17-November-2014
Lyric Threatre
 London, England

LIT UP INSIDE : A short personal reflection

If anyone had asked me 10, 15, 20 years ago what sort of Van concert I’d love to see most of all – this would have been it. Van performing with real thought and care some of his best songs, with great intros and explanations, and very sympathetic backing from a small rhythm section. I’ve seen the Coleraine conversation and playing with Derek Bell on TV in ‘88, but I missed the Swansea Literature event with Gerald Dawe in ‘95, so it was wonderful to finally get to enjoy The Man stripped down to basic Van, and firing on all cylinders.

The first 50 minutes was taken up with a chat in armchairs between Van and Ian Rankin, whose main hero Rebus is always playing Astral Weeks; a couple of film clips from old TV programmes – Dylan and Van on the Hill of the Muses, and Van talking with Michael Longley; and readings of the lyrics from Michael Longley and Edna O’Brien. The introductions were made by Eamon Hughes, the editor of Van’s lyric book.
Ian and Van hit it off pretty much straight away and had obviously been talking for a while backstage – Ian came out with some real sensible questions and some good quips too – the one about George Best Airport being a goodie. When asked how it felt having Bob play behind him on Foreign Window, Van cracked that Dylan had done it before – for Harry Belafonte! - Bob’s first professional recording. Some questions from the audience elicited one or two good comments including the possible derivation of ‘Justin’ by Paul Durcan. But like most of these things Van has stock answers, and although Ian did throw him a couple of times, it was all entertaining and interesting.


The film of Van chatting with Michael Longley from Without Walls led into Michael reading a couple of lyrics – Coney Island and Into The Mystic. Just proved to me that lyrics are not poetry. However Edna O’Brien put a whole different spin on the lyrics, and Madame George became mesmerising with her soft brogue and emphasis in unusual places, and following the verses right through to the end repetition.


After the interval came the piece de resistance – a superb selection of songs with Van singing so well and getting deeply into the music. The band were following him with delicacy and precision – Dave Keary’s fills and trills were exceptional. Van was seated for most of the show and played acoustic on Foreign Window and electric on Why Must I? and Mystic, and took a few solos.

His readings of the songs were by no means straightfoward, adding intonations, asides and extra lyrics, and using that powerful voice to real emotive power. Many of the songs early in the set got explanations before and after, and Madame George even had location references during the song. Coney Island brought a memory to him while singing and he stifled a laugh and added a line about ‘dropping you off at the corner’! Strange he should perform Wonderful Remark when it’s not in the book – Volume 2 next year?


Both Madame George (actually sang as Madame Joy) and On Hyndford Street were tour de forces, both using different voices to complement the music. These songs bring Belfast alive for me, and I can imagine those long 1950s Sunday summer nights lying in bed trying to get to sleep while listening to the radio. He had those voices over Beechie River, I had tennis players from the tennis club – we all had our own sounds floating in on the warm air. Sunday six bells – what a great phrase. And adding in Satre and Christmas Humphreys for good measure tonight.

Van proved again that lyrics are lyrics – they are different with every night, every nuance, every musician, every improv, every original thought that inspired them for the singer, and every new thought they bring to the listener. I don’t care now if I never see Van again – I’ve fulfilled every ambition by seeing and living and breathing this Lit Up Inside show. But as Van told us tonight it’s always being NOW, but there will be other NOWs to come till we get the healing done.
10/10
-Simon Gee

Telegraph

Irish poet Michael Longley promised a unique night, and "Van Morrison presents an evening of words & music" was certainly that, not least because we heard Edna O'Brien reading Madame George as a poem.
The event, at London's Lyric Theatre, was to mark a new book brought out by Faber, Lit Up Inside, which contains the lyrics to nearly 200 Morrison songs, presented as poems.
So was Van the Man lit up? At times, definitely, but there were also moments of vintage deadpan Morrison. The second half of the evening was a concert. He introduced Foreign Window by saying: "This was partly based on a documentary about Lord Byron in which he said 'I have learned to love despair'. I wish I could."
It was mainly chatty Van rather than grumpy Van treading the boards, though, and novelist Ian Rankin did a good job of drawing out anecdotes during a 25-minute question-and-answer session. We had listened to Dr Eamonn Hughes talking about Morrison and watched film footage of Morrison singing with Bob Dylan, and when Rankin asked him how many people have had Dylan as an accompanist, Morrison said: "Harry Belafonte, for one." Asked by Rankin about shows like the X Factor, and whether they were for people "selling their souls", Morrison replied: "Nothing has changed. I wish it had."
The thing about Morrison is that he adores music. Old jazz musicians who know him will tell you that he is passionate about the music of his youth - Morrison is 69 - and he was fulsome in his praise of blues musicians such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Leroy Carr and Lightnin' Hopkins. "it's difficult to understand how people supposed to be so uneducated, like Lightnin', were coming up with Elizabethan language and imagery in songs that were like poetry," Morrison said. He talked here with real fondness about the jazz and blues he had heard as a boy, both from his father's record collection and by listening to AFN radio. "Ray Charles, Sidney Bechet, Mahalia Jackson singing the Lord's Prayer. It was only years later I realised that wasn't normal. I heard Lenny Bruce doing a sketch about Stars of Jazz when he was an in-thing."

Longley, 75, told the audience that what he and Morrison talked about most was jazz: Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith – "where it began" – and the man known as Dr Jazz of Belfast, the late Solly Lipsitz, who ran the Atlantic Records shop on Belfast High Street.
If there was a point to the evening, and to the book, it seemed to be to place Morrison among the literary figures of Ireland. Morrison compared himself to William Blake (he had London, I had East Belfast seemed to be the gist)and used the term 'Blake-ian' three times. But it wasn't all portentous. Morrison has a funny side (he is a fan of Spike Milligan and The Goons and is good at impersonations) and this came across in a few replies to Rankin. After Morrison said that "I wrote poems before I ever picked up a guitar", Rankin asked if a young boy in Belfast would have had to hide his poetry writing for fear of being beaten up. "My first poem was about a shipyard and you wouldn't have been beaten up for that," Morrison joked. He was also witty when Rankin listed the writers Morrison had name-checked in a song (Beckett, Joyce and Wilde), with the singer saying: "Yes, and George Best and Alex Higgins, too."
But both Longley and O'Brien repeatedly described the songs they were reading as poems. O'Brien admitted that she has always been "a little stuck on him" and said she thought he was "in the business of making magic". The 83-year-old author of The Country Girls read his Astral Weeks song Madame George particularly well – and it would be easy to trip up over the lines:
'And the love that loves to love,
That loves the love that loves,
The love that loves to love,
The love that loves to love,
The love that loves.'

Morrison, dressed in his John Lee Hooker outfit (dark hat, dark suit, sunglasses), had already left the stage at that point to prepare for his concert.

So what did we learn?
• That he connects with Samuel Beckett, especially in a love of repetition of words and an agreement about having to go on despite a "sense of despair and futility".
• That the song Moondance started as an instrumental, which he had been playing as far back as 1965, when he used to jam on saxophone in Notting Hill with Mick Fleetwood on conga drums. Have I Told You Lately (that I love you) also started as an instrumental.
• That Tore Down a la Rimbaud took eight years to finish – the longest it's ever taken him to complete a song.
• That part of his early song Mystic Eyes was inspired by the scene in Dickens's Great Expectations in which Pip meets Magwitch.
• That he was a big fan of Sixties English folk singer and guitarist Steve Benbow.
The concert, just under an hour, was enjoyable. This was gentle Van with a tight, acoustic, four-piece backing band (piano, double bass, drums, guitar) featuring brief, chatty explanations of the songs he played, including Alan Watt Blues, Wonderful Remark and Why Must I Always Explain. There was a jazzy version of Into the Mystic.

The highlight, showing Morrison at his playful best, was a version of Coney Island. In the foreword to the book, Rankin says of Morrison's music: "There was a search for the spiritual in the commonplace . . . But there are also stories teeming with incidents and characters and grand travelogues, and extolling of life's simple pleasures."
That's true of the spoken song Coney Island, which Morrison said had a significance because as a boy, around 1959, he helped deliver bread in the van for Stewart's bakery in East Belfast and he would have to get up at 5am to make deliveries at the beach in Coney Island. Belfast, of that time, resonates in some of his best songs about Orangefield, which was still almost a village with cobbled streets when he was growing up.

Although Coney Island had been read out earlier by Longley, Morrison played around with the composition, telling the affluent audience that "jam jar" was "Cockney rhyming slang for car" and, with a grin, changing the emotional end to the song, which is about a car journey across the glorious countryside of Northern Ireland, to include the joke:
'And all the time going to Coney Island I'm thinking,
Shall I drop you off at the next corner?'
For Morrison fans the book is interesting (although for the £500 deluxe version you might want your own Van the Man house concert), not least because you can finally learn some of the lines to songs such as Bulbs, in which I now know he sings about someone called Ada:
'Now Ada was a straight clear case of,
Havin' taken in too much juice.'
You also get a sense of the range of his writing and some of the bleakness in lesser known compositions such as Not Supposed to Break Down:
'Fifteen families starving,
All around the corner block.
Here we're standing so alone,
Just like Gibraltar Rock.'
But Longley was right. This was a unique event, right down to Morrison, no isolated rock for once, exiting stage left, whispering like a revivalist preacher, as he sang a line about crossing a river.
-Martin Chilton

London Evening Standard

Van Morrison has long been regarded as pop’s outpost of grouch. Not any more. Not since last night, when Morrison was gently interviewed on stage by the well-researched and only slightly cowed author Ian Rankin. Whatever Morrison’s motives beyond promoting a book (and Lit Up Inside is a lyrics compendium rather than an autobiography), the writer of Why Must I Always Explain? explained himself with good grace and even a smile.

If that wasn’t enough, Ulster poet Michael Longley and Ireland’s esteemed author Edna O’Brien out read some of Morrison’s lyrics. At the age of 83 O’Brien’s glamorous, stately magnificence remains undimmed: wonderfully, she declaimed Tore Down a la Rimbaud like a frisky Shakespearean heroine.

After that, Morrison’s set might have been an anticlimax. Instead, he cheerily and painstakingly introduced almost every song, most of which had been referenced in the chat or spoken by the Irish giants.

Better still, the man who has spent recent years bludgeoning his back catalogue into bluesy pub rock has rediscovered what made him great. Backed by a super-subtle, super-restrained four-piece band and referencing Samuel Beckett, Byron and Allen Ginsberg, Morrison showcased his almost other-worldly ability to paint word pictures.

The lengthy, languid and impossibly beautiful On Hyndford Street ended the evening with Morrison singing off-stage and, amazingly, he even inserted a genuinely funny new line into Coney Island. As an artist and as a performer, Van Morrison is re-born. About time too.
-JOHN AIZLEWOOD

Setlist (Thanks David K)
Intro: Eamon Hughes
Film: Foreign Window Van with Dylan
Q&A: Ian Rankin & Van
Film: Van & Michael Longley
Reading: Michael Longley - Coney Island & Into The Mystic
Reading: Edna O'Brien - Tore Down a La Rimbaud & Madame George

Second Half - Van & His Band:
Alan Watts Blues
Foreign Window
Tore Down A La Rimbaud
Wonderful Remark
Coney Island
Why Must I Always Explain?
Celtic Excavation/Into The Mystic
Madame George
On Hyndford Street

Big Hand for The Band!
Dave Keary (Guitar)
Paul Moore (Bass)
Paul Moran (Keyboards)
Bobby Ruggiero (Drums)