2008 BBC interview

An interview with Van which aired on BBC 4 on March 10, 2008. The audio of the interview is still available in the BBC 4 archives here (requires RealPlayer).

Intro: Van Morrison has been in the music business for a long time: 40 years! But his new album, Keep it Simple, is a return to the blues- and gospel-inspired sound of his earlier records. He famously gives few interviews, but he has talked with the BBC.

Keep It Simple, album number 35 for the 62-year old Van Morrison, and a musical plea to be left alone, to get on with doing things his way. He's fed up, he says, with people making him out to be something he's not. This time he's hitting back.

VM: It's addressing, basically, the propaganda that's been put out about people like myself who don't do a lot of interviews, don't do a lot of media stuff. Basically I'm a working musician, singer, songwriter, and that's really what I do, right? But there's this whole mythology that's been built up over the years, and propaganda and myths about me. So that's what a lot of this record is addressing.

A career that's stretched more than 40 years from the back streets of working class Belfast to the dizzy heights of President Bush's personal iPod player; there have been countless articles and biographies published about him over the decades, making him out to be everything from megalomaniac to mystic, a reclusive, troubled singer on a spiritual quest. But as he points out on the opening track, "How Can A Poor Boy," not one of those items comes anywhere near the truth. "I've been annointed, appointed, even magnified" he sings.

VM: Nobody knows me. None of these people know me. They don't know where I came from; they don't know where I've been; they don't know what it took; they don't know how hard it was. They don't know me; so that's what that song is addressing. "How can a poor boy get a message through to you."

The message on this new album is loud and clear. Songs like "Keep It Simple," "Poor Boy," and "School of Hard Knocks," a condemnation of celebrity culture, of those who play the fame game.

VM: Absolutely, I think I'd rather put it into writing songs, than photo ops, or being on talk shows or whatever. Because my personality does not suit that being famous bit; I don't have that personality, you see? Some people want to be out there, and I just don't. Basically I'm a simple guy, you know, in a complicated business, and the fame thing, I've never been comfortable with fame, so that's kind of what a lot of this material is about.

But Keep It Simple marks something of a departure for Van Morrison. Unlike recent previous albums, which have seen him recording whatever new material he's been playing live, all 11 songs on this album have been written specifically with this project in mind. The sound's different too, less horns and strings, he even plays a ukelele on three songs, the music is much more blues-based, back to the sort of music he started out playing.

VM: It's got elements of blues, folk, gospel, all of my influences. Curtis Mayfield. It's got a lot of inspiration from various things that I was inspired by in there, but it comes out like a new album. I mean it comes out like this is 2008 and this is what I'm saying now. All of it is based on, you know, the basic music I grew up with, because it all goes back to my father and his record collection, which was predominantly jazz, Louis Armstrong, Sydney Bechet type of jazz, through to Leadbelly, going into Muddy Waters. I grew up in a household where music was playing all the time; that was really what the source was for me.

But this isn't Van Morrison either standing still or looking back. Himself, the subject of three greatest hits packages last year, including the 3CD Still On Top compilation, is in an angry mood. The industry's obsession with nostalgia and back catalog is, he thinks, harming today's music.

VM: There's an obsession at the minute with what some people call the comics, and what I call the propaganda magazines, like Mojo, Q magazine, The Word, Rolling Stone magazine in America; there's this obsession with the past, you know; it's like no one has moved on. There's this obsession with the 60s or the 70s; it's like they've got nothing else to write about or something. I find that's just extremely boring, and, like, I've moved on. I've moved on, but this kind of catalog stuff, they want to keep you stuck in the past, the record companies. Like I had to put the compilation out, of a so-called greatest hits, and I'm not a greatest hits act, that's not what I do. But I had to do that in order to get this one out. Because they said: "Well, if we get this, then we're going to promote this new one." The marketplace is going backwards in terms of, like, stuck in the past; that just happens to be where it is today. I mean, who's having a breakthrough with something new that's really good? I haven't heard it.

Part of the van-the-man.info unofficial website