Van Morrison - A Stranger In His Own World

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9. The End of The 70s

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Given the prolonged break between albums, it is understandable why it is so tempting for critics to cite Veedon Fleece as the album that marked the end of Morrison’s golden era, but in truth, it would be just as fair to expand the era to cover the entirety of the 70's. Before the end of the decade, Morrison produced three further albums which (although much more straightforward than their predecessors) were just as strong as much of what had gone before.

Despite his constant claims of disdain for fame and celebrity, by the mid-70's Morrison had tired of his records commercial success failing to match their critical standing and made a concerted effort to appeal to a wider audience (a publicist who worked under him for a spell during the decade was reportedly fired after failing to help win a, honestly, fairly improbable, #1 hit on the
Billboard Hot 100. The final three albums of the decade, (the underrated A Period of Transition, an album of straight up 70's soul music, the synthesizer-driven FM radio-rock of Wavelength and the return to his speciality of warm folk rock/soul, distinguished from the similar attempts on Moondance and it’s descendants by the dominant lead fiddle playing of Toni Marcus, on the excellent Into The Music) were much less experimental and more commercial than Veedon Fleece, produced with the stated hope of a mainstream crossover. Despite promotional pushes such as making numerous American network TV appearances during these years, on the likes of
The Midnight Special and Saturday Night Live, in the end his efforts were unsuccessful, with only Wavelength particularly selling well out of the three.

Becoming either disillusioned or bored when his shot at the mainstream failed, Morrison quickly changed tack yet again and abandoned his pursuit for the top of the charts by releasing probably the most obtuse and uncommercial record of his entire career, Common One, in 1980. Recorded in an allegedly haunted monastery in France, Common One was the first album of his career where the jazz influence was no longer just to add flavour to the songs but actually started to seep into their structure. Much of the album was improvised with the brass section allowed to run riot with solos all over the songs, three of which were over 10 minutes long. The stand-out track on the album was the 15 minute epic Summertime in England, a song which has gone on to be regarded by some as perhaps the definitive Van Morrison track, arguably encompassing all aspects of The Man’s decades long genre-fusing catalogue. In the space of a quarter of an hour it shifts from catchy funk rock, to a blissed out organ-led improv section, to a section in which Morrison is essentially screaming in order to compete with the rising volume of the horn section as the track shoots up to a crescendo, before fading away again to nothing. It ends with as the band members follow their leader in drifting downwards into silence, as he repeats the phrase “can you feel the silence?” over and over again.
It is one of the greatest demonstrations on record of Morrison’s mastery of the use of musical dynamics. The lyrics, which name drop the literary greats which occupy Morrison’s reading list, such as TS Eliot and William Blake, were deemed pretentious at the time of release, as was the album as a whole. Although Morrison reportedly loved the album, Common One sank like a stone commercially and received overwhelmingly negative reviews, although it’s reputation has improved over the years.

Despite sales and chart positions continuing to be no more than adequate, Morrison’s bank balance continued to grow. By the dawn of the 1980s, Morrison was already a millionaire, a status he had earned while working in an industry where many other artists who had sold far more records than he had ended up penniless. Not only did Morrison have a surprisingly sharp head for business, as well as having learned from his bad experiences with Them, the egotism that drove him to become a solo artist and the fact that he wrote the entirety of the songs that he recorded and performed meant that he kept a far larger share of his royalties than he would have had he been sharing them with band-mates or song-writing partners.

Still only in his mid-30s, Morrison seemingly had a perfect life for an artist who was so-publicly disdainful of celebrity; he had enough money to set him up for the rest of his life, a devoted audience still willing to come to his gigs and buy his records whenever he felt like working but also, enough anonymity outside of the realm of music fandom to be able to move freely in most parts of the world without bearing the burden of stardom that many of his contemporaries faced. To his credit, he continued to work almost as hard as he had before despite being able to afford not to, but, to his discredit, became even more vocal in his criticism of his (relatively minor) celebrity status and even more bitter and argumentative about the music industry and music press which, on the whole, had been fairly good to him.

 

10. The 80's; Video Killed The Overweight Star

 

Following Common One, his next album Beautiful Vision indicated much of what was to come for the rest of the decade, and in a sense, the rest of his career. Although still recognizably a Van Morrison album, musically, and in terms of it’s lyrical content, the production was far slicker and the arrangement much stricter, with the musicians sounding as if they had less space to improvise.
The album also had a bad case of “80s drums” with the rhythm section sounding much flatter and stiffer than on any of his previous records. The album concluded with Scandinavia, the first fully instrumental track to feature on a Van Morrison album, on which Morrison indulged his inability to play keyboards and, predictably, was nominated for a Grammy for best instrumental rock performance. The track prominently featured the use of the ubiquitous synths that dominated pop music in the 80s in the background to Morrison’s noodling and edged the piece close to becoming actual elevator music.

Throughout the rest of the 80's he steered a typically restless trajectory, veering from style to style; Beautiful Vision was followed by further experimentation with the admirable but ultimately failed
experiment of Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, an album that attempted to merge his sound with synth pop, the much more straightforward but tired sounding A Sense of Wonder and the beautiful, haunting and inscrutable No Guru, No Method, No Teacher. Of all of his 80's albums, No Guru is the only inarguable masterpiece, all the more surprising as it really sounds nothing like any of the albums that surround it. Quiet, contemplative and more organic sounding than it’s more polished neighbours, it sounds more than anything else like an even more grown-up version of Veedon Fleece and is home to one of his greatest songs ever, In The Garden, a surprisingly successful merging of rock music with a guided meditation.

This was followed up by two more strong albums Poetic Champions Compose (originally intended to be fully instrumental and again featuring a strong jazz influence) and the acclaimed Irish Heartbeat, a belated exploration of his Irish roots. Following on from his ridiculously underappreciated cover of the Irish folk standard Purple Heather way back on Hard Nose The Highway, Irish Heartbeat was an album-length collaboration with The Chieftains, Irish traditional music’s flagship act of the time, consisting entirely of mostly successful covers of folk songs, many of which were relatively new to Van due to his East Belfast upbringing. The album did well and was generally well received in the rock press, with critics considering it to be one of the better fusions of rock with “world music” released in the wake of Paul Simon’s sales-juggernaut Graceland.

Irish Heartbeat’s relative success was atypical of it’s creator’s commercial fortunes during most of that decade. Morrison’s popularity declined through the 80's, largely due to his having relocated back to the UK. Never a fan of long-haul flights, he began to gig less and less frequently in the USA, which led to the shrinking of his audience there, although he maintained (and perhaps increased) his popularity in Europe.

Another factor in the decline in his popularity was simply due to timing. In the era of MTV when the biggest male stars of the day were the likes of Boy George and Simon Le Bon, the increasingly chubby and rapidly balding Morrison no longer looked remotely like he belonged on the hit parade; Morrison’s biographer Johnny Rogan described his outfit on the front cover of No Guru as looking like that of a history teacher. Indeed, the 80's was not kind to the heroes of the 60's and 70's as a whole. As the Woodstock generation artists began to hit middle age they found themselves awkwardly caught in limbo, now too old to be teen idols but seemingly without any positions yet available to them as elder statesmen. It was only really towards the end of the decade that AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) became a recognized genre that the music industry began to market for,
as they realized that pop music was no longer solely the domain of kids. By the end of the decade and into the 90's (the era of Eric Clapton Unplugged) the Woodstock generation were back with a bang and Morrison was to be one of this trend’s biggest beneficiaries.

 

11. Avalon Sunrise

The commercial Renaissance in Morrison’s career can be credited almost entirely to his manager of the late 80's Chris O’Donnell, former manager of Thin Lizzy. Goaded by his new charge’s complaint of “if I’m such a legend why aren’t I selling more albums?,” O’Donnell rose to the challenge where numerous others had previously failed, demanding Morrison’s record company mount an aggressive marketing campaign to promote his 1989 decade closing collection Avalon Sunset, featuring more advertising and in store promotion in record shops than at any time before in Morrison’s career. The campaign largely played up the “living legend” tag that those in the music press who were still interested had labelled him with and exploited the fact that his name was now widely known even amongst people who’d never listened to his music.

Although not helped by another overly polished and sterile production sound, it’s songs awash with Enya style synths, random harp licks, artificial sounding strings and strangely processed sounding lead acoustic guitar noodling (a production style baring the same relationship to the rawness of Astral Weeks as fine sushi has to a Pot Noodle) Avalon Sunset was elevated to it’s rightfully recognized status as the last classic Van Morrison album by it’s superb, mature songwriting. Apart from it’s ill-judged duet with Cliff Richard, Whenever God Shine His Light, (predictably, but also depressingly, the biggest hit of Morrison’s career in the UK since Them) the rest of the album was excellent, including great songs such as Orangefield, When Will I Ever To Live In God and by far it’s most famous song Have I Told You Lately?

His music having mellowed considerably with age (a mellowing not matched in his personal life in which he continued to be as contrary and argumentative as ever) Have I Told You Lately?, on it’s surface, a simple love ballad, but reportedly a hymn devoted to it’s writer’s relationship to God, was more emblematic of the maturation of Morrison’s songwriting than any of the album’s other tracks. A later radio standard in the UK and USA and an enormous singles chart hit in Ireland, Have I Told You Lately? was a song which I (and maybe others) used to regard as hopelessly middle of the road and a sign of Morrison’s dwindling powers. As time went by I saw the error of my ways and realized that it is not only a good song, not even a great song, but in fact that it is an absolutely perfect song. Treacly production and generic piano instrumental aside, in terms of it’s lyrics, simple but effective chord progression, that slides so seamlessly from verse to bridge that you don’t realize it’s happened, and effortless but unforgettable melody, Have I Told You Lately? is a pop song so timeless that had a Tin Pan Alley hack written it in the early 1900s they would have been able to have retired satisfied. It is an astonishing achievement in his career and something of an outlier amongst his later output, as it is an example of a great song that Morrison wouldn’t have possessed the maturity to write earlier on in his career and is all the better for it. The sunset motif of the album would have made this the ideal point for Morrison to fade away, but in commercial terms, if not creative, it was only now that he was getting started.

Avalon Sunset sold over 600,000 copies in the USA, Morrison’s first gold album there in more than a decade, but the real turning point in his fortunes came a year later in 1990 with the release of
The Best of Van Morrison, the first compilation record of his entire career. Also the brainchild of Chris O’Donnell, Morrison was furious and disgusted when he learnt of the endeavour but quickly changed his tune when, within months, it had become the best selling album of his career, which it remains today by quiet a long distance. The Best of Van Morrison sold more than five million copies in the USA, remained on the UK charts for years and topped the charts in Australia. It seemed as though Morrison’s potential audience had now aged with him. Thanks to Chris O’Donnell’s commercial savvy, a generation of now 40 and 50-something year olds, who had been hearing about Van Morrison’s talents for years but were too busy listening to Rod Stewart & Cat Stevens, finally had an accessible entry point to Morrison’s oeuvre which they apparently adored. At age 45, Morrison had finally, almost by stealth, moved from icon to star.

From that point on all his subsequent albums began rocketing up the charts, initially in Europe (his new releases became fixtures in the UK Top 10) and more gradually in the USA as well. At the end of a very slow process, he eventually reached his highest ever chart position in that country with the album Keep Me Singing which reached # 9 in 2016; fifty two years after his first appearance on the Billboard chart while still a member of Them in 1964. As well as the greatly improved sales figures and increasingly large attendances coming to his concerts, the acclaim and accolades continued to roll in thick and fast throughout the 90s and into the 21st century; inductions into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he famously declined to attend; more on that later) the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, A Brit Award and Grammy Award for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement, a knighthood from the Queen, as well as being cited as an influence by almost every up and coming singer-songwriter in the English speaking world. He even began to earn praise from a lot of literary figures who have saluted him for his evocative lyrics (Irish poet Paul Durcan, who collaborated with Morrison on the bizarre spoken-word track In The Days Before Rock and Roll, referred to him as one of the two finest Irish poets of his lifetime, matched only by Patrick Kavanagh.)

 

Improbably, in the mid-90s he also became a genuine celebrity, becoming a fixture in the British and Irish gossip columns thanks to his relationship and subsequent marriage to Michelle Rocca, a much younger Irish socialite, a role that he appeared to enjoy despite his decades spent railing against the showbiz aspect of music. Through Rocca, he even gained a distinctive visual aesthetic after having been in the public eye for 30 years without one; her recommendation of an onstage look of dark glasses, long black coat and mobster’s fedora (presumably chosen to hide his fatness and baldness) becoming so intrinsically linked with his music in the public consciousness that it is often invoked in articles relating to his classic albums, which were all released decades before his adoption of this look.

Today, Van Morrison is far bigger now than he ever has been, selling millions of albums and playing to packed houses around the world of, principally, older audiences. As glad as I am to see his talent receiving the feting that it surely deserves, any time I listen to any of his more recent albums, the more cynical part of me wonders as to whether these newer/older fans have actually took the time to check out any of the music on which he built the reputation that eventually brought him to their attention in the first place.

 

12. The Wild Night, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle

In his wonderfully titled article “Van Morrison is More Than Astral Weeks and he Damn Well Knows It” music writer Steven Hyden argued that the biggest turning point in Morrison’s career came not with Avalon Sunset but actually much earlier, with Common One. Common One is a deliberately difficult record, probably much too lacking in hooks for the average casual listenership who enjoy Morrison’s contemporary albums but it is enormously significant in that it probably represented the moment, more clearly than any other, when Morrison decided to give up on being a rock star.
Hyden notes that the most complicated and experimental album of his long career was released after a trilogy of straightforward, commercial records all of which Morrison had released as a deliberate effort to move from cult hero to mainstream pop star, a game which he quickly grew bored of. He then went on to make the argument that had Morrison persevered at this time, he might have become a far bigger star and even sooner than his eventual success came to him.

During the period in the mid-70s while he was on hiatus, the rock music landscape was transforming into one that was perfectly attuned for Morrison to take his place as one of it’s major artists when making his comeback. During his time away Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger had emerged as two of the biggest stars in rock, credited as leading lights in the sub-genre known as Heartland Rock, a new style which offered a kind of punk-like, minimalistic alternative to the superficial and showy glitz and glamour of the arena-filling megastars of the decade. Heartland Rock was a form that hearkened back to rock and roll’s simpler past, with its inspirations being routed in the 60’s British invasion, Motown soul and to, a certain extent, even the originators, such as Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc., with many an artist amongst it’s ranks having at least one boogie-woogie riff-based stomper that they were able to pull out of the bag if the crowd started to get restless. Musical hallmarks included a raspy, white guy, vocalist trying and failing to hit notes more appropriate for smooth voiced soul crooners like Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye, fairly rudimentary and functional guitar work, in contrast to the virtuosity that was standard at the time, with the musical heavy lifting being done by piano, organ or saxophone, which became de rigueur additions to compliment the 3 piece rock band line up. The genre’s lyrics were usually more story based than a lot of popular music, in contrast to the tales of witches and wizardry which were bizarrely becoming popular through the likes of Led Zeppelin and the members of the prog-rock fraternity, in an attempt to bring rock music back to it’s roots “on the Backstreets” as Bruce Springsteen put it. “The heartland” that gave the genre it’s name was that of the middle-American towns and cities that the lyrics spoke of;
kitchen sink dramas about ordinary working class life, falling in love, getting married, whether you wanted to or not, working (or, more often, not), petty crime, and dreams of making it big in rock and roll.

Despite the America-centricity of the genre, Springsteen, Seeger and other artists on the fringes of the genre (Jackson Browne and Tom Petty to name but two) were open in their reverence for Morrison, his fusion of rock and soul; his use of the basic rock band line up enhanced by a mini-orchestra of piano, organ and horns, his emotive howling and vocal rolling, stretching the limits of his vocal range to rage against his inability to really express the emotions that were tearing him apart from the inside, and the evocative lyrics always concerned with finding something bigger and better than was offered by conventional life. Although the Heartlanders would be far more specific in the construction of their narratives, (Bruce Springsteen’s overuse of the name Mary for seemingly all of his fictional girlfriends has become a running joke amongst his detractors) they were still informed by the sense of grandeur in normality from Morrison’s work. It was an unspoken irony that so much of this genre that spoke of the trials of the working class youth of America originated in the mind of a young Irish man.

It’s rare in popular music to be able to pinpoint the genesis of an entire genre of music to a single song, but in the case of Heartland Rock this is possible for those who are familiar with Morrison’s back catalogue. The index case for the movement is Wild Night, the atypically hard rocking Top 40 hit single which led off the otherwise country flavoured Tupelo Honey album. Down to it’s undistorted electric guitar riff, built around root position chords in e-minor, rock music’s most sacred key, to its frenetic saxophone solo, thumping piano chords and, most importantly, it’s lyrics of its protagonist seeking to find deeper meaning in a seemingly trivial night out on the town (“And you walk the wet streets trying to remember, All the wild nights breezes in your memory ever, And everything looks so complete, When you’re walking out on the streets”) it presents the fully-formed genetic code of the future sub-genre. Though never mentioned in the same breath as Gloria,
Brown Eyed Girl or Madame George, in my opinion, Wild Night is the single most influential song Morrison ever wrote and one that dozens of artists owe their entire careers to. Wild Night’s influence can be demonstrated by looking at the direct imitations that each of his most obvious disciples attempted; Seeger’s Night Moves, Springsteen’s Spirit in the Night, arguably Thin Lizzy’s Dancing in the Moonlight and in the case of John Cougar Mellencamp an actual cover version which went on to be the highest charting song written by Van Morrison on the Billboard chart when it hit #3 in 1994.

Ultimately, I disagree with Steven Hyden’s thesis that Morrison could eventually have capitalized on the popularity of his imitators to have become a chart topping pop idol due to a range of factors (his lack of conventional good looks, his age at the time, his unwillingness to engage with PR despite demanding to be more famous and, most of all, his aloofness on stage, a world away from the engaging and crowd pleasing story telling of Springsteen) it’s interesting to wonder if he had pursued a more mainstream rock approach for longer whether his legacy would be viewed in a different way or if he would be playing to a different (perhaps younger) audience today.

 

13. Legacy

The same contrarianism that saw him year sharply turn left with Common One no doubt inspired his eventual reaction to the Heartland Rockers who idolized him when they finally came on his radar. Having somehow managed to avoid Springsteen up until his ascent to the position of biggest rock star in the world with the release of Born In The USA in 1984, instead of being flattered Morrison’s was furious, incensed that The Boss had built a successful career by ripping him off. Far from trying to capitalize on the popularity of his devotees, he instead chose to castigate them, penning the bitter No Guru track A Town Called Paradise, which opens with the line “Copycats ripped off my words, copycats ripped off my songs.” This may have been the final nail in the coffin of Morrison’s relationship with the musical mainstream. Morrison’s attitude to rock and roll had always been ambivalent up to that point. Although he had been vocal in his suspiciousness surrounding some aspects of rock culture (excessive drug taking and the peace and love ideology of the hippie movement, which he regarded, rightly or wrongly, as calculating, phony and cynical) he had never been outwardly hostile to the genre it’s self, being on record as saying the highlight of his career was his on-stage duet with Jim Morrison as well as having friendships with many of the era’s biggest icons, such as Robbie Robertson and Lou Reed. However, from this point on his stance noticeably hardened, bristling aggressively when people would refer to him as a rock star and becoming the first artist to decline attending his own induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, leaving Robertson to pick up his award for him. He began to argue that rock and roll was now a meaningless term, applicable to only the original blues-inspired heroes of the 50s and kept alive as a marketing term by a cynical music industry who attempted to sell it as a lifestyle brand. In one interview, he dismissively referred to The Beatles as overrated and “peripheral,” meaning that those who viewed the Fab Four as the starting point for popular music were ignorant, either wilfully or accidentally, of the great heritage which they had descended from; a not unreasonable point of view, but one which he did little to further the cause of by as usual expressing it in the most argumentative and offensive way possible. Perhaps as a consequence of willingly ostracizing himself from his contemporaries, from the 80's onwards he started to lean more into the jazz influence that he had begun cultivating on Common One. Had his jazz flavoured albums been of a similar standard to his rock ones this would have been a legitimate and commendable decision but, unfortunately, his efforts dating from then on were more in line with the easy listening stylings he premiered on Scandinavia than anything from Common One; far more Mantovani than Miles Davis.

It’s hard for me to imagine that the people who were entranced by His Band & The Street Choir and Veedon Fleece when they were first released could feel a similar sense of mystical wonder when listening to recent Van effort’s like The Prophet Speaks, Versatile or Roll With The Punches, all filled wall to wall with obnoxiously “hep” swing tracks being performed by a guy with a voice so weathered by time that it now resembles a bin truck attempting to imitate Tony Bennett. The most disappointing aspect is that Morrison’s recent albums are even more painfully retro than any music being released by any other ageing rock star that I know of. It stands in stark contrast to his best music; whereas Astral Weeks is so timeless that it could pass for something that Sufjan Stevens or some similar indie-folker brought out last week, Morrison’s current material is so dated it would even have sounded old-fashioned in the '60s!

The track that signalled the unfortunate direction that Morrison’s music would take in the 1990s and onwards appeared on Side One of Avalon Sunset. Seeming destined to be instantly forgotten, I’d Like To Write Another Song was an innocuous big band jazz number buried midway through the the first side of vinyl’s track listing. With it’s lyrics on the topic of writer’s block, a seemingly ironic subject for an artist as prolific as Morrison, it sounded like the kind of thing that Randy Newman would knock out in a few minutes to make up the run time on his latest Pixar soundtrack. With it’s textbook jazzy chord progression and forgettable instrumental section, the track was nothing more than album filler, and it is deeply regrettable that it was emblematic of much of what was to come from Morrison in his later career (despite how few classic songs he has added to his glittering back catalogue since, Avalon Sunset came less than halfway through Morrison’s recording career, both in terms of time and the number of records he has released.) However, the fact that I’d Love To Write Another Song is a jazz track is far from the only reason that it is symbolic of the malady that would begin to afflict Morrison. Of all the American styles he’d dipped his styles into over the years,
big-band jazz was not one he had visited often, but it was also not one he’d ignored completely. The title track from Moondance certainly had shades of the style but he’d most explicitly previously attempted it on the track I Will Be There from Saint Dominic’s Preview. By the magnificent standards of that particular album, I Will Be There could arguably also be described as a throwaway, but even at worst it is still incomparably better than I’d Love To Write Another Song.

Firstly, one factor the earlier song has in it’s favour is the simple fact that at the time of it’s release,
I Will Be There was the only song in Morrison’s catalogue which sounded like it did, a welcome detour away from the artist’s regular fare, instead of yet another example of the innumerable seemingly copied and pasted tracks in the same style that began choking up the track listings of his later albums. Not helping the later song’s case is the obvious deterioration in Morrison’s voice that had occurred in the seventeen years since the recording of the two tracks; likely a combination of the ravages of time and the excessive consumption of alcohol and cigarettes. Morrison’s soaring vocals are one of the factors that elevate I Will Be There above it’s successor; although he may not match his legendarily smooth tone, Morrison soars to high notes (both literally and emotionally) that Frank Sinatra could never have gotten near. As well as Morrison himself (and probably most crucially) the most obvious difference is the difference in quality of the backing band. Although the music of I Will Be There is no more complex than Another Song (both are composed of similar chord progressions of lazily shuffling 7th chords,) the band on the earlier track sounds far more invested, the thumping piano that drives the song sounding as if it's player is a man possessed, flinging in tasteful fills with abandon, whereas on it’s counterpart, bandleader Georgy Fame plods through his organ line so stiffly and with so little imagination it sounds as if he’s living in constant fear of Morrison turning around and rebuking him mid-song (which, based both on the anecdotes of musicians who have worked for Morrison and some of his actual onstage outbursts, Fame very well may be.) The same can be said for the horn sections which dominate both tracks as well as the rhythm sections; whereas Another Song trudges rigidly forward, I Will Be There grooves. The band on the first song sound like they really enjoy playing together, whereas on the second song they sound as though they’re just managing to stay awake long enough to finish the session purely by fantasising about what they’re going to have for their teas afterwards.

Although they’re some of the hardest aspects to define, energy and passion are amongst the most important things that lead to the creation of good music, particularly in a genre as technically simple as rock and roll. Although the bulk of Morrison’s songs since Avalon Sunset have not been categorizable as jazz (with the possible exception of a string of albums he released throughout the 2010s) the easy option of using sumptuous lounge orchestration to disguise lazy songwriting has seemingly become irresistible to Morrison on the majority of the music that he has produced in the latter half of his career. Having listened to his most recent release, 2019’s Three Chords and The Truth (which generally got more favourable reviews than much of his 21st century output has garnered, even ludicrously being reviewed by the uber-hip trend setting music website Pitchfork) it became easy to see the various different facets of Morrison’s music that had contributed to it’s decline in quality. As well as the (unfortunate but inevitable) decline in his vocal prowess, almost every aspect of the music seemed tired and disinterested. Despite his many years in the game, Morrison’s songwriting had still not risen beyond the use of the most rudimentary chord structures, but, crucially, he no longer seemed to care about interesting and catchy vocal hooks or memorable instrumental riffs. Although the musicianship is as exemplary as ever, just as on I’d Love To Write Another Song the musicians barely want to break a sweat, seemingly afraid to stretch themselves in their improvisation of solos or ornamentation of the track as a whole. Although it’s unlikely to be true, it’s sounds as though very little time and effort has gone into the arrangements, giving none of the tracks a distinct musical texture, to the point where one track sounds very much like the next. Similarly, the song’s melodies all sound samey and forgettable; perhaps Morrison’s reduced vocal range and his modern inability to use his once much-celebrated improvisational powers to disguise the lack of originality in the tunes has proved to be his undoing.

Morrison has continued to release music at a rate of knots since his descent into mediocrity, with his biographer Johnny Rogan suggesting his eye-watering productivity may be little more than an attempt to stave off writer’s block, with Morrison flinging out every half-developed idea that crosses his mind in order to convince himself (if not necessarily anyone else) that he is still as good as he ever was. However much this can be applied to his music, that thesis can almost certainly be applied to his lyrics. Whereas once there appeared to be painstaking care applied to them, Morrison’s more recent lyrics have become inexcusably lazy. The vivid natural imagery of the golden era, “the gardens misty wet with rain” from the Astral Weeks track Sweet Thing, the “ivy on the old clinging wall” from Warm Love on Hardnose essentially became repeated to the point of cliché; fans could indulge themselves with a fun drinking game by listening to any of Morrison’s post 1980 output and downing a shot every time they heard a reference to topics such as “angels,” “rolling hills,” “crystal streams,” “high on the mountainside” and that old favourite “the mystic.” Phrases which had once been revolutionary in the field of pop music lyrics now seemed ludicrous when seemingly thrown in willy-nilly over inferior and completely edgeless music; a man frequently referred to as a genius now came off as a pretentious hack straining for pseudo-profundity. This trend reached it’s apex with the ridiculous Ancient Highway, a track from 1995’s Days Like This, which bordered on self-parody. Highway was a typical,semi-improvised minor key Van Morrison jam, with it’s vigorously strummed acoustic guitar and gently tootling flute line a callback (intentional or not) to the haunting mood of Veedon Fleece. With the music no more than adequate, the laziness of the lyrics is even more sharply thrown into focus; as Morrison nostalgically pines for his lost Ulster youth, he pulls out all the stops and gets down on bended knee, praying to his higher self to intercede and ensure he “keeps his feet on the ground” while simultaneously watching a nearby river flow. Joining his own “over soul” in the spiritual viewing gallery are an array of mid-20th century pop culture icons ranging from Hank Williams to even George Best. It seems like little more than a copy and paste of Morrison’s career long obsessions sung over a tuneless melody, the grunting that was by then all that remained of Morrison’s legendary scat singing not being nearly enough to distract the listener’s ear from the track’s inescapable laziness.

Despite his over-reliance on his talk show house-band horn section to tart up tired material, the majority of these late period Van tracks are not still jazz by any stretch of the imagination, far too reliant on their use of bread and butter major and minor chords to really resemble American music’s most musically sophisticated genre. And if that is the case, then the question must be asked, what are they? On the album What’s Wrong With This Picture? (in my opinion, probably the worst of his entire career,) pompously released on the legendary jazz label Blue Note, Morrison included an otherwise unremarkable track named Goldfish Bowl, on which he makes his feelings on that subject clearly known. More of the aural equivalent of an angry entry to the Letter’s to the Editor column than a song, Goldfish Bowl became another one of the long litany of songs Morrison has penned in defiance of his critics and the hypocrisy of the music industry (a tradition which originated on the hippie-baiting The Great Deception from Hard Nose The Highway and one which has intensified throughout the decades, to the point where Morrison is now probably second only to Taylor Swift in terms of the number of song’s he has devoted to calling out “the haters.”) “Jazz, blues and funk – that’s not rock and roll” Morrison petulantly states on the track, spitting the lyrics rather than singing them in an attempt to convince others of his own certainly in regards to his role in the world of music. Despite his own truculent stance, this definition is still unsatisfactory. Although unquestionably all of those styles are evident in Morrison’s music, even today in the wasteland of creativity that his work lingers in, with the exception of the spawn of I’d Love To Write Another Song and increasingly frequent twelve bar blues numbers that have stretched some of his most recent album’s run times to beyond the limits of the average listeners’s patience, these styles still cross-pollinate more often than not.

Regardless of whatever Morrison has convinced himself to be the truth, to the ear of an unbiased observer, his own assessment of his music is not accurate. In their legendary concert film, the Martin Scorsese directed The Last Waltz, in which Morrison himself makes a stow stealing cameo, performing a blistering version of Caravan, Levon Helm, drummer with Morrison’s Woodstock neighbours, The Band, described rock and roll very aptly as a fusion of all the styles of music that had congealed together in the American deep south; the likes of folk, country, gospel, blues, jazz and all of the other usual suspects.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, when viewing the genre through this lens, Van Morrison is as much a rock and roll artist as it’s possible to be. Even today, stripped of much of the power and passion that informed his classic albums, his music is still an unquestionable fusion of all of these elements, albeit, elements which he synthesises in a very different manner to any of his peers. Unlike the typical rock band that was common when he was enjoying his golden era (who used the all-mighty force of the electric guitar like a steamroller to squash all of their influences together into a sonic pancake where the points at which the styles met were no longer audible) in Morrison’s music it’s much easier to see where the joins are. Despite his puritanical devotion to his early inspirations, Morrison would no doubt take pride in the fact that he has always tried to assist in the progress and development of his chosen art form, regularly striving to innovate his own sound for fear of becoming redundant (at least up until 1990, that is.) Despite the vitriol that he reserves for all aspects of the music industry, (especially journalists) he is also usually grudgingly willing to receive any award or bit of spare praise that is thrown in his direction. That includes celebrity endorsement; despite his on-the-record stance on The Beatles, a quick online search can easily come up with a selfie of Morrison beaming alongside George Harrison. Further searches can come up with literally dozens of similar results, from Eric Clapton, to Phil Lynott, to Roger Daltrey, to Bono, to Elvis Costello and even to Harry Styles, all artists who would feel no such shame in being referred to as rock. Artists operating in the worlds of jazz, blues and folk continue to produce quality work up to this day, but I don’t think there is one act in those genres who has enjoyed the level of acclaim or can legitimately claim to have been as widely influential on music as a whole in the last fifty years as Van Morrison. And if the progressive fusion of jazz, blues and folk isn’t rock and roll; then what is it?

A very legitimate argument could be made that the single genre with which Morrison’s music can be most accurately identified is not rock but soul; and in truth this argument is probably correct. However, soul and rock are both subgenres that descended directly from rock and roll, which is still the most accurate catch-all term to describe the totality of musical styles that branched off from the original musical style popularized by Elvis in the 1950s.

In the woke climate of 2021, there are many who see rock and roll as an anachronistic and even problematic term, arguing that the obvious decline of the electric guitar-led rock band as popular music’s default combo is no bad thing, given the sub-genre’s white, heterosexual and hyper-masculine traits, and that, as a result, Morrison is no worse off for attempting to have his name removed from the roster of it’s legends. Despite those arguments, the current multi-genre mash that is the music scene of the early 21st century ultimately did originate in the cultural climate created by the explosion of rock and roll and it’s subgenres in the 1960s, of which Morrison can legitimately claim to have been a very influential part. Even though Heartland Rock (as with everything that is undeniably white and working class in America, it is now rather unfairly connected with Republicanism and aggressive US nationalism, an extremely unfair and ironic accusation given that many of it’s leading lights are staunch Democrats; so much so that Springsteen was reportedly asked to go up against Donald Trump on behalf of the party in the 2020 election; Trump verses Springsteen for president – have we slipped into a alternate dimension?) is currently about as fashionable as red trousers or balanced political discourse, many of the cooler bands who still unashamedly identify as rock, the likes of The National, The War On Drugs, Sharon Van Ettan and Haim, have undoubtedly been influenced by it, carrying Morrison’s legacy on into the present day. Somewhat more obliquely, Morrison’s mastery of chanting and repetition to induce meditative states in his audience was an acknowledged influence on the stadium-oriented alternative rock of the 80s and onwards, with the likes of The Waterboys, Simple Minds and most especially U2 admitting to his influence and, arguably, can still be heard in a watered down fashion today in the work of artists who strain to reach similar emotional highs such as Coldplay (although that might be a bit of a stretch.) To a lesser, but more concrete extent, his music has almost certainly influenced, and continues to influence, the likes of modern soul shouters such as Hozier and every guitar wielding rock singer-songwriter who has ever used a horn section to embellish his music. Van Morrison may not want to admit it but he is a rock and roll person and the rock and roll community are his people. By attempting to sever his legacy from the cultural movement that he helped to shape he is undoubtedly doing harm to it, gaslighting his audience into believing that he is something that he is not and never has been. This, in combination with the consistently mediocre music that he now releases is constantly adding fuel to the fire of those who casually and unknowingly dismiss his work as “old-fashioned;” as if that argument were enough to deter the youth of the 21st century from checking out David Bowie or Led Zeppelin.

Others are not as ready to indulge Morrison’s delusions as he himself would. The Irish-trad fusion of Irish Heartbeat was lauded on release by the rock press while being slaughtered in the folk music media, no doubt the exact opposite reaction that Morrison had been hoping for. The likely reason why Morrison keeps doubling down on his denial of his rock icon status is due to the same ever present contrarianism he responded with when reports of supernatural visions were brought to his attention on the tour for that same album. Clive Culbertson, his bass player on the tour, and Derek Bell, harp and keyboard virtuoso with accompanying act The Chieftains, both long-term devotees of eastern spirituality and altered states of consciousness, claimed to have seen angelic figures appearing behind Morrison as he sang on stage. In their interpretation, these beings were spirit guides sent to assist the great man in completing the task he was sent to this world to accomplish. While you would think these sightings would be music to the ears of an artist who had spent his entire career speculating on the nature of spiritual truth, their boss furiously dismissed their visions as hallucinations; most likely unwilling to entertain the possibility as he was angry that he’d not been the one to have seen them himself. This contrarianism is the key element of Morrison’s personality. In many ways, despite how far he has travelled and how much he has seen he is still a product of his Ulster-Protestant upbringing, (the same group of people who insist with a straight face that they are not Irish in any way, despite coming from a region that has the word Ireland in it’s title, in which many of their number are members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, their most famous cultural institution is The Grand Orange Order of Ireland and their national football team wears a green shirt with shamrocks on it) stubbornly denying the reality of the situation when it doesn’t fit his preferred interpretation, even when none of the facts support it.

It might mean very little to many people, but to me the idea that there is an icon of the 20th century’s most significant musical and cultural movement that has written songs about obscure Irish locations such as Arklow, Drumshambo and Coney Island (not actually an island but a peninsula off the coast of the small County Down village of Ardglass, who’s only other claim to fame is that it’s home to a sewage disposal plant) is utterly thrilling, far more so than the existence of the innumerable folk and country and Irish artists who have done the same. Whatever he may have convinced himself to the contrary, Van Morrison’s latest offerings are not getting reviews in Pitchfork on the strength of their music (Three Chords and The Truth is pleasant, but more suited to the programming schedules of Irish local radio, appropriate background noise for middle-aged housewives as they prepare the Sunday roast, than the contents of cutting edge culture websites) but on the reputation of the fantastic music that he made decades earlier. The showband show of the 21st century may keep adding zeros to Morrison’s bank balance, but if he’s to be remembered by music historians in 100 years time, it will assuredly be for the music he produced in the ’60s and ’70s. It is unrealistic to believe that Morrison will ever come close to the heights of his soulful, innovative and eternal golden era recordings ever again, but at the very least he could have the graciousness to acknowledge the musical movement and fans that put him on his pedestal and allowed him to achieve the vast success he enjoys in his old age, instead of crankily and dismissively attempting to deny it’s importance or even it’s existence. By continuing to do so, he’s confirming to many that his true status is as a purveyor of musical relief between the interviews on Irish
light-entertainment shows, with the most acclaim that he should feel entitled to being the flattering of Paddy Cole as they sit together backstage in the RTE green room.

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