Rave On, Van Morrison

Sometimes it becomes necessary to determine exactly at what point the cult of personality begins to distort rather than inform one's appreciation of an artist's music. When natural curiosity about the source of the magic obscures the listening faculties, how the hell can we tell the singer from the song?

Reading between the lines of the press release for Van Morrison's latest album, the boldly titled Back On Top, one almost sympathises with Virgin Records' press department. The reader can sense a vague world-weariness in lines like, "Van Morrison is, as usual, unavailable for interview, but oblique possibilities for features do exist".

One of these oblique possibilities involved the trip this writer, plus a few fellow press-skangers, recently took to see the man they call The Man premiere material from his new record at an invites-only showcase bash in Ronnie Scott's jazz/blues club in Soho. But more about that later. For now, let's ponder the public persona of Celtic soul brother No.1, a man alternately regarded as one of the finest white vocalists of a generation, or a grumbling curmudgeon well past his sell-by date, and ask: does it matter? And if so, how much?

In terms of the music, it can be mystifying how this mercurial figure can go from performances undoubtedly touched by the hand of God ("Cyprus Avenue", "Into The Mystic", "In The Garden") to truculent carps and gripes of the most banal nature on (still great) tunes like "Professional Jealousy", "Why Must I Always Explain?" and "A Town Called Paradise" (which, at the 1986 Self Aid concert, the singer famously prefaced with, "If Van Morrison was a gunslinger, there'd be a lot of dead copycats", as disciples like Paul Brady and Mike Scott looked on). This theme continues in "New Biography" from Back On Top, an attack on so-called friends who've collaborated with biographers, "playing the name game, the fame game" ("How come they've got such good memories / And I can't even remember last week?"), and even the acolytes who run the unofficial websites ("just a hobby on the internet").

This lyrical predilection plumbs new depths on "Golden Autumn Day", a presumably autobiographical song where the singer describes being set upon by two thugs who shoved him to the ground and pulled out a knife. Van's prescribed punishment for the offenders is unequivocal: "If there's such a thing as justice I could take them out and flog them / In the nearest green field / And it might be a lesson to the bleeders of the system / In this whole society". The "green field" bit is important — even in such Death Wish IV vigilante scenarios, the singer demands that his surroundings be effervescently Blakean. But then, as a colleague remarked on the flight over to London, at least Morrison now has a subject matter worthy of his legendary paranoia. And to tell you the truth, if someone assaulted me in a similar fashion, I doubt I'd feel any different.

But this is not to chide Van for finding inspiration in the everyday. The li'l things have furnished his tunes with some of the most luminescent moments in the last 30 years of music, be they the stopped-clock reminiscences of pre-troubled Belfast all over Astral Weeks, the happy flashbacks of "Cleaning Windows", or his fabled fondness for fodder (often with Morrison, music is not the food of love so much as the love of food) immortalised in the gravy rings, barmbracks, wagon wheels, snowballs of "A Sense Of Wonder" or the mussels and potted herrings in "Coney Island". It's just that, for a man who has spent the last four decades on spiritual quests that have led him from his Nonconformist Protestant roots at 125 Hyndford Street, through a youth spent sucking the gospel marrow out of Ray Charles and Mahalia Jackson records, to honeymoons with Celtic mysticism and back, his lyrics can veer from uncommonly beautiful human yearning to a rather cantankerous lack of grace.

But hang on a second. Whoever said that singers (or painters or poets, amongst whose ranks Van would doubtless prefer to be counted rather than any gallery of "rock stars", a term he has always despised) had to kiss babies and asses, play the PR game — in short, conform? Isn't art about challenging norms and wisdoms? Nobody ever venerated Yeats for his chat show skills or Myles for sucking up to the Dublin cognoscenti. There's a very skinny difference between Morrison kicking against the pricks and Kavanagh raging at The Paddiad.

And speaking of Kavanagh, Van's always had a deep affinity with a singularly contrary class of bard. Perhaps the most spectacular example of the singer's innate understanding of the antisocial poetic condition is to be found on his and The Chieftains' Irish Heartbeat record from 1988, specifically the version of Kavanagh's scar-spangled ballad "On Raglan Road". Of the many, many fine performances of this song — including, God forgive me for blaspheming, Luke Kelly's — Morrison's reading is arguably the most authoritative, and certainly the only one to plumb the dark dualities of the lyric, the bitter ambivalence, the feelings of superiority and even veiled hostility the poet harbours for his love ("That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay / When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day").

Furthermore, survey the man's portfolio of lyrics and you'll find myriad references to quarehawks such as John Donne, Walt Whitman, Omar Khayyám, Kahlil Gibran ("Rave On John Donne"), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot ("Summertime In England"), Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde ("Too Long In Exile"), Arthur Rimbaud ("Torn Down A La Rimbaud"), Tennessee Williams ("Wild Children"), Jack Kerouac ("Cleaning Windows") and Lord Byron ("Foreign Window"), not to mention the Willies — Blake and Yeats — who are all over the Morrison canon. And, lest we forget, in 1979 Lester Bangs was quoting chunks of Astral Weeks next to Federico García Lorca, while Paul Durcan popped up over a decade later to provide the unforgettably idiosyncratic voiceover on "In The Days Before Rock 'N' Roll".

The point is, Van hasn't been a pop star per se since the demise of Them in 1966, and he's certainly never been one to do the rounds of photo-ops, in-store appearances and walk-on slots on The Late Late Show. So, to simply berate the man for being a professional bollocks (and who really knows?) is not only idle speculation, it's irrelevant. If music were a popularity contest, few of us would ever listen to the Velvets again. Anything you need to know is on a need-to-know basis, right there in the work.

Which leads us back to Back On Top. The new album has been heralded in some quarters as a return to form, but always approach such claims with caution. The singer's not about to reinvent himself in a hurry, rewrite "Moondance" for VH1, or adopt a whole new public persona. And the trajectory of his career has always been an erratic plot of peaks (Astral Weeks, Into The Music, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher) and troughs (Hardnose The Highway, A Period Of Transition, Wavelength).

In this context then, it was with some reserve that I slipped Back On Top (released on the Virgin subsidiary Point Blank, for which Morrison produced John Lee Hooker's Grammy-winning 1997 album Don't Look Back) into the CD player.

The first impression was one of business as usual. The whole album is angled with a sepia-tinted autumnal vibe, right down to the cover art, and a glance at the track listing yields standard Van titles like "When The Leaves Come Falling Down", "High Summer" and "Golden Autumn Day". Most of the usual lyrical themes and buzzwords prevail, although thankfully, the master's left the "healing" at home this time, a word so bled of meaning in Van's lyrics that it's become a cliché. Also, anyone waiting for Morrison to radically revise his palate of sounds will be disappointed — as tantalising as hypothetical scenarios whereby the singer attempts a sean-nós/jazz fusion over semi-ambient backdrops courtesy of Eno or Orbit might be, it's pretty much the usual reliable stew of Phil Coulter-style piano intros, perky horns and churchy Hammond. But, as Chris Donovan pointed out in his recent album review, the angels are in the details, particularly the gritty tone of Mick Green's guitar, the man's own harping, and Fiachra Trench's string charts. The latter element is an important one: whereas latter-day Van outings have been spoiled somewhat by an excess of syrupy orchestral manoeuvres, here the arrangements are subtle and deftly sporadic, entering and exiting the mix at strategic points, keeping the sugar and schmaltz-count down to a level acceptable to any musical diabetic. Sure, they ain't the woozy 'n' swoonsome bewitchments of No Guru . . ., but as flavouring, they make tunes like "The Philosopher's Stone" pretty unimpeachable.

And as for Van's compositional skills, well, there's a good half-dozen titles capable of holding their own on any anthology of the man's recent work — "High Summer", "When The Leaves Come Falling Down" and the title tune in particular are all strong and vibrant, and the whole shebang has a lovely September-in-Paris feel: songs for strung-out lovers.

Ronnie Scott's jazz and blues club, Soho, London. It's a Tuesday in early March, and as the afternoon dims into evening, the streets are, in the words of the poet, "all misty wet with rain". Inside the smoky club, red-clothed tables are stocked with free booze and refreshments, record company folk hand out press packs, balding hacks in button-down shirts confer with Dadrock experts, scores of young hipsters circulate looking for "a bit o' smooth", and Bob Geldof secures himself a seat down the front. The walls are decorated with framed shots of legends like Muddy Waters and Chet Baker, and on the small stage, a seven-piece band (including Richie Buckley and Brian Kennedy) take their positions.

Without much ado, Van bustles on in a dark suit, blue shirt, shades and black hat, signals the band to strike up the chug-a-lug shuffle of "Goin' Down Geneva", then just as briskly instructs them to mute the groove so he can get something off his chest. "According to Mojo, this is about the loneliness of the long distance . . . whatever," he proclaims, in that peculiar Californian-Ulster drawl, "but it's really about disillusionment and the underdog."

With that misapprehension cleared up, the band belt back into the tune, and as abrasive guitar licks rub up against the bandleader's harp-vamping, he interjects pointed ad-libs ("People tell me a rich man can't play the blues — oh, really?") into verses like, "Last night I played a gig in Salzburg, outside in the pouring rain / Flew from there to Montreux and my heart was filled with pain".

Four minutes later, Van's juggling sheaves of lyrics on the lectern in front of him, quipping, "Sorry 'bout this, I might have to read the words occasionally — it's these mobile phones, y'know? Anyway, the performance is a strong one, and when Van goes for it on the blues harp, sucking the reed out of and blowing it back into the instrument, one is reminded of Keith Richards' recent insistence that Mick Jagger get back into the harmonica as a means of re-integrating himself into the Stones' tight musical equation.

Next up, "In The Midnight" is where everybody gets religion — at first listening a by-the-numbers song of devotion, it soon begins to glimmer, as the singer, unsure of the words, lets the band breathe a while, then blurts out one of those remarkable "babybabybabybabybaby" expostulations, while Kennedy earns his keep with a beautiful boy soprano figure, one of his few truly indispensable contributions to the set.

After "Back On Top", a smooth but pretty groovy rumination on isolation "at the top of the bill", the man gets to grips with what is, for this writer's money, the most interesting of the new tunes, the metaphysical arm-wrestle of "High Summer", which seems to exhibit sympathy for the devil over a rhythm figure descended from "Dweller On The Threshold". Salty stuff this, especially when Ivan delivers the phrase "far away from the jealousy factor", then licks his finger and holds it aloft, as if to gauge the hot air of real/imagined envy blowing stageward from the prating mouths of the critterati.

After that, it's a romp down the last furlong atop the single "Precious Time" (preceded by good-humoured remarks about the last time he was in the singles charts with Cliff Richard), a chirpy bluebeat romp replete with burping baritone sax, the arrangement diametrically opposed to the bleak lyrical content ("She's so beautiful but she's going to die some day / Everything in life just passes away"). Then he's gone, leaving Mr. Kennedy to whip up the applause, and it's all over bar a lively instrumental blues jam for an encore.

So, the post-match analysis? Well, this writer has always thought Van at his best when staging a boxing match with himself, wrestling body and soul out of the mundane and into the wide blue yonder, stalking the boards in abject dejection at his own fallibility, straining to touch the key to the portal of transcendental levitation flickering just out of fingertip-grasp above the stage. Sometimes, amidst two hours of such sweat, blood and tears, he'll get there, channelling anything from five to fifty minutes of pure brilliance through his throat.

Not today, though. Maybe due to the earliness of the hour, maybe because he couldn't be bothered putting in that superhuman effort for a bunch of liggers and scribblers, Van delivered the goods like the old pro he is, but the muse was elusive. But then, as with Neil and Bob, you never can tell with Mr. Morrison. "There's always tomorrow night, somewhere down the road, always strivin', always climbin' way beyond my will".

Back On Top is out now on Point Blank, distributed by Virgin.