LONG before he became infatuated with planes and trains, Richard Branson sold records.
His first shop was in Notting Hill, where you could sit on beanbags and sample the wares through headphones before parting with hard cash. He also had a mail order business which is how, in 1970, I first began to contribute to his coffers. Advertising in the likes of the Melody Maker and the NME, he made available to fans in the boondocks music that even well-stocked local stores did not have. Thus it was that I acquired a copy of Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl.
Back then, the divide between poetry and pop was as wide as that between Sunnis and Shias. The only book I possessed was a copy of John Donne's sonnets which, being preternaturally pretentious, I carried with me everywhere. In time it led me to Eliot and Auden, MacNeice and Pound, all of whose work I pored over like an Egyptologist trying to decipher the meaning of hieroglyphics. All of them, coincidentally, were published by Faber & Faber, then as now the blue-chip poetry publisher.
Little did I snootily imagine that one day Van Morrison would join their ranks. But here he is, booted and suited in Faber's elegant and understated, Armani-esque style, his lyrics accorded the same typographical attention given to The Waste Land and Bagpipe Music. Lyrics are not, of course, the same as poems and it would be silly to judge them as if they are. Having said that, there are some singer-songwriters - Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell spring to mind - whose words read almost as well on the page as they sound to the ear.
If not quite in their league, Morrison is no slouch poetically. Indeed, in Rave On, John Donne/Rave On, Part Two, he makes mention not only of Donne ("thy holy fool") but also Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyam, Khalil Gibran and WB Yeats ("Rave on down through Theosophy and the Golden Dawn"). In other songs Rimbaud and Joyce are introduced to a mix that includes Jack Kerouac, Jackie Wilson and John Lee Hooker. This is where mystic and magic, soul and spirit, beats and bebop meet. Born in 1945 in Belfast of Ulster Scots roots, Morrison has managed throughout his career inventively to fuse Celtic dreaminess with unsentimental blues, rock 'n' roll with R&B, folk and show bands.
Like many Irishmen, he has one foot planted firmly in fields of shamrock the other in asphalt-clad streets. In his lyrics there is a lot of coming and going, between past and present, Eire and America. It's there, for instance, in Choppin' Wood, which among other things may be a hymn to his father, a great and eclectic record collector, who in the 1950s spent some time in Detroit. There he bought albums by Jelly Roll Morton, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke and Lead Belly, whose inspiration, Morrison once said, "got me going". But, then, he was always happy to acknowledge his debts. Indeed, his own music is one long homage to his father's collection, which was reputed to be the biggest in Northern Ireland.
According to Eamonn Hughes, who has edited Lit Up Inside, its contents comprise about a third of Morrison's total output.
The book begins where he did, in Belfast, and travels westward to Boston. The journey is as spiritual and religious as it is physical. Like the blues and song singers he so admires, Morrison is always aware that there is life beyond the temporal. His Ireland, to which he has a Proustian relationship, was one of schism which in the late 1960s erupted into the Troubles. Not only did it divide society, it made escape for many the only option. But whereas in the past Irishmen had abandoned their birthplace because of poverty, they now left because of the pollution of sectarianism.
In No Religion, Morrison made clear he was not inclined to take sides: "And they ask what hate is, it's just the other side of love/ Some people want to give their enemies/ Everything they think they deserve/ Some say, 'Why don't you love your neighbour?/ Go ahead and turn the other cheek'/ But there's nobody on this planet that can ever be so meek/ And I can't bleed for you, you have to do it your own way/ And there's no religion, no religion, no religion here today."
Interestingly, No Religion was not written at the height of the Troubles but in the mid-1990s, when there appeared to be an end to them in sight. Morrison's take was that of an idealist. "Wouldn't it be great just to be born and nobody told you there was such a thing as religion," he's said. "Say it didn't exist and you were just told that all you've got is this life and that's it ... and there's no heaven, no hell."
That could be John Lennon talking about Imagine. Like the Beatle, Morrison seeks through the most popular and transcendental of mediums to give expression to that which is universal. All you need is love could also be his philosophy and he would surely share with Philip Larkin - another Faber man - the view that what will survive of us is love.
In an affecting and personal foreword, Ian Rankin recalls an epiphanic moment when, after suffering a severe panic attack, he listened to a number of Morrison's albums and felt he must change the way he lived.
As Rankin discovered, there is much joy to found in that caramel-coated Irish brogue which, if you press your ear to these pages, you can hear coming through loud and clear.
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