Coaches and Gurus and Snake Oil salesmen will portentously promise to reveal the secret to you.
Better save your money and your time and learn the things that can be taught – vocal exercises, relaxation, the whole assembly of skills that adds up to Technique.
But Presence?
No way.
You’ve either got it or you haven’t.
The gods or muses dispose as they will.
Hard to define but easy to recognise.
Greta Garbo.
Marlon Brando.
Rudolph Nureyev.
Maria Callas.
Miles Davis.
Muhammad Ali.
Van Morrison.
Intensity.
Impact.
Cultural, emotional and spiritual impact.
You’ll recognise it when you confront it.
Mark Knopfler is a gifted songwriter and as a guitar player has undoubted Presence.
He is also canny enough to know that some songs require an extra ingredient that he does not possess.
A voice with Presence.
So, for his Song, ‘The Last Laugh’ he called up Van Morrison.
There must have been a moment in the studio as they listened back when Mark exhaled and smiled deeply as the sound of Van’s voice at the beginning of the second verse lifted the work to a wholly new level.
Presence.
Emotional and Spiritual impact.
Van Morrison.
Sing it Van!
Games you thought you’d learned
You neither lost nor won
Dreams have crashed and burned
But you’re still going on
Out on the highway with the road gang working
Up on the mountain with the cold wind blowing
Out on the highway with the road gang working
But the last laugh, baby is yours
And don’t you love the sound
Of the last laugh going down
Very few singers merit the Bold and the Italics.
Van Morrison always has and always will.
Don’t you love the Sound!
Presence.
Cultural, Emotional and Spiritual Impact.
Demonstrated time after time in studios and on stages from Belfast to Buffalo.
Hey Girl! Baby Blue. Brown Eyed Girl. Sweet Thing. Moondance..
Linden Arden.
Listen to The Lion.
The Healing has begun.
No Guru. No Method. No Teacher.
Just Van and that Voice.
It ain’t why, why, why, it just IS.
A voice capable of transcendence as only the rarest voices are.
A voice that reaches up to the Moon.
Don’t you love the Sound!
Van is 74 this week.
So, Happy Birthday Van!
A heartfelt thanks for all the Songs and all the Singing.
May your Song always be Sung.
if this is your visit to The Immortal Jukebox you are very welcome!
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There are more Posts about Van than any other artist here on The Jukebox so, in case you missed one or would like to be reminded of an old favourite here’s the Van Compendium for your delectation and delight!
Brown Eyed Girl’.
An introduction telling the tale of my headlong plunge into obsession following my first hearing of Van’s best known song.
A meditation on Time featuring 2 astounding versions of John Lee Hooker’s tender Blues Ballad. One a reaching for the stars take of a teenager the second the work of a fully realised master musician.
Except he holds theses titles in Capital Letters while ours are lower case.
That’s because through his enormous gifts as a songwriter, singer and performer he has been able to make present experiences we have all had but are generally unable to express.
Experiences we so often let pass by.
Pass by.
Experiences he makes present in all their Revelation.
In all their Revelation.
And, it’s everpresent everywhere.
Everpresent everywhere.
The alchemy of his genius is through incandescent song to evoke, make present, states of being that are, at least in this world, necessarily fleeting.
A song like, ‘And it Stoned Me’ is a miraculous transmission from beyond the threshold (one of several such works of wonder on the Moondance Album).
An everyday event – a Boyhood fishing trip in the country blessed by Rain and Sun – gives us glimpses of Eternity.
Glimpses that once seen can neve be unseen.
Oh the Water. Oh the Water. Oh the Water.
Rest and Grace.
Coming to you like a mountain stream.
Oh, Oh, and it will Stone you right to your very Soul.
And, out of the corner of your inner eye you can see the steps of time dissolve.
And, see yourself and the world in a new light.
Hey! There You Are!
There You Are.
Just like going Home.
Going Home.
Van’s vocal here flows with the authority of a great River making its peaceful way to The Sea.
On Guitar John Platania, as always, plays with elegant passion.
Jeff Labes, on Piano, makes us feel the flow and dappled delight of that River.
The Horns of Jack Schröer and Colin Tilton bring us the warmth of the Sun.
John Klingberg and Gary Mallaber On Bass and Drums provide the motive current sweeping us along.
Together with their leader they bring us balm and blessing as they stone us to our very Souls.
The 31st of August is always a Red Letter Day for The Immortal Jukebox because it’s the birthday of Van Morrison whose glorious recordings have been the keystone of my musical life for for nigh on 50 years.
Happy 73rd Van!
No one brings together all the traditions like Van.
In his songs, singing and performance you can feel he has viscerally understood and integrated into his art; The Blues, Soul, Rhythm and Blues, Folk, Country and Jazz – all delivered with blazing Celtic devotion.
Leadbelly is there.
Ray Charles is there.
Hank Williams is there.
Arthur Alexander and Sam Cooke are there.
Jimmy Witherspoon and Mose Allison are there.
Mahalia Jackson and Rosetta Tharpe are there.
The McPeakes and O’Carolan are there.
Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis are there.
Bob Dylan is always there.
In Van it all comes together – traditions respected and added to creating a revelatory synthesis.
In celebration today a rhapsodic gem from 1966 pointing the way to the earth shattering triumphs of his solo career.
I remember at college playing a Them compilation for a friend and saying .. well here’s he honouring Ray Charles, here John Lee Hooker, here Bo Diddley and here Bob Dylan and then My Lonely Sad Eyes came on and we both shouted in exultation – here it’s all of them and it’s pure George Ivan Morrison!
Fill me my cup!
Fill me my cup!
Sparkling Wine indeed!
When Van sings like this he joins the Immortals.
You can pick out almost any line, any phrase or word and be dumbstruck by his vocal brilliance.
There’s a thesis to be written on the way he way he sings the word, ‘Lonely’ alone or on the oceanic surge he gives to :
Throw me a kiss
Across a crowded room
Some sunny windswept afternoon
There’s none too soon for me to miss.
He’s singing the Song and the Song is singing Him.
Into the Mystic.
Into the Mystic.
There are more Posts about Van than any other artist here on The Jukebox so, in case you missed one or would like to be reminded of an old favourite here’s the Van Compendium for your delectation and delight!
Brown Eyed Girl’.
An introduction telling the tale of my headlong plunge into obsession following my first hearing of Van’s best known song.
A meditation on Time featuring 2 astounding versions of John Lee Hooker’s tender Blues Ballad. One a reaching for the stars take of a teenager the second the work of a fully realised master musician.
My son and I – The Two Toms – are about to set out on a trip, actually a Pilgrimage to the Far North.
To God haunted Northumbria.
The land of Celtic saints and the Roman Wall.
The land of St Cuthbert, St Aidan, St Oswald and Bede.
Oak Groves, high moorland, the Cheviot Hills.
Bluebells, Campion, Hawthorn.
The rushing sibilant waters of the Tyne, the Tweed, the Coquet and the Rede.
Lindisfarne and the Farne Islands – thin places where eternity whispers in the wind.
Ringed Plovers, Redshanks, Turnstones and Oystercatchers.
It’s a Pilgrimage I’ve made many times now drawn by History and deep friendship.
I’m by nature a Pilgrim.
I need to be physically present in those places, landscapes, which have challenged and nurtured the Souls of Pigrims for thousands of years.
There are two other Pilgrimages I’m planning.
First, The Way of St James.
The Camino, from my front gate to Santiago de Compostella.
More than a thousand miles.
That one requires a lot of research before I’m ready to go (though you’re never really ready – one morning you just have to tie your cloak, take up your Staff and go!).
The other Pilgrimage will be far easier to organise.
Across the Irish Sea to Ulster.
With Van Morrison, a Pigrim Soul if there ever was one, sign posting the Way.
The Way to Coney Island.
Coming down from Downpatrick to visit St Patrick’s grave and maybe a few scoops in Mullan’s Bar.
On and On and On.
Stopping off at St John’s Point.
Birdwatching – scanning the Sky for Arctic Terns, Red-throated and Great Northern Divers, Curlew and Purple Sandpipers.
Stop off at Strangford Lough early in the morning.
On and On and On.
Drive through Shrigley enjoying the craic and taking pictures as we go.
On to Killyleagh.
At Lecale District we’ll take a breath and read the papers.
On and On and On as Pilgrims must.
Over the hill to Ardglass.
Glorying in the sunshine carrying the light that has shone for thousands and thousands of years on Pilgrims – lighting their Way.
In case we get famished before dinner let’s stop of here for a couple of jars of mussels and some potted herrings.
On and On and On we go heading on over the hill, lit up inside, heading towards Coney Island.
Living, Being, in the moment, sunlight streaming, all the time journeying towards Coney Island.
Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?
Wouldn’t it!
Take it away Van.
A moment of eternity captured.
That’s what Van can do.
Epiphanies.
Time present.
Time past.
Time Future.
Captured in 120 seconds or so.
Cymbals, Strings, G and F.
Harp and Guitar.
Summoning up the previous time – the 1950s – before the career, before the fame.
A day trip with his Mother.
Images that enter the Soul – if you will allow them to.
Intimations of Immortality.
With Mussels and Potted Herrings.
Breathing life into reverie and reminiscence – Van Morrison.
Here’s Van demonstrating that there is a sense of humour animating the Visions.
And here’s another Son of Ulster, Liam Neeson, with a sonorous version.
On and On and On.
Things won’t ever be great all the time – this side of Paradise.
Be grateful for the Epiphanies.
Have Faith Pilgrim.
Have Faith.
On and On and On.
On and On and On.
Notes :
The Musicians on Van’s original recording are :
Van Morrison – vocal, guitar
Clive Culbertson – Bass Guitar
Neil Drinkwater – Synthesiser
Roy Jones, Dave Early – drums, percussion
Arty McGlynn – guitar
There is an excellent short Film set on Coney Island. ‘The Shore’ directed by Terry George and starring the brilliant Ciaran Hinds.
This Post for my boon companions of The Way – Tom & Ian.
Often, when we tell the story of our own life, to ourselves, or to others, the narrative teems with incident. An action movie filled with high drama.
Now, reflecting on my own life I have come to realise that a more apt comparison would be one of the contemplative, steady gaze movies directed by Robert Bresson from France or Yasujiro Ozu from Japan.
The meaning is won, revealed, not through a hectic series of heroic events but powerfully accumulated through close attention to small details and patient meditation on the weathering, sometimes destructive, sometimes ennobling, passage of time.
Life is mainly waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Waiting for what you want or need the most.
Waiting for your mother’s or father’s attention.
Waiting for the fabled excitement of love and romance and high passion to blow into your life like a hurricane.
Waiting for someone to recognise you as the one they have been waiting for.
Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Waiting on the waterfront for the one, miraculously found, to return.
Waiting, worrying, wondering why she had to go.
Waiting, never understanding why she had to go.
Waiting, rheumy eyed, obsessively scanning the horizon for her to return.
Waiting, waiting, covering the waterfront.
Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker.
Bluesmen. Brothers in The Blues.
Initiates. High priests. Orphean adepts.
Anam Cara – soul friends.
Sounders of the depths. In their music they tap the source. The energy they draw upon seems to come, direct, from the very core of the Earth.
In touch with such power is it any wonder that they are often described as, ‘glowering’ and, ‘moody’.
I Cover The Waterfront looms in our imaginations like a fevered dream. The great Booker T on organ sets up a heat shimmer from which Van and John Lee emerge like royal travellers from some mysterious distant land bringing testimony of great import.
Some say the purpose of art is to stop time. Well, here, Van and John Lee do a wonderful job of making time eddy and meander as they dig deep into the song. They are both able to lead us away from the tyranny of everyday time into new dimensions of being.
Ships leave harbour and the coast vanishes as they voyage into the open sea. Beside the vastness of the sea humans seem small, insignificant. Yet, the sea is bound by the shore while the human imagination knows no such bounds. With their voices, their intense vocal and imaginative presence, Van and John Lee take us far beyond the mere realms of cartography and circumnavigation.
Their music at its best always opens new territory bringing us visions, emotional insights and dare one say it – mystical revelations.
They bring it on home while we are waiting.
Waiting for someone to reply to the message in a bottle thrown in the sea those many years ago.
Waiting for the knock on the door – sometimes in hope, sometimes in dread.
Waiting before you go out with seed for the sowing.
Waiting before you return carrying your sheaves.
Waiting for forgiveness.
Waiting in vain for the Raven’s return.
Waiting for the Dove to return with an Olive leaf.
Waiting for a miracle.
Waiting for Ahab to sail The Pequod, laden with Whale, back into Nantucket.
Waiting for Godot.
Waiting for The Dodgers to come home to Brooklyn.
Waiting for this terrible day to become tomorrow.
Waiting for the slow train coming around the bend.
Waiting for the full moon to rise.
Waiting for two riders to approach.
Waiting for the barkeep to pour one scotch, one bourbon, one beer.
Waiting for the foghorn to blow.
Waiting for the dawn to break.
Waiting for the wind to howl.
Waiting for the circle to be unbroken.
We are all waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
Whatever you are waiting for I hope it will have been worth the wait.
And, as each of us waits, for our own reasons, the music of Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker lends us peace and perspective.
Notes:
The version of I Cover The Waterfront featured here comes from the John Lee Hooker record, ‘Mr Lucky’. I’m sure of few things but I am sure you can never have too many John Lee Hooker records.
This post largely written on the decks of the M/S Lily and S/S Ukkopekka as they sailed in blazing sunshine between Turku, the Island of Vepsa and the town of Naantali in Finland.
‘There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love’ (Washington Irving)
‘Oh, I awoke in anger, so alone and terrified,
I put my fingers to the glass,
And bowed my head and cried’ (Bob Dylan – I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine)
Sometimes we cry. Sometimes we don’t know why. Sometimes (though we are loath to admit it) we know exactly why.
Sometimes we know we are about to cry. Sometimes the hot tears overwhelm us in an instant.
Sometimes we cry when we read, or write, a tear stained letter.
Sometimes we cry when the hearse carries our loved one away.
We knew that would happen one day, even thought ourselves prepared for it, yet we learn that no one is ever truly prepared for such an emotional earthquake.
Sometimes when we unexpectedly catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror we find ourselves surprised by tears of shame and regret.
Sometimes we cry tears of pure joy – remember the day your child was born? The day you got married?
The day that dream that you feared would never be more than a dream became miraculously true!
Sometimes we cry because with sickening finality we know that dream is over, over.
Sometimes we cry not believing just how stupid, stupid, pluperfectedly stupid we have been.
Sometimes we simply cry and cry and cry and somehow having cried our hearts out we feel a little better.
Sometimes we need a great singer to to sing about the tears in things and we feel a whole lot better.
An artist who delights in the sensual world of earthly love and light and linear time while understanding in the very core of his being that we are also citizens of co-existing realms beating to the rhythms of a different eternal drum.
In his art he seeks to demonstrate that there are no walls between these realms but rather permeable membranes we can pass through if we would but release the flickering fires of our imaginative and spiritual nature.
So, when Van heard the song, ‘It’s All In The Game’; bizarrely written in posthumous collaboration by a Noble prize winning Vice President of The United States (Charles Dawes) and a savvy professional songwriter (Carl Sigman) he recognised that this slight, sentimental ballad from the 50s was ripe for transformation into a kaleidoscopic revelation of the simultaneously transitory and eternal landscape where the travails of all of us as winners and losers in the dance of the love are truly all in the game.
Van’s performance here as a singer, arranger and bandleader is proof of his genius as an artist. Surely, listening to such a searching performance, each of us will find our own history stirred and evoked; often in surprising, potentially disturbing ways.
One of the great gifts true artists can offer us is the opportunity, through encounters with their art, to come to terms with our unresolved subconscious struggles to find integration and wholeness.
Each of us in our own unique way will discover that we know what they’re writing about and what Van is singing about!
Van recorded, ‘It’s All In The Game’ on his magisterial 1979 record, ‘Into The Music’ which is lit with incandescent grace throughout.
Characteristically he assembled a superb team of musicians who had the technical chops and the imaginative reach to follow where his arrangements and inspirations led.
Herbie Armstrong (rhythm guitar), David Hayes (bass) and Mark Jordan (piano) were Van veterans and in Peter Van Hooke (drums), Toni Marcus (violin) and Katie Kissoon (backing vocals) he found rhapsodically empathetic partners.
The extravagantly talented Mark Isham and Pee Wee Ellis on the horns added enveloping depth and colour to the sound.
Of course, as with every great Van Morrison record, it’s Van’s heart-stirring, heart-stopping vocals which cast the spell we have to surrender to.
Here, Van in a vocal tour de force seems to hold the song up to a series of shades of illumination and heat so that, ‘Your heart will fly away’ can move magically as the song progresses from barely perceptible, deeply tender, softly shimmering candle light to searing, inescapable white hot conflagration.
And, this is not achieved through dramatic changes of tempo but through the vocal and imaginative engagement which Van brings to individual syllables, words and phrases as he utters them – teasing them, testing them, for artistic, spiritual and emotional weight.
Van makes intuitive raids upon the hoard of popular song for the mysterious values bound up in the sheer sound of the words as well as their overt meaning.
Of course, Van knows that words can only take you so far. Sometimes it’s the silences between the words and the accents of their placement which are most revealing.
Van added his own coda to, ‘Its All In The Game’ with its segue into his own, ‘You Know What They’re Writing About’ where he brings it all back home to the landscapes of his Belfast youth which will always haunt his every hour.
To my mind it is a mark of Van’s spiritual, not to say mystic insight, that he knows that there is no need to travel to distant valleys or Himalayan hideaways to find illumination.
Sometimes there’s no more words to say but its all right there in front of you. Right in front of you, wherever you are – down by the river, down by the pylons, down by the pylons, down by the pylons …..
Van Morrison is undoubtedly the living custodian of the hallowed tradition of blues based singing. He has spent a lifetime listening to and learning from those he inherited this tradition from.
So, when Van takes on a, ‘Big ballad’ he draws upon and invokes the shades of Ray Charles, Jimmy Witherspoon and Bobby Blue Bland with their ability to command a band, caress a lyric and move with fluent dynamism within a song from whisper to scream.
Van brings all this lore to his live performances of, ‘It’s All In The Game’ – each time setting forth on a new pilgrimage invoking the muse to descend.
It is possible to spend many days losing yourself while listening to epic performances by Van of this song (believe me I’ve done it!).
From the treasure trove I’ve chosen a performance from Dublin in 2015 where if you can’t see the muses of fire above his head you can certainly feel their presence.
What Van Morrison adds to the grand tradition he inherited is the product of his own unique Celtic soul: his gift for being at the dead centre of a song while being absolutely outside it at the same time.
If a songwriter is very, very lucky they might in their lifetime write one song that becomes the misty eyed anthem of love for devoted couples all over the world. A love song that incarnates love rather than merely describing it. A song that always seem fresh while yet building a patina of fond memories that increase every time it is played.
A song which flowing like a river, never the same twice, still seems to contain the past, the present and the future. A song which takes up residence in the hearts of succeeding generations – for today and every day, someone, somewhere, is discovering that they are in love for the very first time.
By my count (and on The Jukebox my count is the one that really counts) Van Morrison has written at least four songs that meet the criteria outlined above. From his incandescent second solo album the title track, ”Moondance’ with its peerless swooning swing and, ‘Crazy Love’ with its intoxicated, intoxicating, sweet surrender.
From ‘Avalon Sunset’ came the deep, devotional, ‘Have I Told You Lately That I Love You’ – a song especially close to my heart as it was the first song my wife, Clare, and I danced to once we were married.
But, if I had to pick one song to demonstrate the depth of Van Morrison’s romanticism; proof that he was and is the great courtly love balladeer of his age I will always choose, ‘Tupelo Honey’ – a pluperfect song, glowingly alive with love’s grandeur.
Good God, what a hallelujah of a song! A song that shares the blissful total immersion in the sweetness of love with Solomon’s Song of Songs! I love the majestically sure, unhurried flow of the song which sweeps our hearts away, illuminating our deepest wish and need – to love and to be loved.
The team of musicians assembled in San Francisco in 1971 to record Tupelo Honey brought all their technical accomplishment to the track but, no doubt inspired by their mercurial leader, they brought something much rarer – a devotional surrender to the music they were making, so that ‘Tupelo Honey’ really does sound like a direct revelation from Heaven itself.
On drums, the great Connie Kay from the Modern Jazz Quartet, having already played with angelic grace throughout Van’s sublime masterpiece, ‘Astral Weeks’ outdoes himself with his backbeat and fills surging the song forward to greater and greater heights of rhythmic rapture. On guitar Ronnie Montrose plays with a shimmering, harp like delicacy that is endlessly beguiling.
Mark Jordan’s piano takes us by the hand and navigates us through the song assuring us that we can and will find our way to that promised land of love and fulfilment we all believe is out there waiting for us to come home to. Bruce Royston on flute is the harbinger of the miracles to come while Ted Templeman on organ, Gary Mallaber on percussion and ever faithful Jack Schroer on saxophones ensure that the miracles are delivered.
Tying everything together is Van’s vocal which reached pinnacles of inspiration that is beyond the reach of critical language to adequately express. So, I will unashamedly borrow my language from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, ‘God’s Grandeur’.
Van Morrison’s singing on Tupelo Honey flames out like shining from shook foil, it gathers and gathers and gathers to a greatness that elevates everyone who listens to it – inducting them into a vision that encompasses love in all its sacred and sexual incarnations. A vision which once experienced leaves a permanent flaming brand on the heart and soul.
This post dedicated to Clare because she’s as sweet as Tupelo Honey. Because she’s an angel of the very first degree.
Note:
There’s a wonderful live version from his 1979 tour of Ireland featuring Toni Marcus on violin and the late Peter Bardens on keyboards which I urge you to investigate.
‘Turn it up! Turn up your Rad-io!’ (Van Morrison – ‘Caravan’)
‘We were the War children – born 1945 ….’ (Van Morrison – ‘Wild Children’)
‘I can get your station when I need rejuvenation … Wavelength you never let me down’ (Van Morrison – ‘Wavelength’)
‘… I like Morrison because I know that his work comes from the same level as my own poetry – the level of daydreaming; that he’s out to annihilate ego; that he’s after the same,’nothingness’ as Kavanagh was after ….’ (Paul Durcan)
Van Morrison is an only child. A child alone much of the time by inclination and perhaps vocation. A soul born to dream, to live in dreams and to birth those dreams in songs and singing – dreaming in God.
As a boy growing up in East Belfast he was close to the sea and the countryside. From his house, beyond his bedroom, he could hear voices echoing over the Beechie River and imagine the mist swathed shipyard towers looming out of the night as the foghorns guided ships safely home.
His head, heart and spirit opened up and welcomed dreams and intimations of an immortal world coexisting with the mortal world. Walking down Hyndford Street to leafy Cyprus Avenue he could be transported so that he was both thrillingly outside himself and strangely never so completely himself.
Dreaming those young man’s dreams he found sustenance for his creative imagination in the sights and sounds of his home city, its hinterland, and in sounds closer to home emanating from the radio and the HMV record player. The radio and the record player would become almost sacred objects.
The sounds they produced would enter deep into his consciousness, his soul; sounds he could never forget, sounds he would store as treasure and draw on for decades – fusing them through the mysterious alchemy of art into extraordinarily beautiful and affecting visions of his own.
And these visions have their genesis in the days before Rock ‘n’ Roll. The days of post war austerity. Days which could seem monochrome, mundane and stultifyingly metronomic. Days when a dreaming boy hunched close to the radio and the record player in search of a rainbow for his soul.
Together with fellow Irishman and fellow dreamer, poet Paul Durcan, he would dramatise those dreaming days in a song, ‘In The Days Before Rock ‘n’ Roll’ – a song which would catalogue some of the signposts of those dreams in a performance which has something of the hyper real, time slipping, giddy character of a waking dream. A performance which has me laughing out loud and punching the air with Joy as he hymns the stations and the musicians that called to him – that called his own unique voice into being.
‘In the Days’ is a dream that’s shot through with good humour, strangeness and charm. A dream that flows like a pure mountain stream strong enough to cut through stone yet gentle enough to dip your hand in. A stream you would surely want to let the goldfish go into!
A dream brought to vivid life over four days in the studio by an intimate quartet – Paul Durcan as the inspired/crazed narrator, Dave Early on drums, Steve Pearce on bass with Van Morrison on animating spirit, piano and vocals.
The sleeve notes tell me the song last 8 minutes and 13 seconds but that only records how long it lasts the first time you hear it – for once you’ve heard it it will be playing in your imagination and in your dreams for the rest of your life. Come aboard!
A Listeners guide:
Paul Durcan:
Paul Durcan is a maverick Irish poet who has been writing poems which fizz with emotional and literary energy for as long as Van has been writing songs which fizz with spiritual and musical energy. Durcan’s poetry speaks in an urgent conversational tone about almost every aspect of life not excluding the political, the sexual and the spiritual.
Reading a Durcan collection is to be taken on a thrilling literary roller coaster ride which will have you laughing and gasping as well as exhilarated and emotionally pummelled. He is a performance poet on the page as well as the stage addressing his audience as friends and fellow campfire sitters as he examines the crazy world we live in. He seems to me to be wholly mad and wholly sane simultaneously – ideal territory for a poet to occupy.
‘Justin’:
Who is Justin? Just a name plucked out of the air for its sound, its comparative rarity in a world awash with Jims and Georges and Pauls? Probably we will never know who this, ‘gentler than a man’ man was. Just a thought but it strikes me as not insignificant that an Irish poet from the latter half of the twentieth century would use a name which happens to be the little know second name of the greatest Irish poet of that era: Seamus Justin Heaney!
Vintage radios such as those made by the Telefunken Company in Berlin were gorgeously tactile objects. Radios, humming with valve power and gleaming with polished wood, bakelite and glass, softly lit, took pride of place in our homes in the days before Televisions took up their imperial dominance in our living rooms. No point and shoot remotes then! Radios were switched on and off and tuned to stations using knobs that clunked satisfyingly into position and dials that you set spinning to call up and capture sounds from distant lands beamed in from the ionosphere.
The very air crackled with possibility as you waited for the signal to settle as you settled down to laugh along your favourite comedians, sing along with your favourite singers, gasp at the heroics of your favourite detective or be amazed by a discovery as the spinning dial led you into imaginative territory you had never dreamed existed.
Radios conjured up dreams, created communities of interest and painted pictures that seared into our memories. Radio, despite all the technological developments of the last few decades remains the dreamers ideal companion. Tune in!
‘I am searching for … Luxembourg, Athlone, Budapest, AFN, Hilversum, Helvetia …’
One of the great pleasures of vintage radio was discovering what programmes were made by exotically named radio stations broadcasting from places which often had to be looked up on an atlas to see where they were! Not knowing what you might find and be introduced to was exciting and expanded our cultural horizons.
I’ll take spinning the dial over preset culture any day of the week: only listening to what you already know you like narrows your horizons and precludes the revolutionary discoveries that open up new worlds.
As you scanned the stations on the radio dial even reciting their names became a form of litany – clearly recognised above by Paul Durcan who has a genius for incantatory recitation.
Luxembourg:
Radio Luxembourg had a very powerful signal (on 208 metres Medium Wave) which washed tidally over the British Isles bringing many young people their first regular exposure to those new fangled musics their parents just knew were no good for them. Luxembourg, in contrast to the BBC, was a commercial station which meant it was happy to devote whole programmes to showcasing the new releases from record labels such as Capitol and Phillips.
On Saturdays at 8pm in 1956 (when Van was aged 11) you could listen to, ‘Jamboree’ – described as two hours of non-stop, action packed radio featuring ‘Teenage Jury’ and American disc-jockey Alan Freed with an excerpt from his world changing show, ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’.
Athlone:
Athlone is a historic Irish town on the shores of the River Shannon. From the 1930s to the 1970s the principal transmitter for Irish radio was located in Athlone and the Irish national radio station came to be known on radio dials all over the world as Athlone. The fledgling Irish state was keen to promote native culture with Irish sports and traditional music being prominently featured.
Athlone is also the birthplace of the great Irish tenor Count John McCormack whose golden voice resounded all over the globe in the first half of the twentieth century.
Like Van he had a voice that was able to express the normally inexpressible – a voice that could send shivers through the soul.
AFN (American Forces Network)
One of the spin-offs from the presence of GIs in Europe as a result of WW2 and the ensuing cold war was AFN whose broadcasts of American music could be listened to by Europeans hungry for the jazz and blues based music which was so hard to find anywhere else. Being near an American military base was a boon both for the likely strength of the signal and the possibility that personnel from the base might have records never seen in domestic stores.
Lester Piggott (‘The long fellow’) was, as my Dad would have told you, the greatest horse racing jockey who ever lived. He won England’s premier race, The Epsom Derby, an almost unbelievable 9 times from 1954 as a teenager with, ‘Never Say Die’ through to 1983 when he won with, ‘Teenoso’. Lester Piggott became an almost mythical figure not just in the world of the turf but in the folklore of the nation.
Children and grandmothers who never opened a racing page in their lives would go into a bookmakers on the day of a classic race and simply say, ‘I’ll have five shillings on whatever Lester is riding!’ And, very, very often that turned out to be a very smart bet for no one was a better judge of what horse to ride than Lester Piggott and no one more capable of riding a race with ice cool expertise to ensure victory. Lester was a close mouthed man with a very dry sense of humour – he had no time for the hoopla of celebrity. He he lived to win horse races and he spoke horse with a fluency that’s probably never been matched.
Fats, Elvis, Sonny, Lightning, Muddy, John Lee!, Ray Charles:The High Priest! The Killer: Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard.
Van Morrison was extraordinarily fortunate to be the son of a father who had lived in Detroit and who had a fabled collection of blues and Rhythm & Blues records young Van could immerse his thirsty soul in. As he says he heard Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon on the street where he was born. Leadbelly became his guiding spirit. A spirit he has remained true to over five decades and more of music making.
The radio brought to him and millions of others the original Rock ‘n’ Roll creators – the revolutionaries whose legacy will live for ever. The greater the distance we are from those giants of the 1950s the greater their genius is clear. They were the guides and spirits who befriended us – who turned on the coloured lights for whole generations. Their genius is lovingly celebrated in the roll call here to form an honours board of immortality.
There can be no doubt that Van Morrison has joined that company.
As the song fades back into the ether a transported Paul Durcan says:
‘We certainly got a lot of beautiful things in there Van’.
Truer words were never spoken.
Thanks to Kerry Shale for suggesting the topic of this post. For those of you who may not be familiar with the name Kerry is a multi-talented actor, writer and voice over artist. He also, obviously, has great musical taste!
The Immortal Jukebox 