- Music
- 28 Oct 03
It’s the title of his new album, his first on the legendary jazz label, Blue Note. it’s also an apt introduction to an interview in which Van Morrison talks freely about his work, his background in Belfast, his brushes with the music industry – and about what made him what he is.
Van Morrison isn’t comfortable doing interviews. Never has been. “I don’t like analysing myself,” he says at one point, and that’s at the heart of it. But there is more to it as well. He put it in a song. ‘Why Must I Always Explain?’, on Hymns To The Silence, reflected the unease he feels generally with being the target of questions, questions and more questions.
It isn’t just that he doesn’t want to have to answer. It’s that he feels that the process can often inimical to what really matters. His guiding spirit is a jazz one. Don’t think about too much. Just do it. Then move on. Keep living in the present time. Being a dweller on the threshold of the past, looking back and poring over the work that’s done and out there, tends to drag you down. Better to keep moving on.
There is also the sense that, no matter what is said, there is the likelihood that it will come out somehow mangled at the other end – if not in the first instance, then almost certainly further down the line, when it is being cut up and pasted down by some guy who is trying to stitch a biography or an article or a profile – or even a frigging news story – together. They don’t know you. They can’t in any meaningful sense. But they’ll churn it out anyway and get paid for the privilege.
You don’t need to listen to ‘Goldfish Bowl’ or ‘Too Many Myths’ from his new record to know that the way in which he is depicted in the media is a source of ongoing anger. He doesn’t like the way things you might have said in one context can be regurgitated in another. And used to make an argument which isn’t yours, an argument with which you might even disagree – an argument that might even be damaging to you. And so for the most part he steers clear of it. But when there’s a new record, it’s professional time. You need to let people know it’s out there. And so he puts the work in, agrees to sit in front of a tape recorder and shoot the breeze.
Talking to him in the autumn of 2003, it seems to me that he is finding the struggle less of a brain-fuck than he might have done at times in the past. He talks like a man who knows – even fleetingly – the meaning of happiness, as well as the meaning of loneliness. In this interview, he describes himself as being lucky to have gone through the shit he went through when he went through it. It is a measured and philosophical way of looking at things. Or at least it feels like that to me.
But then, what do I know? In the end each of us is finally, irretrievably on our own, having to make whatever sense we can of what we see, hear, taste, touch and smell. Speaking for ourselves is hard enough. Speaking for someone else, in the deepest sense, is an impossibility. No one knows that better than Van Morrison.
NS: After all these years, do you agonise at all about the running order on an album?
VM: No.
NS: Do you have it set out in advance in your own mind?
VM: No, not really. No, when you’ve been doing it as long as I have, the running order is not really very precious, you just do it and whatever seems to fit – slow, fast, fast, slow – you just try not put two slow songs together if possible. That’s the way you do it. It’s not agonising at all. Spur of the moment decision.
NS: Place names in America attain a kind of resonance through music. That doesn’t often happen with English place names, but ‘Somerset’ leans in that direction. Are you happier in England than in the States?
VM: It has nothing to do with that. It’s just a pun on Summer Set. Acker Bilk wrote the melody and I just wrote the lyrics to his melody. The instrumental was originally called ‘The Summer Set’, so I changed it to ‘Somerset’, the county. That’s where he’s from. Simple as that. I always liked the tune, you know. I always liked Acker Bilk’s music. Surprise, surprise. But it’s no surprise to me. I grew up listening to jazz, which included Acker Bilk and Chris Barber and these kind of people.
NS: There’s a kind of a sense of humour about doing something like ‘Whinin’ Boy Moan’.
VM: Well, this is a song that I like and again, the kind of music that I grew up listening to. It’s from Big Joe Turner, it’s a take off from that really.
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NS: Is there a sense in which you’re taking the piss out of people’s perception of Van Morrison or the way you’re depicted at times?
VM: No, not at all, it is just the way it is. What you see is what you get. I’m not taking the piss whatsoever. I wonder how you got that out of it?
NS: It’s a theme, the way you’re depicted, or perceived, which comes up in a different way in the song where you excoriate the newspaper barons. It’s pretty direct.
VM: That’s ‘Goldfish Bowl’. You can’t really get at them directly, as we know, because the press and the media are all powerful. They can do what they want. This is just a little song. If you want to sue them it takes years and years and years, and I don’t have the time and energy or the inclination – so the only way I can get back is in a song, which is what I did. It’s my freedom of speech, just like their freedom of speech.
NS: Would you have any fear that something like that would only attract more attention from the people you’re writing about?
VM: I don’t know, it remains to be seen. What do you think? You probably know more than I do because you’re a journalist.
NS: The level of intrusion and invasion of privacy at the moment can be completely over the top.
VM: Plus the fact that they can say anything they want and in order for you to combat them, they don’t have to prove that they’re right, you have to prove they’re wrong – so you’re in a lose-lose situation. In order to prove they’re wrong you have to take them to court, which takes years of litigation. That’s why they’ve got it all tied up, they’re in a win-win situation. There you have it.
NS: ‘The Meaning of Loneliness’ is a great song. Is there anything you can say about the background to it?
VM: It’s just about reading. Stuff I’ve read over the years. Camus, Nietsche, Herman Hesse, people like that. It’s about the existential philosophy that’s where it comes from. A lot of my song ideas come from stuff I read, stuff people say, stuff you hear, that’s my source for writing songs. You read books, and you absorb them and then over the years, you think ‘oh I’ll try that idea’.
NS: You do ‘St. James Infirmary’ on the album. Is death something that you think about much?
VM: It’s a song I always liked. I grew up with this music, this is what I listened to when I was a kid. It’s as simple as that. It’s a good blues vehicle. Even before I recorded it, it was a hit live – so it’s natural to put it on a record.
NS: But presumably, as you get on, death become more of a concern, in the sense that there’s only so much time left.
VM: Well, I think I said that in some other song I put on the previous record. Which was ‘I have to watch my back when I’m running out of time’. I said that in there. Yeah, to answer your question, that’s in that song. That is a thing for anybody over 50.
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NS: One of the things that does come across from the songs is that it’s tough being on the road.
VM: Of course it is. You read the biographies of any musician and you find that out. It’s never supposed to be anything else.
NS: It’s a tough life and also a lonely life.
VM: Yeah. But at the same time, you don’t take all this stuff literally. You’re singing about this, it doesn’t mean you’re living that. You’ve got to separate the singer and the songs. It’s about ideas and concepts and things that inspire you sometimes, and sometimes they make you ponder. And then what comes out is absorbing that, then putting that out in songs by some sort of osmosis. That’s what the process is. But it’s not literal. One day you might feel like that, when you’re in the middle of a journey – ‘what the hell am I doing here’? But you don’t feel like that every day. There is no black and white situations. It’s all part of life. You win some, you lose some. Highs, lows, middles.
NS: On the record, you sing about the fact that the music is jazz, blues and funk, and there’s a line “but it ain’t rock’n’roll”.
VM: Well, it’s not rock’n’roll and I’ve been saying this for years. But it doesn’t matter how much you say it because people have selective hearing. They hear what they want to hear. Or they see the projection that they want to see. I’ve been saying this stuff in interviews for a long, long time, possibly 30 years or more. I’m not a rock singer and I don’t want to be a rock singer and I’m not interested in that. It doesn’t seem to get across.
NS: Why do you think that people define you in that way?
VM: I was in a situation where I didn’t have any choice. I was coming from a country that didn’t have a music business, and was controlled by a few people. If you wanted to do music then, you had to go through these people. There wasn’t any other way, It wasn’t like, do you want to do this or do you want to do that? If you do that, it means you can make music and if you don’t do that, chances are you’ll end up in a dead-end showband or you won’t be playing at all. So I had to go with what they said. They said to me, ‘we want you to record a pop tune’. I didn’t have much choice. I wanted to eat. I wanted to keep doing gigs. I had to do what I had to do. That’s changed over the years because now I’ve become independent. I had to fight for all that and had to go through years and years and years of wrangles and people who just didn’t care, and on and on and on and on, to finally be in a position where I could do what I wanted. I had to fight for it very hard. That was just my experience. Everyone’s going to have their own problems. I came from a working-class situation, we didn’t have anything, there was no money around, so if you were offered something, you took it. You didn’t sit and think about it.
NS: Do you feel looking back over the years as a musician worker, whether there are things you now...
VM: I’ll give you an example, like in those days ‘St. James Infirmary’ is a song I wanted to record – but there was no way that they were going to let me record that song then. No. It was a joke. So now I’m in a situation I can do what I want. Sorry, what was the question?
NS: I was going to ask if there are things that you look back over and have a sense of regret about...
VM: I don’t have any regret. I think I’m very lucky, I’m happy with life because my experiences led me to do what I had to do. I think I’m extremely lucky to be where I am. Having started the way I did, I’m very, very lucky to have been able to dig myself out and become independent. I don’t have any regrets whatsoever.
NS: You talked a bit there about what it was like in Ireland.
VM: It was just that, like, things were happening in London then, so no matter what part of Ireland you came from, everybody had to go through London because that’s where it was happening. You have to remember this was very, very early days, before the internet, before music became a communication tool, before televisions and all that. Everyone had to go to London and that was just what you did. It was like conscription, you know what I mean? Before, they had to go in the Army when they were 18 and if you were a musician you had to go to London. It was the only game in town, there wasn’t any other game.
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NS: Did you have a jazz-inflected album in mind when you were talking to Blue Note?
VM: No, I went to Blue Note after it was done. It’s just basically me trying to get back to my roots. It started with the blues. That’s what I love. That’s the music I listen to. I’m just basically – what’s it the guy said, some philosopher said, follow your heart? That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing what I like, which is what I should have been doing all along. I got caught up in a lot of fucking shit. I’m now in a position to do what I like.
NS: That must have fucked with your head in that the music was completely contradicted by the business?
VM: Yeah, but everybody needs experience. You don’t get it on a plate and if you do there’s something wrong. It’s not a free lunch. I’m not the only person that’s been through the mill. A lot of people have been through much worse than I have. It’s par for the course and you must know that. Everybody got screwed, everybody went through shit. It’s the archetypal story.
NS: We talked about Astral Weeks before, and the way in which a band was imposed on you for that record.
VM: Yeah, but that was good. I couldn’t have picked that myself. I didn’t have any complaints about that. To me that was great, the guy that did that definitely did the right job, I couldn’t have done that. I wouldn’t have known to get those people. That was perfect. For those songs, that was a perfect combination.
NS: There must have been times times, dealing with record company A&R guys who want you to make the record they hear in their heads, that you felt ‘this guy is actually trying to rearrange my fuckin’ music’.
VM: Everybody went through that – but that’s the experience, in any profession or any walk of life. You don’t start at the top, you have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Some people never got away from that, I was lucky I did. It takes a lot of balls to fight your way out, that’s the problem. A lot of people don’t have balls so they just stay there. Then they become this dodgy act or something. I was interested in music, I wasn’t interested in images or what people thought. I was putting music first, the rest to me was bullshit.
NS: ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture?’ is interesting in in that you are commenting on the assumptions that people have about Van Morrison.
VM: I’ve always been saying this, I’m just saying it more upfront. You get the people that think they know you because they read something in the paper or they see something on TV or they have your record. It’s all, like, a projection, which is perpetuated by the media and the newspapers. It’s how they make money. It’s like talk is so cheap that it makes them millions of pounds. You get this worldwide projection now – even if you say something it’s on the internet, projected all round the world. You’ve got this huge machine now, it’s like the Andy Warhol thing about 15 minutes. I mean that was supposed to be a joke but now everybody’s taking the joke and trying to make it into something serious.
NS: There’s a thing about living in the moment, living in the present time on the record – that’s hard, isn’t it?
VM: No, it’s all you’ve got, all you’ve got is the present time. It’s the idea that’s hard, the idea that you think it’s hard, that’s part of it too. It’s part of the propaganda, you know like everything’s difficult, really hard, you’ve really got to think about everything. It keeps you out of the present moment. If things are very hard and difficult, then you’re not in the present moment, you’re either thinking about the past or the future.
NS: Have you any sense of what’s going to happen after you die?
VM: No idea.
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NS: Do you give a shite?
VM: Well, this is another thing that keeps you out of the present – the future is keeping you out of the present time.
NS: In ‘Evening In June’ you rhyme moon and June. It’s the oldest one in the book. Was that deliberate?
VM: No, it wasn’t deliberate, it was just the way the song went. I was trying to say before, you don’t sit down and you think about, you just fuckin’ do it. You don’t think about ‘ah this, what does this mean and I’m going to put that there’, you just fuckin’ do it. Whatever comes out is what it is.
NS: Do you not ever write a song and later come back and change something?
VM: Sure, you edit it, but it’s not a big thing. Just do it.
NS: And yet the fact that you change it also means that it’s a craft thing.
VM: Oh, you change it to make it work better – or you like that word, that night. You could rewrite it forever.
NS: Thinking about a record like Period Of Transition, which wasn’t one of your strongest, do you look back and think, ‘I fucked up there’?
VM: In some respects I don’t know why the hell I put that out because there’s a lot better stuff that I’d recorded. At that time I was thinking about maybe hooking up with Dr. John. It was all about me all the time. I was tired of that. I wanted to do something kind of like what I did with Georgie Fame later on, where it’s not all about me all the time. It’s like you can move the energy about. Something to bounce off, you know.
NS: While there’s freedom in it, there’s also a responsibility in being the one that’s at the centre all the time.
VM: You can’t stay the same, you know. One sure thing is if you’re a musician and a singer who wants to get involved, then you have to change, that’s the way it works. That’s why – it hasn’t always come out under the banner of jazz but everything I always did was the jazz approach, because that was my background. That was what I understood. I understood jazz, I understood how it worked, that’s what I apply to everything. It’s about evolvement. If you’re a pop singer you don’t need to evolve you just, like, get a set together and play that forever and have some hit songs and play them over and over. If you’re a real musician, if you’re really involved in music and singing, you need to evolve. I mean I have to evolve, otherwise I don’t want to do it. I’m not interested.
NS: Are there things that stand out in your mind – breakthroughs as a musician where you felt ‘I can do something now that I never thought I could do, that I was always stretching to do before, I’ve made some kind of a breakthrough’?
VM: Well, that happens a lot at gigs, that’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t happen that much in the studio but you see when you do a lot of gigs things happen. You get a real kick. Albums are not the whole picture. You really need to go to loads of gigs to get the whole picture because that’s really what it’s about.
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NS: And as an instrumentalist, do you practice a lot?
VM: As an instrumentalist I don’t really practice, I don’t really play enough. Years ago I used to play a lot more but you know recently I’ve been caught up in a lot of business stuff and unfortunately, a lot of it has become more about getting the business out of the way and doing about 20% music and the rest of the time doing business. It has become that, so I don’t really play enough. I’m not playing enough. When I get some of this business stuff sorted I might be able to play more. Get back into playing again.
NS: As a singer, are you able to do the things that you weren’t able to do?
VM: That all depends on what sort of musicians you’re working with, are they making you stretch? I know what you’re getting at but the only answer is that, yeah, if you’re stretched, if you’re playing with musicians who make you stretch, then you go places that you don’t think you can go and that’s really the optimum. That’s what it’s all about for me. But you don’t always get where you can make those leaps and bounds. I do lower stuff now than I did years ago. That’s all I’m conscious of. My voice seems to naturally want to go lower. I don’t like analysing myself, ‘cos I’m always doing something else. It’s like trying to do the Best Of retrospective. I mean that bores me to death because the whole point of jazz is spontaneity. The whole point for me is you do something and then you go on.
NS: Do you hear a song in your head with an arrangement, or do you...
VM: Sometimes you hear the whole thing and sometimes you don’t get it for years. You work on some songs for a long period of time and you don’t get the next bit. Other songs come quickly. It goes from one extreme to the other. Some songs you rewrite later on and they come out different, like a different song completely. There are no set rules.
NS: Does a title ever lead to inspiration?
VM: Yeah, it’s usually the way it works for me. That’s the first thing you get, the title, and you go from there..
NS: Do you ever feel ‘I hate this fuckin’ process’?
VM: No, I like it.
NS: Is a sense of humour important?
VM: A sense of humour just is. Whether it’s important or not is up to the individual, it just is, it exists. That’s another thing that people don’t understand about the gig thing. There is comedy in it as well. There’s been comedy in it for a long time, but unless you actually come to gigs – it’s like ‘come and see 50 gigs and then you’ll know a bit more, you’ll get close to what it’s about’. If you’re just, like, looking at it from afar or listening to records, you don’t really know what it is.
NS: The laughter in ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture?’ is a nice moment.
VM: Well, the record company wanted me to keep that in. I didn’t want to keep it in but the president of Blue Note said ‘keep it in – that’s what people want’, so we kept it in. Also, jazz is like...mistakes, it’s better to have it in the moment. Jazz is spontaneous... that’s the whole thing.
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NS: Thinking about your origins in Belfast, did you find it a struggle dealing with what you’re given – moving away from where you were born, your parents and that whole thing, and making something of yourself?
VM: Well, there’s always a stress involved in any, for want of a better word, genre or art form, there’s always going to be a struggle. That’s what the whole writing process is about. You must know that as a writer. If there’s no struggle then you wouldn’t do anything. What are you going do? Retire? I mean you’re creating something. You have to stare at your page, you have to put something on it. Where’s the idea coming from? Are you getting any ideas, are you not getting ideas, what are you going to say? There’s always got to be a struggle. Sure. What else is there? That’s what life is made of. I don’t know anything else, do you? I mean if there is, tell me about it.
NS: In Dublin when I was growing up, there was a constant kind of tug, a kind of a drag on you, not to break out from the social constraints.
VM: I never had that because I came from the opposite of that, I came from the mentality of the... you didn’t have words for it then but it was like, it wasn’t actually anti-establishment, it was more like free-thinking. The area of Belfast I grew up in, there was a lot of musicians in it. There was a lot of people that I felt connected with, and probably one of the saddest things in my life was when I had to go to England to work and I lost all these connections. I was never really able to reconnect with all those people. Well, a lot of that’s gone now. A lot of these people, some of them are dead, some of them moved on, whatever, but I grew up in this kind of environment where there was lots of people into various kinds of music and who read books and had ideas. That was the kind of environment I came from. It was working class, but it was working class with a different twist. I never bought the commercial thing anyway, at any stage of the game.
NS: In this part of the world, a lot of the tug and the restrictions had to do with religion.
VM: There was always that going on. But this was before all that bigotry got really big. Everybody was just too busy getting on with what they liked to do and what they’re interested in, there was no time for that. The people that I grew up with, my peer group of that time, wasn’t into that stuff. They were into sharing ideas, you know they had energy and they were like interested, they saw a bright future. All that changed later on. That was the environment I grew up in.
NS: Is education something that you’ve thought about much? You left school early, you went on the road, you just went in a certain direction and...
VM: No, I just didn’t go in a certain direction. I educated myself. I was always educating myself all the time. To me school was boring. I was always educating myself.
NS: Where did the drive to do that come from?
VM: Because I came from that kind of background. People were interested in things, not religion, not politics, they were interested in philosophy, ideas, music, art. It’s called free thinking. It wasn’t Protestant or Catholic, it was outside of that.
NS: Are there people that stand out in your mind, whose contribution, whatever the nature of it, outside the purely music arena, has made a difference to who you are or the way you see yourself?
VM: My parents made a contribution to my early musical education. If my father hadn’t got the records, I wouldn’t have had the musical education. I learnt through absorbing what I was hearing and I had a big pair of ears to listen.
NS: But there’s people who have an influence – like, just to take an example, at a certain stage I read Walt Whitman and it gave me a whole new twist on things.
VM: For me, it was Kerouac. I was working with this geezer who was reading all this stuff so he gave me a few books by Kerouac and then Sartre, Nausea. Things like that. Initially you go – when you’re 58 it’s a different take but I suppose I still have the same influences. Even now, I can still see the direct line back to those kind of things.
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NS: Is there anything that you get a really good laugh out of at the moment?
VM: Well, I don’t know, off the top of my head I can’t think.
NS: I’m interested in what makes people laugh.
VM: I can’t think off the top of my head. Nothing specific.
NS: Do you think of movies as an art form?
VM: Well, sure, it all depends who’s making it. Sure, a lot of it is. Then again, a lot of it is rubbish. It’s like everything else. It all depends what your taste is. I don’t know what you’re trying to get at but I mean everybody’s not going to like the same thing. But what’s trivial to one person might be significant to somebody else.
NS: But would like something like Pulp Fiction as a movie?
VM: Yeah, yes I liked it. I liked the way it was put together, it was really very well done. I liked most of his films.
NS: You said that you consider yourself lucky. That’s something that the majority of people wouldn’t say about themselves. They tend to think ‘I made my own luck’...
VM: Well, you do make your own luck, that’s true.
NS: And the other thing that people feel is that they’re not lucky – that it could have been different, it could have been better.
VM: I suppose what I mean is, I’m lucky that I took the blows early on that I had to take. I’m lucky in retrospect that actually there were these people around that gave me the opportunity. Where if I had stayed and stuck with that, then I would have been like, you probably wouldn’t have heard of me now. But I took that knowledge and I moved on. A lot of people wouldn’t have had the opportunity. Even now, if you get ripped off, you’ve got to ask, ‘so what? I got ripped off, so what?’ When you see it as part of a learning experience rather than thinking about how hard done by you are – these people were giving me a great opportunity to do my thing, so to speak. They gave me an opportunity to be able to do music and that was a springboard to me getting out of the chains – whereas if I maybe had a nice ride to begin with, it might have been all over by 1970.
NS: You talked a little bit about the press and the barons: what do you think are the most malignant influences currently, in the grand scheme of things, which militate against people, anyone, being able to realise their own potential?
VM: In the old days they used to say in the record business, they used to say, ‘what we’re in it for is the lowest common denominator’. That’s what they used to say in the old days – and now I feel we’re way below that. I don’t know where it’s going, but we’re well, well below the lowest common denominator at this point. I can’t imagine what it’s like, coming in to do this now. In my wildest dreams I couldn’t imagine what it’s like. At least I had something to bounce off, I had something to come up against. Now it’s lower than the lowest common denominator, whatever that works out at. It’s a kind of Big Brother world, you know?
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What’s Wrong With This Picture is out now on Blue Note