1996 Guardian interview
The phone is ringing. It's 7.30 in the morning so it must be someone in LA who hasn't gone to bed yet or else someone here in Dublin who's been up all night. It's neither. "Have you seen the Daily Mirror this morning?" It's Willie Richardson, Van Morrison's manager, calling from London. You nearly feel like saying that, well, actually, no, you don't read newspapers in your sleep. "Look, I know you're writing this article on Van and Michelle and I've got to tell you, this story is breaking, It says," says Willie, "that Michelle has been having an affair behind Van's back." Willie is completely shocked. So are you. Aw shit. There you were in America and it was all hunky-dory. More than that, it was great. Van Morrison and his fiancee Michelle Rocca and rock 'n' roll. And now this. It's hard to believe. Just a month ago, Van's on stage in his long John Rocha jacket, the one with the velvet lapels, and he's got on his pork-pie hat and his groovy shades. Heck, he's the Blues Brother. And he's giving some lip: "How many people are here to hear the artist formerly known as Van Morrison? Well you're not going to hear "Mystic Eyes" or "Gloria" or "Domino". I've been Van Morrison for about 20 years and it's a publicity stunt." And then of course the bastard tears into "Gloria" and everyone goes ape. It's the tailend of April in New York and you're never seen Van Morrison look so happy, grinning away at the band. He always said he'd never mellow but maybe he has. Half-a-century old and the Man is a nice guy. He's playing in the Supper Club, a 600-seater off Times Square. It's the hottest ticket in New York, 75 dollar seats are being snatched off the touts for 300 dollars each. The venue is a cabaret joint with a bit of velvet, tables and a balcony upstairs for more punters. It's jammed. Van's doing four nights. The first night, he sings for four hours and "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" - his homage to James Brown that takes in everything from "Be Bop A Lula" to quotes from Van's own songs - last an hour. Then it's onto - gulp - "Slim Slow Slider" off Astral Weeks. Van on his acoustic guitar intoning with the gravitas of a gravedigger: "Saw you walkin' down by Ladbroke Grove this morning...I know you're dying, baby, and I know you know it too." The club goes wild. Robert De Niro drops by. The next night he and Van will have dinner at one of De Niro's restaurants, in Chelsea. Richard Gere shows up and takes the stage with his guitar to give a fairly credible reading of Van's "Gloria". Mad, really. Richard duetted with Van a couple of years back at the Dome in Brighton, too. And Van did some music for a De Niro film, King of Comedy from 1983, which featured Van's "Wonderful Remark". "There's strength in numbers," Van Morrison will observe, talking about famous people hanging out with each other. But it wasn't always like this. Put it this way: Van's social graces were far from famous. Van: I think I'm a loner, I think I'm an outsider not because I want to be but I found I had to be. I was in a situation that if I didn't play along with the music-business bullshit then I became an outsider. I don't believe in the propaganda and I don't jump through their hoops.
BP: Are you shy?
BP: And does that not cause great convolutions when you go on stage?
BP: What about this ethereal thing called fame?
BP: In what way?
BP: And did you ever think of abandoning ship and becoming a gardener or
something?
BP: Do you wish you could walk around unrecognised?
BP: Always?
BP: But having said that, it is the work you chose to do, isn't it? At the Supper Club, it's softer now and Van's singing "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You". His fiancee, Michelle Rocca, wanders on stage. She's waltzing with her man and the stage lights catch the ring on her finger that sparkles like the royalties from three Van Morrison albums. And Van has a look on his face that's half embarrassed and half the cat who got the cream. The two had been together about three years. Michelle is a star, too, grand hand gestures and grand words, like Moet. She was Miss Ireland, she's got three children and she's divorced. She hosted Eurovision live to a trillion viewers, spoke lotsa languages. "Come in, Norway..." They looked a brilliant couple. Not now. There's no question Van is really hurt. And, for the moment anyway, unforgiving. "It's all over. I've been betrayed. We're finished. I'm completely disgusted by the behaviour of everyone involved. We won't be getting back together and that's that," he says. The next day - last Saturday - Van flies out from London to Denmark. He's headlining a festival in Odense, playing in front of 60,000 people. The word is it's one of the best sets Van's done ever. In Dublin, the phone's ringing again. It's my friend Eileen, blathering on about the Van and Michelle tabloid stuff, and how "maybe Van will write something great now. I've had enough of this "Have I Told You Lately" sugary stuff. That's what these song writers need, a bit of heartache and pain..." George Ivan Morrison was raised in Hyndford Street, Belfast, an only child in a Jehovah's Witness family. No one ever called him George. Ivan is reserved for family and people who want to ingratiate themselves with him. You catch yourself calling him Ivan once or twice. Commonly, he's known as Van The Man, simply one of the most spellbinding artists to have risen from the cauldron of blues, rhythm 'n' blues and jazz. Van's father was an electrician and an avid collector of blues records. His mother, Violet, was a jazz singer. The Vanchild fell in love with music, bitten by the primal blues of Leadbelly. He first sang on stage when he was 14, he left school at 15 and spent the next five years mostly on the road, singing and playing sax. He formed Them in 1963 as a house band at the Maritime Hotel in Belfast. The band lasted three years before Van left in 1966 for the US. Astral Weeks, the first proper Van album, was made in two days in 1968 when he was 22: commercially a flop at the time but now in everybody's list of the ten best records of all time. Van migrated to Woodstock, north of New York, where The Band and Bob Dylan were already living. It was a leafy retreat, maybe spoiled by the festival in 1969. A lot of fans never left Woodstock - they didn't know the way back. Van married, briefly, and moved on to California. Disillusioned with the music business, he retired in 1974, the year his album It's Too Late To Stop Now came out. "It was great. There was nowhere I had to be, "says Van now. Three years later, he was back in Ireland, performing again. Apart from that break, Van has played more or less constantly for 35 years and made around 30 albums. The current short tours, first in the US, now in Britain and Ireland, are unusual; generally, Van does hit-and-run gigs in Europe, over a weekend. He loathes interviews, especially answering personal questions. He's not deliberately Garboesque, he just wants to get on with his job. His constituency is incredibly loyal. Van is a mesmerising performer - his voice is extraordinary, full of passion but it can also be soft, boyish. Then he growls like a bear with a thorn in him bum. He's not a pin-up, yet he touches the soul. If he never made another record, he'd still be hugely popular. His music has always been rooted in jazz and rhythm 'n' blues. He toured with the Chieftains in the eighties and his early heroes. He'd say he was primarily a song writer - if he weren't for the songs he at least pretends to think he'd be making a living playing in bar bands at weekends...singing Ray Charles songs, maybe. Rolling Stone Magazine calls him "simply one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever". "Propaganda!" is Van's response.
BP: How did it feel being screamed at by girls when you were in Them? Did
you like it?
BP: Weren't you doing stuff like doing the splits and leaping up and down? It was sometime in the sixties, 1966 probably. You were in Dublin in the Coffee Kitchen, the late-night hang-out off Molesworth Street. You were managing this beat group called The Kult and in the wee hours before dawn you were with two Kult members: a student from Strabane in the North who plays guitar and does all the Chuck Berry stuff, called Paul Brady, and the keyboards man, another Northerner, this one with long, long hair which he shakes to great effect whenever he launches into Sonny Boy Williamson's "Bye Bye Bird". Jackie McAulay is his name and he used to be in Them. And just now, Them's lead singer comes down the stairs into our dungeon. The atmosphere...suddenly it's terrible, all heavy, all dark. Tense. You hadn't met Van Morrison before. He didn't spark with charisma; he could have come to change the ashtrays. He was very down, depressed. The band he'd formed to play the kind of music he loved was breaking up and it looked like his dream was going down the toilet. There'd been bad blood when Jackie left. Them were from Belfast, formed by Van, this hustling pugnacious guy who's had enough of being in The Monarchs Showband doing seven sets a night to GIs in Germany. (At least they didn't wear the traditional spangly showband suits - they looked like a bunch of plumbers - and, seeing their audience was American, they didn't have to play Marty Wilde and Cliff Richard.) But Van had seen this group in England, The Downliners Sect - a bunch of white boys playing maracas and wearing deerstalker hats with an exotic aura, but they played Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs. Wild rockin' rhythm 'n' blues. It lit Van's taper. In Them, as a punky kid, Van Morrison rumbled out "Baby, Please Don't Go", "Here Comes The Night" and the most famous B-side ever, "Gloria" - "And her name is G-L-O..." - since covered by just about everybody, including Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Patti Smith. Them brought Top Of The Pops, teen frenzy and trouble with the record company. "Sometimes the band was just whoever turned up," says Van. Session musicians, like Jimmy Page, were called in when Them were recording - it's Jimmy's guitar you can hear on "Baby, Please Don't Go". The record company reckoned Page was better and quicker; sometimes he'd knock off three sessions in a day, the Kinks, Herman's Hermits, Engelbert Humperdinck even. That was the kind of thing that cheesed off regular band members, getting to the studio and finding other musicians booked to play on their records. McAuley quits. Band disintegrates. So we're in the Dublin cellar and it's depressing. Van's world is falling apart around him. You lend him a fiver. Time change. Van seems very much at ease with the particular bunch of musicians he's with now. Pee Wee Ellis, who previously played sax with James Brown and worked with Van on Days Like This, is musical director. Georgie Fame is on keyboards. On this side of the Atlantic, Van's teaming up with Ray Charles, who'll open the bill and may join Van on stage at the end. Van is always a great collaborator, especially if he's in control. There's a mutual fanclub between him and Dylan, and they've performed together. Van's daughter Shana, now in her early twenties, duetted with him on A Night In San Francisco. Lately, he's taken to producing. At the Fitzpatrick Manhattan Hotel, he plays the tracks he has just produced for John Lee Hooker, 78-year-old blues god, in San Francisco. Hooker's voice draws you in, emoting like a slo-mo cobra. Van listens, a cross between professional producer and wild-eyed child. "It's a work of love," beams Van the fan. "It's also hard because John Lee Hooker only comes into the studio for three hours at a go, so you've got to cram a lot into a short time." He's produced Tom Jones and won't hear a word against him. Back home in Bath, Van recently recorded five tracks with rockabilly template Carl Perkins, the man who told us about Blue Suede Shoes before Elvis. He loves all these old geezers, they're the people he grew up with. So from John Lee Hooker to Carl Perkins to...well, okay then, Cliff Richard. The two of them made a single in 1989, called "Whenever God Shines His Light". Actually, they sound pretty good together. "That was a fluke," Van grins as he recalls it. "Cliff to me was "Move It" [Cliff's sexy rock 'n' roll hit, his first, from 1958] and his film Expresso Bongo. I said in the studio, you know, sort of tongue in cheek, why don't we get Cliff, and somebody sent him a tape. I had forgotten about it then someone said 'Cliff wants to do it.' It was fun. I Liked the record. He's an icon." A star? "I don't believe that anyone knows what a star is," says Van. "I'm certainly not one. A star is anywhere from Cliff Richard to Rod Stewart to Mick Jagger. A star is an image." Years ago, Van went through a great reading phase, great writers, great philosophers. He is a sponge for information, and very intelligent. Maybe too intelligent: if you're so sharp, you see things that upset you. His lyrics are genuinely poetic. The words tend to work on the written page. His songs are mostly about love, nature and often have a mystical quality. He makes many references to writers: "Rave On John Donne" is the title of one song, Jack Kerouac turns up in "Cleaning Windows". Tennessee Williams, Byron, Blake, Spike Milligan, Beckett, Rimbaud are all mentioned, musicians, too. Ray Charles crops up in several of his songs. The last book Van read was about shadows. He is a shadowed person. Sometimes he has an aura of unease; they're not there all the time, but you can see him suffering daggers of discomfort. He's at his happiest on stage, that's probably his oasis. Something happens there, something spiritual.
BP: Would you describe yourself as a seeker?
BP: And what about when people treat you as this deity almost, that you
have a hotline to God and magic and genius?
BP: It does go on. And some people would regard you as an icon.
BP: John Lennon or Chuck Berry? When President Clinton made his recent peace trip to Belfast, he sought out Van. Clinton wanted to play sax with Van and his band but wasn't allowed by his own security people. So Van played "Days Like This" in Belfast town centre and 60,000 sang along. They're dressed in dark clothes, shades, hats, and they're propelled by some invisible force through the crowd. We're in New Orleans at Jazzfest. A billowing mass of people surges from strident gospel and sexy rhythm 'n' blues to funky, good-time jazz. In the Rhodes Gospel Tent, the massed voices of the Kennedy High School Choir hug the heavens. It's beautiful, hot and humid and...cool. And our two figures, headed by Willie Richardson The Manager and flanked by Fred Dryer The Security Man are push, push, pushing determinedly through the throng. They're aiming for the food area. They've arrived, wherever they are. A bewilderment or signs announce Louisiana catfish and gumbo pheasant, crawfish and cochon de lait po'boy and alligator sauce piquante and jambalaya. Panic. It's all too much. Van Morrison is very uncomfortable. There's a lot of twitching going on. Van Morrison is in hell. It seemed so simple; pop down to Jazzfest from the hotel, get something to eat there, check out the vibe, especially the gospel tent, meet up with his old sparring-partner pal, Dr John. He'd be playing there himself the following day, this was a chance to chill out and enjoy it. But now, Van Morrison is out in the open. People are pointing at him, nudging their partners, going for bits of paper. It's getting tight. "You go back. I'll get the food," says Willie. Oh, thank God. Yes. And Van and Michelle are hurried backstage by Fred. On stage, blues guitarist Buddy Guy is doing his string-bending thing. Van and Michelle sit in the van. Van's nearly trembling. He's very shook. Michelle calms, soothes. Seafood pasta arrives in Styrofoam dishes. Van and Michelle sit in the Van and eat it, and Van says "I was like this even before I was Van Morrison." He never liked crowds. Then he announces: "I want to go now," and they do, Van and Michelle and the manager and the security man. The aged New Orleans rhythm 'n' blues singer Ernie K. Doe once proclaimed, "All music it comes from N'Awlins," and right now it's pouring out of the hot pavements into the humid night air: jazz, blues, rock 'n'roll, and zydeco propelled by the clickety click of the frattoir - finger thimbles percussing across a metal wash board. There's brass bands, gospel music, R&B. Even the water splashing off the wheels of the Mississippi paddle steamers seem to be in tune. Meanwhile, Van is in suite 2104 at the Windsor Court Hotel, Van and his Fawlty Towers videos. He's watching the one about the German visitors - "Don't mention the war" - and the one about the rat. In suite 2104 there's Morrison, Michelle and Moet. Van's laughing fit to burst and he's happier than a pig in shite. Everyone else is rockin' and havin' a gas at Jazzfest. But then, they're not Van Morrison. But then, even Van Morrison isn't Van Morrison. Van: I never said that I was a nice guy. Okay? Never.
BP: D'you think you are?
Michelle: But I think you are...and it's not because I'm in love with you
but because I love you as a person.
Michelle: You don't have to. I think you're a nice person.
BP: So if anyone every says you're grumpy...
BP: ...or you're a cunt...
Michelle: Well you don't have wings.
Michelle: Everyone can be grumpy. In Memphis we stay at The Peabody Hotel where ducks ride up and down in the elevators between their home in the lobby fountain and their cage on the roof. Van and Michelle are delivered to the Memphis In May Beale Street Music Festival in a long, long white limo - it's a leather upholstered beast that's a cross between a coffin anda juke box. The air conditioning is just so. The luxurious Portakabin affair that's the star's dressing room is labelled "Van". Inside it's a cornucopia of goodies: cardboard cut-out Elvises with the King leering in his gold suit, Sun Records mugs, Graceland ballpoints with a tiny pink Cadillac inside. On the wall, there are posters of The Million Dollar Quartet: Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash - wild young rockabillies who like innocent jackals tore the stomach out of tired old crooners like Perry Como. There are T-shirts - including one labelled Memphis Recording Service on 706 Union, the home of Sun Records where Elvis, Jerry Lee et al first recorded, and just down the road a piece from the Peabody - keyrings, a scented candle, Elvis playing cards, a pair of Elvis nail clippers. Presents for the star. It's like being let loose in a chemist's shop. "Grab everything!" says Van chortling, as he, Michelle and I fall upon the gifts like scavengers, stuffing the trophies into plastic bags, laughing like drains. We'd planned a trip to Graceland the next day - but Van wasn't in the mood. In "Underlying Depression", Van sings "Lord I was born with the blues and my blue suede shoes/And my underlying depression." Is that the way it has to be?
BP: Van, I want to ask you a question on the record. The question is this:
you said earlier this evening, like 20 minutes ago, that you do your work,
you do your songwriting, you do your...
BP: ...and, the third one was, you do your performing. If you could swap
all of this for peace of mind, this job you have, you said you wouldn't do
it, you wouldn't swap it?
BP: Oh, you would swap it?
BP: Swap it for peace of mind.
BP: And d'you think that's attainable? Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website |