Van Morrison

• 1. Introduction

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  Van Morrison, the Northern Irish singer and songwriter, once had his recording future bought for 20,000 dollars in cash, handed over in an abandoned warehouse on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. The buyer was Warner Bros. Records. The contract it took over belonged to a man who had signed it without fully studying it. That deal cleared the way for Astral Weeks, an album that sold poorly at first and now appears on lists of the best ever made. Decades later, in 2016, the same musician was knighted for services to the music industry and to tourism in Northern Ireland. He holds two Grammy Awards and has placed albums in the UK top ten across four consecutive decades. Between the warehouse and the knighthood lies a career that runs from Irish showbands to garage-rock hits and long, mystical song cycles. How did a boy from working-class Belfast arrive at a sound sometimes called Celtic soul? Why did he spend years insisting that no guru, method or teacher stood behind his music? And why does a man so admired often avoid playing his own best-known songs?

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• 2. Hyndford Street

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  At 125 Hyndford Street in the Bloomfield district of Belfast, George Ivan Morrison was born on the 31st of August 1945. He was the only child of George Morrison, a shipyard electrician, and Violet, born Violet Stitt, who had once been a singer and tap dancer. The family were working-class Protestants descended from the Ulster Scots who settled in Belfast. The house had previously been occupied by the father of the writer Lee Child.

  The richest thing in the house was a stack of records. During the early 1950s his father had spent time in Detroit, Michigan, and came home with what was then one of the largest record collections in Northern Ireland. The boy, who began to be called Van while he attended Elmgrove Primary School, absorbed Jelly Roll Morton, Ray Charles, Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Solomon Burke. The shelves also held the blues of Muddy Waters, the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, the jazz of Charlie Parker, the folk of Woody Guthrie, and the country of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. Years later he credited Ray Charles and Solomon Burke with getting him going, saying "If it weren't for guys like Ray and Solomon, I wouldn't be where I am today." The first record he ever bought was by the blues musician Sonny Terry.

  When Lonnie Donegan scored a hit with "Rock Island Line", written by Huddie Ledbetter, Morrison felt at home in skiffle. He had been hearing Lead Belly long before. His father bought him an acoustic guitar when he was 11, and he picked out basic chords from The Carter Family Style, a song book edited by Alan Lomax. In 1957, at the age of twelve, he formed a skiffle group called the Sputniks, named after the satellite the Soviet Union launched in October that year. By the following year the group was playing local cinemas, with Morrison handling most of the singing and arranging. At 14 he formed another skiffle-style outfit, Midnight Special, and played a school concert.

  Then came the saxophone. After hearing Jimmy Giuffre play on "The Train and The River", Morrison talked his father into buying a tenor saxophone. He took reading and sax lessons from the jazz musician George Cassidy, who lived nearby on the same street and became a friend. Morrison saw him as a big inspiration. He also played guitar and shared the singing in Deanie Sands and the Javelins. That group's four main musicians, joined by pianist Wesley Black, became known as the Monarchs.

  Morrison left Orangefield Boys Secondary School in July 1960 with no qualifications. After several short apprenticeships, he settled into work as a window cleaner, a job he later alluded to in the songs "Cleaning Windows" and "Saint Dominic's Preview". He kept playing part-time with the Monarchs. He also played with the Harry Mack Showband and the Great Eight, alongside an older workmate named Geordie Sproule, whom he later named among his biggest influences.

  At 17 he toured Europe for the first time with the Monarchs, who now called themselves the International Monarchs. Morrison played saxophone, guitar and harmonica, and covered bass and drums when needed. The band worked rough clubs and US Army bases in Scotland, England and Germany, often playing five sets a night. In Germany they recorded "Boozoo Hully Gully" and "Twingy Baby" as Georgie and the Monarchs. It was Morrison's first recording, made in November 1963 at Ariola Studios in Cologne, and it reached the lower end of the German charts.

  Back in Belfast that same month, the group broke up. Morrison reconnected with Sproule in the Manhattan Showband, alongside guitarist Herbie Armstrong. When Armstrong auditioned for Brian Rossi and the Golden Eagles, later known as the Wheels, Morrison tagged along and was hired as their blues singer.

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• 3. Them at the Maritime

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  In April 1964, an advert called for musicians to open a new rhythm and blues club at the Maritime Hotel on College Square North, an old Belfast hostel popular with sailors. Morrison had just left the Golden Eagles. He assembled a band from the Gamblers, an East Belfast group formed in 1962 by Ronnie Millings, Billy Harrison and Alan Henderson. He took the place of his friend Bill Dunn, who had left months earlier to become a pastor. Eric Wrixon, still a schoolboy, played piano. Morrison played saxophone and harmonica and shared the vocals with Harrison. Wrixon suggested the new name, taken from the 1954 horror film Them!

  On that small stage the band played without a set routine, and Morrison made up songs as he went. He had written "Could You Would You" in Camden Town while touring with the Manhattan Showband. "Gloria" had its first public performance at the Maritime, and depending on his mood it could stretch to twenty minutes. Morrison later said "Them lived and died on the stage at the Maritime Hotel." He felt the records never captured that spontaneity. The line-up kept shifting after the Maritime days, leaving only Morrison and Henderson as constants. A weaker version of Them carried on after Morrison left.

  Dick Rowe of Decca Records heard about the band and signed Them to a standard two-year contract. In that time they released two albums and ten singles, and two more singles appeared after Morrison had gone. Three songs became hits: "Baby, Please Don't Go" in 1964, then "Here Comes the Night" and "Mystic Eyes" in 1965. Yet the song that outlived them all was "Gloria", the B-side of "Baby, Please Don't Go". It became a rock standard, covered by Patti Smith, the Doors, the Shadows of Knight, Jimi Hendrix and many others.

  Riding the British Invasion, Them toured America for two months in May and June 1966. The tour included a residency at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles from the 30th of May to the 18th of June. The Doors supported them in the final week. Doors drummer John Densmore noted in his book Riders on the Storm how much singer Jim Morrison, no relation, took from Van Morrison. Biographer Brian Hinton lists the stagecraft, the air of subdued menace, the poetry improvised over a rock beat, and the habit of crouching by the bass drum during instrumental breaks. On the final night, both Morrisons and both bands jammed together on "Gloria".

  The ending was less glamorous. Near the close of the tour, the band fell into a dispute over money with their manager, Phil Solomon of Decca Records. Their work visas were also running out, and they flew home dejected. After two more concerts in Ireland, Them split up. Morrison turned to writing, sketching out songs that would later appear on Astral Weeks.

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• 4. Bang and Astral Weeks

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  Bert Berns, who produced Them and composed their 1965 hit "Here Comes the Night", persuaded Morrison to return to New York and record as a solo artist for his new label, Bang Records. Morrison flew over and signed a contract he had not fully studied. Starting on the 28th of March 1967, he spent two days at A & R Studios and recorded eight songs, meant to become four singles. Instead, the label issued them as the album Blowin' Your Mind! without consulting him. He said he only learned of the release when a friend mentioned buying a copy. He told people he "had a different concept of it".

  One of those eight songs, "Brown Eyed Girl", came out as a single in mid-June 1967 and reached number ten in the US. It spent sixteen weeks on the chart and became Morrison's most-played song. A 2015 evaluation of downloads since 2004 and airplay since 2010 judged it the most popular song of the entire 1960s. In 2000 it ranked number 21 on the Rolling Stone and MTV list of 100 Greatest Pop Songs, and in 2010 it stood at number 110 on Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. It entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in January 2007.

  Berns died later in 1967, and trouble followed. His widow, Ilene Berns, became locked in a contract dispute with Morrison that kept him from performing or recording in the New York area. The song "Big Time Operators", released in 1993, is thought to allude to his dealings with the city's music business. He moved to Boston, struggled with money and personal problems, and had trouble finding bookings. By his own account he had slipped into a malaise. The few gigs he could get restored his footing, and he began recording for Warner Bros. Records.

  The buyout came with a catch. A clause required Morrison to hand over 36 original songs within a year to Berns' music publishing company. He recorded all of them in a single session on an out-of-tune guitar, with lyrics about subjects such as ringworm and sandwiches. Ilene Berns judged them "nonsense" and never used them. Known as the "revenge" songs, they stayed unreleased until the 2017 compilation The Authorized Bang Collection.

  Morrison's first Warner album was Astral Weeks, a mystical song cycle he had already played in several Boston clubs. He later said "When Astral Weeks came out, I was starving, literally." Released in 1968, it drew an indifferent public response at first. Critical acclaim arrived later. AllMusic's William Ruhlmann called it hypnotic and meditative, and others compared it to French Impressionism and mystical Celtic poetry. A 2004 Rolling Stone review began "This is music of such enigmatic beauty that thirty-five years after its release, Astral Weeks still defies easy, admiring description." Alan Light heard lost love, death and nostalgia for childhood in it.

  The rankings kept climbing. Mojo placed it at number two on its 1995 list of the 100 best albums, and Rolling Stone put it at number nineteen on its 2003 list of 500 greatest albums. In December 2009, a Hot Press poll of leading Irish musicians voted it the top Irish album of all time.

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• 5. Moondance to Mysticism

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  Moondance, released in 1970, became Morrison's first million-selling album and reached number twenty-nine on the Billboard charts. After the sorrowful, vulnerable tone of Astral Weeks, it brought back an optimistic message and a lively rhythm and blues style. Lester Bangs and Greil Marcus shared a full-page Rolling Stone review, praising a consciousness "visionary in the strongest sense of the word." Morrison liked the band format: "Two horns and a rhythm section", he said. He produced it himself because he felt nobody else knew what he wanted. "Come Running" reached the American Top 40, and "Into the Mystic" slowly built a wide following.

  Albums arrived quickly. His Band and the Street Choir, also from 1970, carried the hit "Domino", which reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. Tupelo Honey in 1971 produced "Wild Night", later covered by John Mellencamp and Meshell Ndegeocello. Morrison first meant it as an all-country record, and the musicians would rehearse, then play a whole set in one take. Co-producer Ted Templeman called the method the "scariest thing I've ever seen". In 1972, Saint Dominic's Preview pulled back toward the daring spirit of Astral Weeks. "Listen to the Lion" and "Almost Independence Day" each ran past ten minutes.

  During a three-week visit to Ireland in October 1973, Morrison wrote seven of the songs for Veedon Fleece. When it came out in late 1974, Rolling Stone's Andy Greene later recalled, the critical establishment greeted it with a collective shrug. Its reputation has grown steadily since. The album refers to the poet William Blake and to the Grail-like object of its title. Morrison then took three years to follow it. After a decade without a break, he stopped listening to music for several months and suffered from writer's block. He seriously considered leaving the business.

  He returned with A Period of Transition in 1977, made with Dr. John, who had appeared with him at The Last Waltz concert the year before. In 1978, Wavelength became the fastest-selling album of his career to that point and soon went gold. Its title track used synthesisers to mimic the shortwave radio stations he had listened to in his youth. Its opener, "Kingdom Hall", drew on childhood religion with his mother. Into the Music followed in 1979, and its songs first spoke of the healing power of music, an interest he never dropped.

  In February 1980, Morrison and a group of musicians travelled to Super Bear, a studio in the French Alps, to record Common One on the site of a former abbey. It remains the most controversial album in his catalogue. Its longest track, "Summertime in England", ran fifteen and a half minutes and ended with the words "Can you feel the silence?" NME's Paul Du Noyer called it "colossally smug and cosmically dull". Greil Marcus, once a champion, wrote "It's Van acting the part of the 'mystic poet' he thinks he's supposed to be." Morrison insisted it was never meant to be a commercial album. Biographer Clinton Heylin concluded that he never again attempted anything so ambitious. In 1982, Lester Bangs offered a kinder verdict: Van was making holy music, and critics had paid too much attention to the lyrics.

  The rest of the decade stayed spiritual. Beautiful Vision in 1982 returned to his Northern Irish roots, and its "Scandinavia" was nominated for a Grammy for best rock instrumental. Its songs reflect a new muse, a Danish public relations agent who shared his spiritual interests and steadied him through much of the decade. Inarticulate Speech of the Heart in 1983 used synthesisers, uilleann pipes and flute, and four tracks were instrumentals. On that album's credits he gave special thanks to L. Ron Hubbard, having studied Scientology. In 1985 he wrote the score for the film Lamb, starring Liam Neeson.

  Then he drew a line. His 1986 album, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, was a rebuttal to attempts to place him in a creed. He told the Observer: "I have never joined any organisation, nor plan to. I am not affiliated to any guru, don't subscribe to any method and for those people who don't know what a guru is, I don't have a teacher either." Poetic Champions Compose in 1987 offered the ballad "Someone Like You", later heard in the film French Kiss and in Bridget Jones's Diary. Irish Heartbeat in 1988, recorded with the Chieftains, reached number 18 on the UK album chart. Avalon Sunset in 1989 reached number 13 and carried "Whenever God Shines His Light", a duet with Cliff Richard, plus the ballad "Have I Told You Lately".

  On the last song of that album, Morrison can be heard calling the chord changes to his band, counting one to four. He often finished whole albums in two days, and frequently released the first takes.

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• 6. On Stage

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  By 1972, after nearly ten years as a performer, Morrison began to feel stage fright when facing thousands of people instead of hundreds. He grew anxious and found it hard to meet the audience's eyes. "I dig singing the songs but there are times when it's pretty agonising for me to be out there," he said. After a short break he returned in clubs, in front of smaller crowds, and recovered his nerve.

  The double album It's Too Late to Stop Now, released in 1974, has been called one of the greatest live recordings ever made. Its tapes came from a three-month tour of the US and Europe in 1973 with the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. Biographer Johnny Rogan wrote that Morrison was in the midst of arguably his greatest phase as a performer. Soon after the recording, he trimmed the group down to a smaller unit, the Caledonia Soul Express.

  On Thanksgiving Day 1976, he played the farewell concert for the Band. It was his first live show in several years, and he nearly skipped it. At the last minute he refused to walk on when his name was announced, and his manager Harvey Goldsmith said he "literally kicked him out there." Morrison and the Band lived near each other in Woodstock and shared a history of stage fright. He sang "Too Ra Loo Ra Loo Ral" and then "Caravan" from Moondance. Greil Marcus, in the audience, wrote that Van burned holes in the floor and, in sheer exuberance, kicked a leg in the air and kicked his way offstage like a Rockette. Martin Scorsese filmed the night as the basis for The Last Waltz in 1978.

  The association with the Band gave him two nicknames. In the duet "4% Pantomime" on the Band's album Cahoots, Richard Manuel sings to him as "Belfast Cowboy". In The Last Waltz, Robbie Robertson calls out "Van the Man!" as Morrison leaves the stage after "Caravan". The second nickname stuck with his fans.

  Bigger audiences followed. On the 21st of July 1990, he joined Roger Waters for The Wall - Live in Berlin, singing "Comfortably Numb" with Waters and Band members Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko. The live crowd was estimated at between three hundred thousand and half a million. On the 30th of November 1995, he played for an estimated sixty to eighty thousand people during US President Bill Clinton's visit to Belfast. His song "Days Like This" had become the official anthem of the Northern Irish peace movement.

  By the 2000s, Morrison played few of his best-known songs and resisted becoming a nostalgia act. In 2006 he told Paul Sexton: "I don't really tour. This is another misconception." He said he averaged two gigs a week, more only in America. On the 7th and the 8th of November 2008, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, he performed the whole of Astral Weeks live for the first time. Guitarist Jay Berliner, who played on the 1968 recording, joined him, with Roger Kellaway on piano. The live album came out on the 24th of February 2009, and the shows continued through New York, London and Berkeley. At the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles he filmed the concerts so that Farrah Fawcett, confined to bed with cancer, could watch.

  The shows themselves are built on improvisation. Morrison believes in the jazz habit of never playing a song the same way twice, and apart from the Astral Weeks run he avoids preset set lists. He steers his band with hand gestures and sometimes signals an impromptu solo. He prefers small venues or symphony halls with good acoustics. His 2008 ban on alcohol was meant to stop audience members leaving their seats mid-song. As Scott Foundas of LA Weekly wrote, he takes his band and audience on a journey whose destination is anything but known.

  In August 2014, Orangefield High School, his old secondary school, closed for good. Morrison marked the closure with three nights of concerts, from the 22nd to the 24th, in the school assembly hall. The first night was reserved for former teachers and pupils.

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• 7. Voice, Words and Company

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  "No white man sings like Van Morrison," Greil Marcus once said. In a 2010 book, Marcus judged the voice the richest and most expressive pop music had produced since Elvis Presley. Morrison's growl mixes folk, blues, soul, jazz, gospel and Ulster Scots Celtic influences. His early voice was described as "flinty and tender, beseeching and plaintive." When he began playing Astral Weeks live in 2008, reviewers heard a deeper, louder roar. Morrison explained that he now sings from lower in the diaphragm, which spares the vocal cords. He said he can stand four feet from a microphone and still be heard.

  The songs return again and again to a Belfast childhood. "Cyprus Avenue" is a nearby street, "Orangefield" is his school, and "On Hyndford Street" names the street where he was born. His love songs often blend the sacred and the profane, as in "Into the Mystic" and "So Quiet in Here". From his 1979 album Into the Music and the song "And the Healing Has Begun", he has often built songs around belief in healing through music and a form of mystic Christianity. His lyrics show the influence of the visionary poets William Blake and W. B. Yeats, as well as Coleridge and Wordsworth.

  Whether the words count as poetry divides his biographers. Brian Hinton argues that, like Blake or Seamus Heaney, he takes words back to their origins in magic. John Collis counters that he repeats phrases like a mantra or bursts into scat singing, so the words can seem prosaic. Morrison himself says: "I write from a different place. I do not even know what it is called or if it has a name. It just comes and I sculpt it, but it is also a lot of hard work doing the sculpting." Two collections of his lyrics have been published. Lit Up Inside appeared on the 2nd of October 2014, and Keep 'Er Lit followed on the 5th of March 2020, with a foreword by Paul Muldoon and 120 songs.

  Marcus wrote a whole book on the moments where Morrison reaches what he calls a kind of violent transcendence. Those moments can come from hesitations, repeated phrases and pauses, until the sound, the "yarragh", becomes an active agent. Critic Jay Cocks put it differently: Morrison is adamantly inward and unique, and he can always be found on his own wavelength. Morrison himself says he does not consciously aim to take the listener anywhere. Genre labels slide off him. His catalogue spans blues, jazz, country, gospel, Irish folk, big band, skiffle and spoken word, as on "Coney Island", yet he defines himself as a soul singer.

  He has also shared the microphone with an unusually broad group, including John Lee Hooker, Ray Charles, George Benson, Eric Clapton, Bobby Womack, BB King, Michael Bublé, Joss Stone, Natalie Cole and Mark Knopfler. The Hooker link began in 1971, when they duetted on the title track of Hooker's 1972 album Never Get Out of These Blues Alive, which also included a cover of Morrison's "T.B. Sheets". In 1995, a reworking of "Have I Told You Lately" on the Chieftains' album The Long Black Veil won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Morrison produced and appeared on Hooker's 1997 album Don't Look Back, which won the 1998 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. Its title track, a duet, took the Pop Collaboration Grammy too.

  In that decade he also built close partnerships with Georgie Fame, who lent his voice and Hammond organ to the band, and with the younger vocalist Brian Kennedy. In 1991 he wrote and produced four songs for Tom Jones on Carrying a Torch, and he sang with Jones on the 1999 album Reload. In 2004, he duetted with Ray Charles on "Crazy Love" for Genius Loves Company. His 2015 album Duets: Re-working the Catalogue gathered Steve Winwood, Taj Mahal, Mavis Staples, Mick Hucknall and his daughter Shana Morrison. Later he formed a recording partnership with Joey DeFrancesco.

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• 8. Later Decades

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  The Best of Van Morrison, a hit collection he compiled himself, opened the 1990s as a multi-platinum success that stayed a year and a half on the UK charts. AllMusic judged it far and away the best-selling album of his career. Over the early and middle 1990s, three albums reached the UK top five. Critical reception, however, cooled. The Healing Game in 1997 drew mixed reviews. In 1998 he finally released unissued studio recordings in the two-disc set The Philosopher's Stone, and 1999's Back on Top became his highest-charting US album since Wavelength in 1978.

  In the 2000s he performed two or three times a week and created his own independent label, Exile Productions Ltd. It lets him keep full production control, then deliver finished albums to whichever label he picks. In 2001, nine months into a tour promoting You Win Again with Linda Gail Lewis, Lewis left the tour. She later filed claims for unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination. Both claims were withdrawn, and Morrison's solicitor said he had accepted a full apology and retraction. Down the Road in May 2002 became his highest-charting US album since Saint Dominic's Preview in 1972, and one track honoured his late father George. Magic Time in 2005 debuted at number twenty-five on the Billboard 200, and Amazon named him one of its top twenty-five all-time best-selling artists.

  Pay the Devil, a country album, came out on the 7th of March 2006 and peaked at number seven on the Top Country Albums chart. Keep It Simple, his 33rd studio album of new material, followed on the 17th of March 2008. It debuted at number ten on the Billboard 200, his first US top ten. In 2007 the compilation Still on Top reached number two on the UK chart, his highest UK placing.

  In 2015, he sold the rights to most of his catalogue to Legacy Recordings, the catalogue division of Sony Music. That summer, 33 of his albums reached streaming services for the first time. His 70th birthday that year was celebrated in Belfast with two concerts on Cyprus Avenue on the 31st of August, one broadcast live on BBC Radio Ulster. From around then, his output rose. He has released, on average, more than an album a year since turning 70. Keep Me Singing, his 36th studio album, arrived on the 30th of September 2016. In July 2017, former professional wrestler Billy Two Rivers sued Morrison and Universal Music Group over use of his likeness on the cover of Roll with the Punches, and a preliminary settlement followed. Versatile, Morrison's 38th studio album, arrived on the 1st of December 2017. In November 2020, he and Eric Clapton released the single "Stand and Deliver", with profits going to his Lockdown Financial Hardship Fund.

  The COVID-19 pandemic brought sharp public conflict. Morrison spoke against social distancing rules for live music, called on people to "fight pseudo-science", and released three protest songs in September 2020. He accused the UK government of "taking our freedom". Belfast councillor Emmet McDonough-Brown said his lyrics undermined health guidance, and some called for his Freedom of the City honour to be revoked. Northern Ireland health minister Robin Swann called the songs "dangerous". In November 2021, Swann sued Morrison for defamation over remarks calling him a "fraud". In 2022, Morrison began his own proceedings against Swann over a Rolling Stone opinion piece. Both claims settled confidentially shortly before they were due in court in September 2024.

  The music kept coming. Latest Record Project, Volume 1, a 28-track album released in May 2021, put him back in the UK top ten and made the 2020s his fourth consecutive decade with a top-ten album. In June 2021, The Times observed that he played one of the first large London concerts after events restarted. In 2023 he returned to roots with Moving on Skiffle and Accentuate the Positive, and started the direct-to-consumer label Orangefield Records with archival releases. Live at Orangefield, released in 2024, came from his 2014 concerts at his old school.

  Kenneth Branagh's Oscar-winning 2021 film Belfast used his songs extensively, and Morrison received his first Academy Award nomination, for Best Original Song, with "Down to Joy". The song did not appear on a Van Morrison album until 2025, when it became the lead single from Remembering Now.

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