlikely socialite, he was far more likely to be spotted propping up the bar of exclusive Dublin clubs in the company of Bob Geldof, Ronnie Wood or Shane MacGowan.
In the past 15 years, he's appeared to be in deliberate, hurried retreat from the quest for spiritual transformation that has driven the best of his music. Increasingly, he has concerned himself with a literal reaffirmation of his musical roots. He's made a skiffle album with Lonnie Donegan, a country album with Linda Gail Lewis, and a live lounge-jazz album with Georgie Fame. At times, his more recent recorded work has seemed to be an afterthought to his still joyous, often electrifying live performances; many of his late releases appear to resemble little more than side projects.
Invariably, though, as soon as he's begun to convince us that he's doing little more than marking time, he'll return with a clutch of songs that serve as an impressive reminder of what made him such a monumental talent in the first place. The finest of all time? Very possibly.
Bang on time, bedecked in a sharp black suit, Van Morrison shuffles into the hotel lounge, managing to look both informally relaxed and ill at ease. He orders a round of green tea, keeps eye contact to a minimum. His body language suggests someone who could name a million other things they'd sooner be doing than talking to a journalist in an Aberdeen hotel. Gradually, he settles into the situation and he starts to warm up, firstly by talking about his love for the recently departed Ray Charles, whose "This Love Of Mine" he covers on his latest album. He talks not as you might presume. Not with the slow, hesitant cadences you'd expect from the sensitive song-poet responsible for lines like: "I will raise my hand up into the night time sky/ And count the stars that's shining in your eye." Instead, his conversational style is tough and fast, his words rapped out in the manner of a blue-chinned Belfast docker holding court in the nicotine mist of a waterfront bar. Hardly the intimidating, obstreperous, monosyllabic interviewee of lore, Morrison proves to be charming, cooperative and, for the most part, unguarded. At a couple of junctures, asked whether he's OK for time, he nods and says, "No problem, let's keep going. It's good stuff, this." And so for two hours he talks, not seeming to mind when the line of questioning deviates from the agreed script, providing what might well be the most expansive, even revealing, interview of his often turbulent but never less than remarkable 40-year musical journey.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SWEET THING
From childhood to Them
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UNCUT: Van, do you remember when you first decided that music was going to be your life?
MORRISON: It was sort of decided for me when I first started hearing music that made me sit up and think, "What's this?" Somewhere along the line, I might have thought about it in terms of, 'This is what I could do.' But the first thing was beyond ambition. The first thing was hearing this music.
There's a story about you hearing Mahalia Jackson for the first time at the age of three and being transfixed by the sound. Any truth in that?
That sounds right. I would have been about three. That was my earliest recollection of it. My father had all these records. When he was off work or at weekends there'd always be music playing, Traditional jazz stuff. Blues. Big band music. Relatives would come around on a Saturday evening. They'd go to a club first and then come back and have a few drinks and sing songs. "Danny Boy", that kind of thing. My mother sang, played piano and harmonica.
She used to play the bagpipes as well, right?
Yeah, that went on. She'd march up and down the stairs with these bagpipes because she was thinking about joining a pipe band for a while. She was also taking dance lessons.
So music was all around you?
You just had to open the back door and there it was. The neighbours had all the Hank Williams stuff, so I heard that from five doors down. There were a lot of musicians in the area. People had all these great records. Not just my dad but all my friends. Wherever you went, there was this great music. Until later, I didn't know that wasn't normal. People tell me, "We didn't have that when we were growing up." It's always a surprise. To me, it was normal, y'know? All this different music that I connected with.
Greil Marcus writes about the "shock of recognition" he felt when he heard Robert Johnson's blues for the first time - the shock being the realisation that he'd recognised something that nothing could have led him to expect to recognise. Is that what it was like for you?
When I heard Leadbelly, yeah. Absolutely. It was that kind of recognition. Same kind of thing I got much later when I started reading Blake. Recognising a certain feeling in something. When I first heard Leadbelly, it was like getting a key. Leadbelly was a , folk singer who sang blues, showtunes, children's songs, cowboy songs, boogle-woogle, old-fashioned accordion tunes, you name it. He did everything in a different way. That opened up the door for me.
He made you see what was possible?
Exactly. Music didn't have to be one thing. I got the same thing later when I first heard Ray Charles. Ray sang blues, he sang jazz, he sang country. That was another kind of key for me. When I heard Ray Charles At Newport, that was it. I started to understand something about harmony, phrasing, how to work a band - all that kind of stuff. The music I loved, it spurred me on, yeah. Made me want to sing better, perform better, all that.
Your first proper band was a DIY skiffle outfit, complete with kitchen washboard and tea-chest bass. How important was skiffle to you in terms 01 musical development?
For me, skiffle tapped into the Leadbelly thing. When Lonnie Donegan started coming out with versions of Leadbelly songs, that's when it all kicked in for me. See, Donegan never properly received his due. He was a great singer. Also, he's underestimated as a guitarist He could do more with three chords than most people could do with 50 chords. People tend to dismiss skiffle as DIY music. It can be that. It all depends who's doing it. Skiffle stands on its own. It was never a poor cousin to rock'n'roll. America never produced anything that was close to Donegan. Nothing that I can find.
Was Donegan a bigger influence on you than Elvis?
Absolutely. Elvis wasn't important to me at all. To me Elvis was peripheral. In my father's record collection I'd heard Chicago blues, country blues, rhythm and blues... I liked the energy of rock'n'roll but, y'know, by the time that came along, I felt I'd already heard it. I mean, I liked Little Richard, Big Joe Turner, Fats Domino and Carl Perkins so much more than Elvis. As a singer, I had some admiration for Elvis. But, to me, he was more image than anything.
Before forming Them, you performed in a number of showbands. By all accounts the live shows you performed with those bands were completely untamed.
They were wild, yeah. You had to have an act then. You were judged by your last live show. And your show had to be something different otherwise you didn't get booked. You almost had to kill yourself to be different. We'd try to do things that other people weren't doing. If we were going to leap around, we'd better be leaping around better than anyone else was leaping around. It was very competitive in that way. That was the name of the game - to get people dancing, to entertain. It was that simple.
There'd be elements of comedy in those shows?
We'd do Charlie Drake numbers, stuff like that. We had a singer called George Jones and he was the real comedian. I was more like the fall guy. We'd do a Charlie Drake number, "My Boomerang Won't Come Back'; and ad-lib our own stuff on top. See, I was brought up on all that stuff. I actually saw Charlie Drake's last show when they put him through a bookcase. They pushed his head through this bookcase, thinking it was made of cardboard. But it was a real boqkcase. He had to be taken to hospital. That was it. There was never another Charlie Drake show after that.
Did you regard Them as being different from all the bands who were part of the British blues explosion of the early '60s?
Definitely. When the blues started getting noticed, I could hardly believe it. It was like all my Christmases come at once. Because this stuff wasn't new to me at all. I'd been listening to it most of my life. By the time that stuff started to be popular, it was in my bones. It was like breathing by then. Blues was my calling card. People tend to forget that I was discovered as a blues singer. It was nothing to do with rock music. To start with, Them was a blues thing. When it stopped being that, it all started to go wrong.
From early on, you seemed determined not to march to anyone else's beat.
Well, what happened with Them is that they tried to manipulate us, turn us into a pop group. Suddenly, it seemed like we were working to someone else's agenda. They expected us to be slick and showbizzy. Well, I was neither of those things. For me, that was going nowhere. I couldn't pull that off. It was an alien thing to me. I wanted to play blues music, pure and simple. I wasn't doing it for the money or the fame. I had no interest in being a personality. Them started out as something straightforward and it got twisted into something else. We became fodder, that's all.
So when you saw yourself billed as The Angry Young Them...
I flipped. That was basically a PR stunt. It was a pun on the John Osborne title, of course. It was another way of trying to make us different from all the other groups with their gimmicks. So that was our gimmick. I didn't want any of that stuff to go out. I thought it was stupid. But I was basically outvoted and couldn't do anything about it. I was just a musician. I didn't know anything. Other people were calling the shots. They were trying to sell us, y'know? But I've never been into selling myself. It's always been about the music. That's all I know about.
At what stage did you realise that your ambitions lay beyond singing in a blues band?
It was a gradual thing. I'd start bringing in other stuff, broadening the thing out. I'd bring in a Ray Charles element or a Bobby Bland element, but people weren't getting it. Basically, the record company just wanted pop records. They'd give us songs that were just imitations of stuff already on the chart.
Did starting to write your own songs come out of a need to prove yourself as more than a lead singer?
It was more like a natural thing. I'd been writing my own songs when I was doing the showband thing, long before Them got a record deal. "Gloria" - that was one of the first I wrote. They tell me now that "Gloria" is a classic. But it was a throwaway song. Written completely off the cuff.
How important was Dylan to you in terms of influencing your writing style?
Well, Dylan was being talked about as part of a folk thing. But I didn't actually hear him until the second album (The Preewheelin' Bob Dylan). I heard that in a record shop in Belfast and, by that time, he was already in a different category. What he was doing by then was folk-based, but it's what he was saying that made all the difference. After hearing Dylan, a lot of songwriters realised that their subject matter didn't have to be what was taken for granted, didn't have to be boy-meets-girl songs. The folkiest thing about Dylan is that he was telling stories, but telling them differently, writing on a number of different levels at once. He was going beyond folk into something closer to poetry. With Dylan, it was more the metre of what he was singing than the music itself, and what he was implying in the songs. Dylan made things possible, y'know? He was an originator. Not the only one. But he was the one who brought it all into the mainstream.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WAY UP IN THE HEAVEN
The making of Astral Weeks
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You've ta1ked a little about how your music was written "unconsciously". Was Astral Weeks like that?
Kind of. But there were different versions of those songs. Words changed, whole verses changed... there were so many drafts of those songs. Starting with me singing them into an old Grundig tape recorder back in Belfast after Them broke apart. I think the unconscious approach to writing came a bit later. With Astral Weeks, there was more editing involved.
Do you have any thoughts on the early versions of "Madame George" and "Cypress Avenue" that you recorded for Bang Records in New York?
There was a lack of understanding involved. The people I was working with, producers and session musicians, they didn't get what I was trying to do, which was to stretch things, both lyrically and vocally. For me, it was like starting all over again. I was bringing in songs with more lyrical content, songs with a different feel. That's when things started coming apart. I mean, I'd had a hit with "Brown-Eyed Girl", but that was more of a one-off. The people I was working with thought that's what I was about. But I'd moved on from that and was going for something far less structured. After I recorded for Bang, I went into another studio and cut those songs again. Those versions have never surfaced. That session got sabotaged because Bang didn't want me to do anything different. It was an ego thing. They didn't like what they were hearing so they got the engineer to sabotage those tapes. By the time I came to do Astral Weeks, it was the third time I'd recorded the songs. It was like third time lucky.
How much luck was involved in getting those musicians for Astral Weeks?
You're joking, right? It was nothing to do with luck. That's one of many myths. Because those songs had been worked on for a long time before we finally cut them in the studio. I'd been playing them in dives in Boston and New York, just myself and a bass player and a flute player. Those songs were completely rehearsed by the time we came to record them. The producer of Astral Weeks [Lewis Merenstein] had come up to Boston to see me play them. Even before we got near the studio, those songs were ready; they'd been worked to death. The idea that Astral Weeks was some fluke, something done with smoke and mirrors, it's complete bullshit.
Was there a chemistry between you and those musicians?
No, no. There might have been some chemistry going on. But that would have happened with or without those particular musicians. OK, Merenstein got some great jazz guys in. But a lot of the time they weren't actually playing the songs. If you listen to the record closely, they're out of sync a lot of the time, or sometimes they're not sure where they're going next. That's because there was no rehearsal. We just walked in, started playing, and those guys were just winging it.
Winging it? Oh, c'mon...
No, seriously. There was no rapport. We just got on with it and it worked because they were good enough as musicians to make it work.
How did you feel when you first heard the final LP?
I felt it was as close as I could get at that time to what I wanted. Of course, I'd do it so differently now. Back then, it was more than I expected. Considering all the struggle I'd gone through with Bang Records, hearing the playback, I was thinking, "Yeah, I've got my day in court now."
It's an extraordinary record for a 22-year-old to write and a 23-year-old to record.
It is. I'll buy that. Making Astral Weeks, I was just following my heart, y'know? That's all I've ever done in terms of making music.
Lester Bangs once argued that it's not a young man's record. Rather, that there are "lifetimes behind it".
I wouldn't disagree with that, either.
It's widely regarded as your finest work, even your masterpiece. Maybe it's the yardstick against which all your other albums are measured and judged. Has that ever made Astral Weeks feel like a millstone to you?
Not really. I was very young when I made Astral Weeks. It's a lot of water under the bridge and I can't relate the same way. I'm 59 now. It's very difficult to relate to the 23-year-old version of me. The main problem I have with Astral Weeks is that I don't have any control over it. Warner Brothers owns it, and that's still a bone of contention.
How does it make you feel when you hear people say that Astral Weeks changed their lives?
Well, they tell me that, too. But it didn't change my fucking life. I was starving before I made Astral Weeks and I was still starving when it came out because I saw no money from it. I got recognition for it later, much later. But, at the time, forget it. Nobody wanted to know. It didn't sell well. I've never actually been able to find out what it's sold. By the late '70s, I'm told it had still only sold 30,000 in the UK.
It seems to perplex you somewhat that Astral Weeks continues to be such a source of fascination for music fans.
It's just not how I think about it. I mean, people are still debating the meaning of a song like "Madame George". Well, there's nothing to debate. "Madame George" is pure fiction. It's like a movie, a sketch, or a short story. In fact, most of the songs on Astral Weeks are like short stories. In terms of what they mean, they're as baffling to me as to anyone else. I haven't got a fucking clue what that song is about or who Madame George might have been. Those words just came through. That's what happens when you write songs. You pick up on stuff you're not even aware of. Years later, you might realise that such-and-such a line was inspired by something specific. At the time, you don't even know that, because you're picking a lot of it up subconsciously.
But you can understand why people find it difficult to accept that Astral Weeks is not at least semi-autobiographical?
Some of Astral Weeks is real. For sure. ThereÕs names of people - Huddie Ledbetter [Leadbelly's real name], that's real. There's place names - Cyprus Avenue, Dublin, Fitzroy, Sandy Row. They're real, OK. But they're also fictionalised. Someone - it might have been Truman Capote - once coined the word "faction". Maybe that's what it's like. Some of it's fact and some of it's fiction. Some of it's actual and some of it's dreamt up from somewhere. Fitzroy is actually a street but it could also be a person. That's the great thing about songs. You can move stuff around. You can be writing about what seems to be one person but it's actually a composite. You can juggle things around as much as you like. What comes out doesn't come out in a predictable or literal way. By the time the record's out, you can forget where most of it came from in the first place.
When you listen to Astral Weeks these days...
I don't remember the last time I listened to it. I don't usually listen to myself. Because I need to keep what I'm doing fresh to feel like it's all evolving. Why would I listen to an album like that? What it means to me is irrelevant, or should be irrelevant. It meant something to me when I was doing it. Now it doesn't matter to me in the slightest.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CALEDONIA DREAMING
From Moondance to Wavelength
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Between Astral Weeks and Moondance, was there a conscious decision to make an album that was more obviously commercial?
With Moondance, the whole set-up was different. The big difference was that it was more like working with an actual band rather than a bunch of session guys. Also, I produced it more or less by myself. Simply because I couldn't find anyone else to do it. As far as the commercial thing goes... after Astral Weeks, I needed to come up with a collection of songs that at least had a chance of being played on the radio. I was fed up with being broke, y'know?
By the time of St Dominic's Preview, you'd more or less become your own genre. You even gave it a name - Caledonian Soul.
That was just a tag I came up with. I'm not sure how relevant it was, or for how long. In terms of my own music, I've always thought about it in terms of jazz. I don't mean "jazz" in the sense of chord structures. I mean that my approach to music is jazz. Like Louis Armstrong said, "I never sing or play the same way twice." Every time Armstrong sang something, it was different. He didn't believe in the idea of playing a wrong note. To him, it was always perfect. I love that idea. ThatÕs the basic approach of jazz and blues. It's also been my approach. Leaving enough space in the music for something new to come in every time, not being too controlled.
You prefer writing, recording and performing to be completely spontaneous?
Yea, thatÕs exactly it. ItÕs about what comes out spontaneously. ItÕs about the unknown Ð thatÕs the best way I can put it. Other than that, it's completely mystifying. The idea of doing something spontaneously, that goes way back, past Kerouac, past Louis Armstrong, past Coleridge. It's an ancient thing.
Throughout the 70s you were being routinely described in the music press as "a rock visionary" or as an "Irish mystical guru". Those kind of labels pissed you off, didn't they?
Yeah, it really pissed me off, because I couldn't even pay the rent. I was labeled a lot of different things. They told me I was a poet. I didn't need anyone to tell me I was a poet. I knew I was a poet because I'd been writing poetry for years. I'd been told I was a poet at school. It wasn't news to me. I was writing poetry before I even knew what poetry was. And a lot of the poetry I'd been writing turned into songs. That still happens today. Some of the songs just start out as poems. Songs can come from all kinds of different places. So many of my songs from that '70s period, I haven't a clue what they're about. A lot of the time, I was just picking up on a vibe. Like I was living in this old house outside San Francisco, one of those old family houses that had apparently belonged to some long-gone socialite family. Staying in this place, I was just picking up on what was in the air, and two of the songs on Veedon Fleece were written about this vibe that I was picking up in this house. I didn't know what I was writing about. But, obviously, I was picking up on something from another era.
By the mid-70s, you were internationally famous, but you seemed to find your fame extremely hard to bear.
It wasn't so much the day-to-day stuff, being recognised on the street or whatever. That's never been a huge burden to me. I'd prefer to walk around without being recognised. Who wouldn't? But if I've got time to sign autographs, I'll do it. Those people have bought my records.
Do you feel a responsibility to your audience?
There's a responsibility to both my music and my audience. I mean, the audience is supporting me, isn't it? What's wrong with that? Those aren't the people who project on me. They're the real people. They enable me to do more music and they're the people I relate to. But you have to remember that I knew nothing about fame and how people like to project things on famous people. I was totally naive about all that stuff. I'd experienced some of that with Them. But that was more about image and packaging. When I started doing my own stuff, it came to me that these outside ideas could be projected onto your work as well. I didn't want any of it. It amazed me that people bought into it so much.
But why did that bother you so much? Couldn't you simply have shrugged it off, or completely ignored it?
No, I couldn't ignore it because it made me self-conscious about writing songs. Suddenly, this whole mythology was projected onto me and my music. Everything I did was fixed. Everything I said was fixed. I think it all started with Rolling Stone magazine in the late '60s and early'70s. To the guys who were writing those reviews, everything was rock music and everything had to have a mythology around it. You have to remember that these guys were stoned most of the time. If you're listening to a record in that state, you're going to get dozens of meanings from songs.
It's just interpretation though, isn't it? It's just one person's opinion. No harm in that.
Well, it's what it means to you when you're listening to it. Not some guy from Rolling Stone magazine waffling on and putting his own fairy tales on it. It's Alice in fucking Wonderland when it gets to that level. Total fantasy, written by people who have no idea what they're writing about. And it's got fuck all to do with the actual thing. See, there was a point in the '60s or '70s when it all became about icons. People would sit around debating what the next Beatles album was going to say - like The Beatles were going to tell us where it's at. As if The Beatles were a religion or Bob Dylan was the man who had The Word - even though he rejected all that shit. Well, I reject it, too. I always have done. But it's still the same. After all this time, it's still being perpetuated.
After releasing Veedon Fleece in 1974, you basically retired for three years. What were the reasons behind that?
I always had a strong sense of myself. I always did what I did. I also had a strong sense of when was the right time to pull the plug on something. I hadn't really had a break in 16 years or something and, at the time, I was suffering from a lot of stress. That was the main reason I stopped. Nothing else. I'd been putting these records out and I felt I wasn't getting much out of it. Things started to feel oppressive. I just couldn't handle the tension, so I basically disappeared for a few years. I just needed to get out of everything for a while. Do nothing. Be nothing. Just that.
You then returned to recording in 1977 with the release of A Period Of Transition, which was a collaboration with Dr John. Then, in 1978, you released Wavelength. Those two albums seemed to mark the end of a certain phase for you musically. The closing of a chapter, perhaps?
Well, A Period Of Transition was what it says in the title. That was a transition thing. Basically, I was tired of putting out Van Morrison albums. So I did the collaboration with Dr John. It still came out as a Van Morrison album. But the idea was to do something that wasn't just about me. It probably wasn't the best stuff I had at that time. Same with Wavelength. The end of a chapter? Maybe it was in some ways. I was about to move to a new label. Things felt different. It was time for a change, really.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE HEALING HAS BEGUN
From Into The Music to Enlightenment
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Your 1979 album, Into The Music, included the song "And The Healing Has Begun". That particular song seemed to presage some of your main lyrical concerns of the following decade.
Well, it's all about healing, isn't it? Art, literature... that goes way back. It comes back to this question: what's your original face? Know what I mean? Who are you really? There's so many different kinds of healing but, if you are in alignment with yourself, then that in itself is going to be healing. If you're trying to be something other, like something superficial, trying to be someone you're not, then that would take you away from your true centre. Really, if you're asking about those songs and those albums, then it's about getting back to the true centre within yourself. That healing thing. It was nothing new. Music has always been about healing, hasn't it? I was just doing my own thing on that.
So, for you, it was principally about music as a healing force through the '80s?
Yeah, that's it. But I'm not sure that Into The Music was the start of something totally new. Maybe it was getting back into something I'd started with Astral Weeks. It was nothing to do with some kind of religious conversion, which is what some people thought. Some people thought it was now a Christian thing because I mentioned "finding sanctuary in the Lord" or something. But it wasn't as defined as all that.
There was much speculation about your religious beliefs in the '80s. Did that unduly bother you?
Well, what happened is that people would take things I at face value and say, "Oh, he's being a dilettante". What it's really about is that, if you study knowledge, then you really have to study knowledge. You don't just study one thing. You can't just say, "OK, I'm going, to study Hinduism:' If you're going to study knowledge then you have to study the whole field. You need to get an overview and you have to look at the whole picture. That's what people are getting at when they say that my music was about the mystical or that it was about searching for something. That's how it's been interpreted. But, when one studies knowledge, one gets influenced by things. Again, the songs come out of things that youÕre being influenced by at the time you're studying. For me, that's what that '80s phase is.
It wasn't a search for anything specific? Truth? God?
No, it was just looking for knowledge, looking for light. It was never about one thing, one religion. It was about finding out about myself. Trying to find some peace of mind, some light. If anything, it was more about the journey itself than reaching some kind of destination. That's where the music was at.
An inarticulate speech of the heart? Finding a way to describe the indescribable?
That's right, that's what it is. You see, a lot of those albums in the '80s... a lot of the songs came out of the stuff I was reading at the time. Poets like Blake. Literature was more of an influence around that period. That stuff leaked in.
With 1986's No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, you seemed to be making a definite statement about where you stood in terms of your beliefs.
Yeah, that was a definite statement on my part. "Just you and I and nature, and the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost". I was saying that I had no teacher, no guru, no nothing. That I wasn't tied up with one thing. In that song "In The Garden", that was the first time I'd addressed that idea in my music. It's actually a song that takes the listener through a meditative process. The whole album was meant to be a meditative experience. I'd been into meditation for years. That was nothing new. What was new was finding the right kind of focus to write a song that said, "This is how it is for me."
Avalon Sunset from 1989 included the song "Whenever God Shines His Light". Was that another personal statement?
Really it all depends how you go beyond the surface of that. If you're only looking at the surface of a song like "Whenever God Shines His Light", you'd think I'd become a devout Christian or something. I mean, Cliff [Richard] ended up on that song. He did a great job. That was a freak accident, too. We were sitting around in the studio and someone said, "We should get Cliff to do a vocal on this one." We were having a laugh. Next thing I know, some guy contacted Cliff about this, which I didn't know he was going to do. Couple of weeks later he told me that Cliff was ready to do it. I'd completely forgotten about it by then. Then, when the song came out, there were all these assumptions about it. But it wasn't that I'd become a Christian or anything. To make any sense of it, you have to listen to the overall thing. Another song on Avalon Sunset is "When Will I Ever Learn To Live In God?" You have to listen to the verses in that. The key is in the verses.
Through the '80s, traditional Irish music became a stronger influence on your work. Culminating, obviously, with the album (Irish Heartbeat) that you made with The Chieftains in 1988. Was it a conscious decision to reconnect to your roots?
As you know, I never think about music in terms of categories, right? When I was growing up, it was all just music. Categories meant nothing to me. As well as blues, jazz and folk, I grew up listening to a lot of Irish singers. So the Irish thing was just another strand that found its way into my own stuff more and more because I'd absorbed that stuff a long way back.
Wasn't there a point in the '80s when you seriously considered giving up music? You talked about taking up poetry full-time. Or being a teacher.
See, I don't really suit the music business. Or, indeed, any business. I'm incompatible with the way things are done. That's why I might have felt like I might just as well get out of it all and do something different. It's not easy doing what I do. It's not easy being able to fight the fight with these people.
In terms of your music, would you call it your obsession? I can't relate to the word "obsession". The music can be all-consuming for me, especially if I'm in the middle of extensive recording. If I'm working on a record for months, it can be very consuming. The rest of the time, I can take it or leave it. It's only when I'm intensely involved in the creative process that I lose myself in it.
Enlightenment (1990) seemed to mark the end of another cycle in your work. On the title track, you sing, "Enlightenment, don't know what it is", as though you'd come to the end of a particular spiritual journey and concluded that there was no meaning in any of it.
There were three very influential books I read when I was younger, and there's a direct line back to those books. One was The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. Another was Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys. The third was Nausea by Sartre. So, if we're talking about some kind of search, it goes all the way back to when I was a teenager. It didn't start with Astral Weeks or whatever. And, if we're talking about enlightenment, then nobody knows what the fuck it is. We don't know what anything is. We just give things names. But, if you go behind all that... we're sitting at this table, right? But that table doesn't think of itself as being a table. It doesn't have a name. That name is imposed on it, y'know?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOO LATE TO STOP NOW
From Hymns To The Silence to Magic Time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Throughout the '90s and up to the present, it seemed that your music was in retreat from the varied spiritual concerns that had dominated your work for more than a decade. Would you agree with that?
Maybe it was more focused in the past. That made the records more cohesive. Maybe I started to feel that "spiritual" was a loaded word. What does it really mean? How does anyone relate to that word? As soon as you start using it, people tend to put their own dogma on you. So I did start to back away from that word and its various connotations. Because my connection to that word didn't seem to tally with what anyone else thought of it. It just didn't seem relevant after a while. Hmm. Maybe I did pull away from all that.
Interviewed in 1995, you were asked about the mystical elements In your work and you stated that you had run out of steam on that particular matter.
I don't think I ran out of steam on it. If we're talking about mysticism, then listen to the song "Magic Time" on the new record. ThatÕs mysticism. That element is still in there. Maybe I'm just not as focused on it as I used to be. I felt I was getting too focused on it. I felt I was being misunderstood. Other people were putting their slant on it. The whole thing was turning into something else. Maybe I just felt I was going over the same old ground.
Through the '90s, you were increasingly concerned with distancing yourself from 'rock music' and defining your music on its own terms. Why was that so important to you?
It was something I needed to say. But, however often I said it, people didn't seem to get it. Maybe because that point of view doesn't sell. Being a rock musician is perceived to be something noble, something predictable that people can easily grasp. They're still selling that myth and that myth keeps on being propagated. If you listen to my music, how can you think I'm a rock musician or a fucking rock star? Blues and soul, rhythm and blues, that's what all my music is based on. Sometimes other elements come into that - jazz, folk, gospel. But it's got fuck all to do with rock.
Since Moondance (1970), you've produced your own albums. Don't you think your work would benefit from using an outside producer? Don Was, say? Rick Rubin? Daniel Lanois? Bob Dylan?
I don't really need a producer, that's the thing. I just need somebody to get the music on tape, someone to turn the machine on and start recording. Besides, there aren't really any producers any more. None that I'd call producers. There's no one like Jerry Wexler, Bert Berns, Phil Spector... Those guys didn't just book the studio and get the coffee in. They arranged the songs and gave you something to work with. So what happens is that I do it myself because I can't see anyone out there who I'd connect with in terms of them producing my songs. It's very hard to find someone you can translate this stuff to without it becoming a futile exercise.
Have you given up on the idea of making albums with a singularity of sound or uniformity of mood?
I think it's more that I've gone beyond the idea of concepts. I don't really think of an album in the way that maybe I used to. It's way too much pressure. Another part of the mythology was this idea that by putting an album out I was making a big statement about where I was at. A lot of the time, I might have put 10 songs or whatever on an album, but there might have been 30 completely different songs that didn't make the cut. I don't really look at my albums and think that I was saying anything relevant to me at that time. Not about my life. Hopefully, those albums are relevant for any time, not just for the time they came out.
Any albums you truly wish you hadn't made?
Not really. I don't think so. There might be certain songs I'm not happy with. Or I might not like the mix on one or two. Some of the arrangements I could have done better with. But I can't dwell on things like that. I need to get on with what I'm doing in the present time.
On your latest album, there's a song entitled "Carry On Regardless" that lists some of the best known Carry On films. Not what people would expect from you at all.
Those Carry On movies, they're making something of a comeback. They've been on TV a lot lately. So I thought of tipping the hat to those films in a song. I grew up with all that stuff. Sid James? He was a genius if you consider not just his Carry On work but also everything he did with Hancock. The song is also a diatribe about some of my experience of dealing with people in the tabloid media and the music business. It's talking about the incredible amount of stuff I have to wade through just to get a record out. So that song is mostly tongue in cheek, having a bit of fun. But it's also an excuse to get a bit of venom out.
A great many of your songs in the past decade seem to have essentially been diatribes against the music business, journalists, biographers, celebrity culture...
I don't write songs about the music business, per se. It's about my own direct experience. I'm not saying itÕs like this for everybody.
Most artists have a beef about certain areas of the music industry. But few of them go as far as to voice their complaints in song. Few of them seem to be as angry as you seem to be about it all.
I'm not really angry about the music business. I don't like the way it's rigged, that's all.
Why does it bother you so much?
How can I not be bothered about this stuff? I can't pretend to be neutral about it. Look, I haven't really changed since I was 18 years old. I couldn't buy into the idea of hype then, and I can't do it now. If that makes me sound angry, fine. If those songs sound angry, fine. They couldn't be anything else. They're about my experience. If I sound bitter, then I sound bitter. Maybe I'm entitled to feel bitter. I wouldn't expect anyone who's had an easy ride to understand it. Those songs, they're about what I've always talked about. The difference recently is that I've become more upfront about the subject in music. It's not that I'm looking to get revenge on anyone.
Surely the good vastly outweighs the bad in your career? Most people would look at your life and consider you blessed.
It comes and goes. Of course, I try to find what's good in it. I need that to keep going. But here's what it is. The media can say anything about anyone at any time. They can fucking dump on anybody. But if someone like me comes out and writes a song that says, "That's not how it is," I get annihilated for it. All hell comes down on me. Well, I've got the freedom to say "Fuck you!", haven't I? That's what those songs are about. I've got my freedom of speech and I'm saying, "Fuck you!" That's it. If I want to say, "Rupert Murdoch is a fucking asshole", then I'll say it. If I want to get up on a soapbox in Hyde Park and say it, that's my right. If I read a biography about me and I think it's full of bullshit and lies, I've got the right to say that the guy who wrote it is a complete c***. Is this a free country or what?
In recent years, it seems you've been far happier performing live than you've been with the process of making albums. Is that fair comment?
Well, live shows short-circuit all the bullshit that goes with making records. It's a live gig, it's happening now, it's what it is, and everybody goes home afterwards. You can't mess with it too much. That's what I like about it. I was a performer long before I got into recording music. I didn't get into this to put albums out. That was always more of a secondary thing.
You've talked of performance in terms of simply acting out the songs. Is that all it can be?
Yeah, sometimes it's just a job. It can be that. There's nights when I might not be into it. There's a million reasons why that might happen. You can't be inspired every night, that's a simple fact. Basically, it's whatever happens on the night. Sometimes it's meaningful, sometimes it's like meditation, there's a kind of enchantment there... sometimes it's none of those things.
It's rumoured that you've been working on an autobiography for the past 20 years. How's it shaping up?
It's something I've been working on for years, off and on. To me, the main purpose of it is to dispel the myths. Because those myths, they're too much to live up to.
What's the biggest myth about Van Morrison?
I couldn't say because it's been different at different times. The main one, I suppose, is the myth of what actually happened in my life. You get these biographies that claim to be about me. They come up with stories and some of it is partial truth, some of itÕs completely made up. ItÕs all third-party stuff. They interview people from years ago who know nothing about me now and probably didnÕt know much about me then. Then thereÕs books that say things about my music, like they know where the songs have come from. It's all bullshit. The only reason I want to do a book is to expose all that.
Clearly, it perplexes you why you'd be a source of fascination to people who love your music.
I don't think it's that. It's got nothing to do with the people who like my music. It's to do with the people who write the books, people who know nothing about me. It saddens me that people who like my music buy these books to find out what the music is about. They'll never find out about my music by reading a book written by someone who knows nothing about me. It's unreal. I don't recognise myself in those books at all.
How do you respond to the accusation that you're an extremely difficult - even impossible Ð man to work with?
I'm not alone in that. Every famous person is described as difficult or impossible. Because that's the way the media perpetuates the myth. They like to pin famous people down as difficult. Or they'll pin them down as a nice guy and wait for an excuse to turn it around and say, "He's done this, he's thrown a tantrum - he was nasty after all." There's always negative connotations going on with anyone who's famous. They may say negative things about me because I work very hard. I don't know. I think it says more about them than it does about me.
Is it important that your music is listened to 100 years from now?
No, I can't relate to that at all.
Does it mean anything to you that your music is loved by so many, that it's influenced and informed their lives in a very intimate way, that it's helped people get through dark nights of the soul? That, to many people, you've been more than a hero, and something more like a saviour?
Yeah, well, that's got its place, certainly. But it's not the whole picture. I'd love it to be the whole picture. If you like, it's a double-edged sword. Sure, that's a great thing. But there's a price for everything. I make music that means something to people? That's fine. But I have to deal with scumbags, the kind of people I wouldn't even spit on. No matter what... there's things that get me through dark nights of the soul. Music, books, whatever... but shit still happens in the real world. For me, it always comes back to the music. That's all that's ever mattered. Like I said at the start, it chooses me and, whatever that energy is, it's not something easily understood. It comes through me at some level and I have to get it and use it, make it work. That's what I need to do. That's all I've ever needed to do. That's all I know. That's all there is.
