Belfast & Van Morrison: Works in Progress

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Belfast, Bob Dylan, Gerald Dawe, poetry, Seamus Heaney, Van Morrison

A version of this article appeared in the Ulster issue of Reading Ireland.

There is no denying Gerald Dawe’s sense of wonder for Van Morrison – and for Belfast – in his lovely book In Another World. Culled from all the material Dawe has published on Morrison since the 1990s, it is a portrait of these artists in and of Belfast, their “otherness” in the city that made them, a city that changed forever when sectarian violence took possession of it in the late 1960s. In his preface to this little volume of essays, Dawe welcomes us in to partake of all on offer in Belfast the early and mid-1960s, a wondrous time for the northern capital, a mecca for live music in dancehalls and ‘hops’ all over the city, and in living rooms and parlors, its people tuned into the radio. In his North Belfast home, young Dawe is immersed in a world of creativity, “fascinated by stories overheard” about the way things used to be – in the songs of his opera singing grandmother, of Cleo Laine and Sarah Vaughan, of Ella Fitzgerald on the gramophone. This is another world, a lost world where all the young dudes in Belfast wore black arm-bands following the news that Otis Redding had died in a plane crash in Wisconsin. It was in this other world that Ella Fitzgerald performed one night, and when Dawe’s mother returns home from the gig, she tells him, “I’m sent.”

In the heart of this rocking city, he places Van Morrison, a working man working out his songs with “the accent you heard in the streets,” helping lead the way for Dawe to emerge as a poet, with a new confidence that it was possible to be both “a Belfast guy and lyrical.” Armed thus, two Orangefield Boys School alumni begin their journey in a “city dominated by work, work, work.” But theirs is a creative labor, a different kind of work than expected of them in industrial Belfast. In Another World is a tribute to that labor and to the city that inspired it before The Troubles “put into quarantine those kinds of energies.”

As he has explained elsewhere, Dawe is a poet in love with “the notion of cramming a world into a short space on the page, by allusion, turn of phrase, suggestion,” a notion that is realized in this slim volume of just 116 pages. Reminiscent of Seamus Heaney’s thatcher, Dawe has the Midas touch, “pinning down his world, handful by handful,” with trademark exactitude. The world that produced Van Morrison and Gerry Dawe is a red-bricked “civic landscape of class distinction,” in which children learn their place very early in life. In his music, Morrison revisits this Belfast, in songs of innocence and experience as the guy who worked in a meat-cleaning factory, a chemist’s shop, and as a window-washer in Orangefield. It is in these lyrics that Dawe finds a kinship with Patrick Kavanagh, in the “walking down familiar streets in search of that elusive authentic past, although when he asks Morrison about the Kavanagh connection in a 1995 public conversation, the transcript of which is included in the book, the singer keeps it simple: “It’s really all the same. The difference is you just do it with music.” This suffices for Dawe, the acclaimed poet who once responded when asked If he could write his epitaph in no more than 10 words, what it would be and why,

Gerald Dawe, Poet, born 1952 Belfast. The simpler it is the better.

In retrospect, Dawe is surprised by Morrison’s candor, aware as the rest of us of the singer’s reputation as a notoriously difficult interviewee. Throughout his career, Morrison has explained repeatedly that he will not and, more importantly, cannot “intellectualize” or engage in the kind of navel-gazing analysis of his music that will compromise what Dawe calls “the fate of genuine artistic endeavor.” Not surprising then that Morrison has delivered more than a few blunt responses to interviewers who have not been paying attention, reminiscent of Bob Dylan in that famous 1965 press conference in San Francisco. When asked if he thought of himself as a protest singer or a rock and roll singer, young Dylan replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man.” Case closed.

Similarly, any attempt to pigeon-hole Van Morrison is a fool’s errand. Hip to this, Dawe probes to determine the source of the songs, where the lyrics come from. And, Morrison tells him.

Morrison now in his seventies is the consummate performer, a recording artist still on the road honing his craft, doing what he refers to as “earning my living” as he has done since beginning his musical apprenticeship in the early 1960s. Already as gruff as John Lee Hooker, he seemed much older, having written “Gloria” when he was a teenager, playing in the city’s clubs, Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club on Great Victoria Street and at The Maritime.

Asserting himself with all boldness, he served his time in Belfast until 1967 when he “ran out of space” and left for New York. “I worked my way from my Belfast to New York and didn’t even know I was there because it was work,” Morrison once remarked in a 1987 interview. A year later, he would record Astral Weeks. Dawe clarifies that contrary to what many music critics have described as a breakthrough record for Morrison, Astral Weeks is a compilation of work – a vision – that he had begun sketching in Belfast. Considered together, its songs mark a poetic shift, presenting another mode – another mood – for the singer. Most resonant and relevant for Dawe is its centerpiece composition, “Madame George,” a farewell not only to Morrison’s youth, but also to a way of life in a city still unblemished by bombs and bullets and unnecessary bloodshed. For young Gerry Dawe, it is a farewell to a place where curiosity and creativity had flourished, where he and his friends “did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape.” As Dawe describes it, “’Madame George’ is a portrait of a society about to withdraw from public view at the same time as the voice which describes it is also leaving the scene.” The reality is that fifty years ago, Astral Weeks may not even have been on the radar in Northern Ireland, its people more intent on what was happening in Derry in 1968. For some, it would take thirty years to fully absorb the blow that Astral Weeks was their Paradise Lost – it was Seamus Heaney’s “music of what happens.” This poignant goodbye to Belfast may indeed prompt readers to indulge in fantasies about another world that might have been.

What if the storm never came?

With the insight of a local, Dawe meanders through space and time, from the attic of his house in North Belfast overlooking the city’s amber lights below to streets and characters and urban rituals now familiar to a global audience – to Cyprus Avenue and Fitzroy, to the lower Falls and Orangefield, to Hyndford Street and the Beechie River and out to the Castlereagh Hills. There’s Madame George, and Sam and Van cleaning windows before breaking for tea and Paris buns and lemonade in the corner shop; there’s “the soldier boy older now with hat on, drinking wine”; there’s the train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, and, in “Boffyflow and Spike,” which Dawe reads aloud while Morrison accompanies him on guitar, there is a sense of wonder: “wee Alfie at the Castle picture house; pastie suppers at Davy’s Chipper, gravy rings, barmbracks, wagon wheels, snowballs. A Sense of Wonder.” Going back to a time “when the world made more sense,” as Morrison proclaims in his 1991 Hymns to the Silence, it would be reductive to characterize In Another World as a sentimental trip to a place where the grass is always greener. Nonetheless, it is a journey of nostalgia, and it is worth noting, as Dawe has pointed out previously, the etymology of the word: “Nostalgia is about the pain of home, -nostos – home, and algia – pain.” In Another World is a more nuanced imperative to get on with the show, summed up in the title track of Morrison’s 2003 album, “What’s Wrong with this Picture” – “Don’t you understand I left all that jive behind?”

His journey from “the home place” in pre-Troubles Belfast to a space where he could pursue artistic life on his own terms is not one that can be packaged in the myth of modern celebrity culture. As Dawe describes it, Morrison’s work inhabits a space that “has continuously moved in and out of his audience’s expectations,” the artist a wily critic of the crassness and commercialization of a music business that “thrives on and exploits disclosure” of the private persona behind a typically recalcitrant public self. Morrison leaves no doubt about this, once stating that “music is spiritual, the music business isn’t.”

His spiritual journey began in a childhood home that was full of music. His father, a shipyard worker and an avid record collector, was the key influence, with an enormous collection of rare American blues and jazz vinyl. As Morrison himself acknowledges, “There was probably only ten big collectors of blues and jazz in Belfast and my father was one of them.” Fitting then, that at the age of nine, Morrison was already a fan of Jelly Roll Morton, Lead Belly, and Solomon Burke. Orangefield Boys School was no match for the education he received from his father’s astonishing collection of jazz and Wild West books or from the movies of the day. His years at school were not helpful. A self-described freak, Morrison explains that

“There was no school for people like me . . . either we didn’t have the bread to go to the sort of school where we could sit down and do our own thing or that type of school didn’t exist.”

Thus, he was never taught about the Irish writers or any literary traditions. It was through other often solitary means that he discovered Dickens, Kerouac, Yeats, Blake, Kavanagh, Joyce, Heaney, and his own distinctive voice as an Irish writer. Unlike Dawe, a poet, literary critic and former Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, Van Morrison brings no academic credentials to his craft. He brings to it what he tells Sean O’Hagan in 2008, an exploration of the themes of “all Irish writing . . . Basically, Irish writers, and I include myself here, are writing about the same things . . . Often it’s about when things felt better. Either that, or sadness… It’s the story about going back and rediscovering that going back answers the question, or going back and discovering it doesn’t answer the question. Going away and coming back, those are the themes of all Irish writing.” Or more succinctly,

There are two stories in music – leaving and going home.

Now in his early seventies, having released his 40th album, The Prophet Speaks, Morrison describes himself as a “work in progress.” His second album of 2018, it is a collaboration with jazz multi-instrumentalist Joey DeFrancesco and marks a return to the blues and jazz that inspired him as a young musician in Belfast, a journey back to “the old way, the jazz way.” Previewing it from the Europa Hotel in Belfast, Morrison says “It goes back to Into The Mystic and various things I’ve written so it’s new and old; there’s a thread which is ongoing.” Still a journeyman, honing his craft, Morrison reiterates his commitment to the labor as inseparable from the homing instinct that is a powerful motif in his work, explaining in a statement to Rolling Stone, “It was important for me to get back to recording new music as well as doing some of the blues material that has inspired me from the be- ginning. Writing songs and making music is what I do, and working with great musicians makes it all the more enjoyable.”

Morrison shares the cover of the record with the ventriloquist dummy from Educating Archie, evoking the radio program from his childhood. Apt, this tribute to a time and a place Dawe captures as one where “people really did get on with it; and get it on,” the kind of stoic yet soulful quality Seamus Heaney summed up as “keeping going.” Journeying back, it is a tribute to radio, a wireless portal into another world – a free world – in “the days before rock n roll.” As Dawe reflects,

“radio was our way into the wider world. At first it was the big old woolen-faced box in the corner and then the moveable transistor which was carried around like an iPhone . . . the radio was a great connector; it made a younger generation feel that even while you might have been up in the back bedroom on your own, you knew there were thousands like you ‘listening in’ and that conversations were had about whose new single was just out, or an album. Or simply playing back music from before.”

Dawe’s final chapter of this particular journey In Another World opens with lines from the late Mose Allison, a genre-defying artist revered by Morrison, who once referred to himself as “the man without a category” in a world eager to place him in one. Closing the book on Van Morrison’s Belfast, it is through Allison’s lens that Dawe ponders the only question that continues to matter. This world is another world once more: