have been conscious of this at the time, but there was certainly the sense in which he was doing his thing and then just moving on. It wasn’t as if he was being a ‘pop star’ – that wasn’t there at all. This music was something he could ‘do’, something he was brilliant at. He’d get on stage with the band and then go. In a way, he was an anti-hero. Them were anti-heroes and they fitted the mood. But it wouldn’t have been a conscious thing, a pose. Morrison went on to become more sophisticated.
We tried different things and in Smithfield – which was a market, like a casbah – you could buy and sell just about anything, including records, second-hand records. It was magnificent – coins, clothes, old transistor radios, wardrobes, you name it – and there was one shop, the name of which won’t come to mind now, and the fella who had this shop was very interested in music, soul, R & B and blues.
I will never forget going into that shop. To see this guy, you’d think he should be looking under the bonnet of a car, but when he started to talk about blues and R & B, you were in another world. He knew everything: different versions of the same songs – exactly who was who in the States. We used to go in and talk and I remember one time he put on a track – it was a Chess album track of John Lee Hooker. We were all in the shop (it was just a big counter and the records were stacked behind it), and it was extraordinary to hear this guy.
There was the feeling then that music was the counter-culture. Belfast was very much a city dominated by work – that is what you were there for – work, work, work.
When I think of the 1960s, people’s energies were directed at getting out and about; getting into Belfast. Them, the Belfast band that was doing so well, personified this feeling of being able to express yourself ‘here’. They suggested to those of us who were about six or seven years younger that you could do these things, that you needn’t be afraid to set up your own band. We did; just that and we called our band The Trolls.
We played in different places. We were pretty desperate. I think we lasted about six months and that was it. But it was the kind of confidence Them gave myself and a few others I knew which made me start to write. We realised we weren’t singers, we weren’t musicians, but we could move into other ‘art forms’.
In that sense, Van Morrison opened the door for myself and other young men and women to think that ‘work’ wasn’t the only way forward, that there was a different kind of work and you could do it on the stage or with a pen. It was the possibilities Them generated that were so important. They broke the sound barriers of what was often an uptight, class-bound society. By the late 1960s, when Them had broken up, Van Morrison was really on his way out because he’d gone over to the States. We lost sight of him, but then he produced the album that everybody recognises and identifies as being so extraordinary – Astral Weeks. The thing to remember is that Belfast was on the cusp of a whole series of changes. The Civil Rights movement was up and going.
A lot of friends had left Belfast and were now in London or had disappeared elsewhere. When Astral Weeks came out, there were just a few of us still around. To listen to that album, which was a huge poetic shift away from the raucous energies of Them, and pointed in another direction too – towards poetry. For the mood poem that is Astral Weeks – I mean the entire album, but particularly ‘Beside You’ – was so revealing. Here was this strong voice and strong personality that could also move across into something so much more lyrical and moody. That was a big shift too. You can be a Belfast guy and you can still be lyrical.
It seems silly now, but the extent to which Morrison had moved into another mode, another mood, shocked people. Then, of course, the curtain fell with the beginning of the Troubles and by about 1970 it seemed as if Astral Weeks, Them and all that were light years away.
My feeling now is that Morrison’s music ‘disappeared’ because the immediacy of what was happening in Belfast (the terrorism, the darkness) overtook us. We seemed to lose out; the ‘gang’ drifted apart; we went our different ways. I went to college in Coleraine and then eventually moved out of the North altogether, to Galway.
The joy, the pleasure and the energy that Morrison embodied went underground as the heavy political charge of the 1970s took over. It was only later that I heard ‘Listen to the Lion’ from the magnificent It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a double album of his tour with the Caledonian Soul Orchestra. What you had was an artist who could lift the roof and bring together these different forms of music. You had the energy of the voice, the dynamic quality of it, and that marked an entire period for me. That was Van Morrison, doing his thing and not being compromised by ‘pop’. You had the feeling that he was going to produce something quite different.
We had a strong sense of being from Belfast. We didn’t really have a sense of being ‘Irish’ as such. When you think about it, great bands used to come to Belfast – John Mayall, Hendrix, Cream, The Small Faces and Pink Floyd. We didn’t have to go to them. In a way, we were almost arrogant about music. The standards we were used to were phenomenal, so it created the expectation that everything else had to measure up. We really had such a marvellous experience in Belfast. Occasionally you’d get some old fella shouting something at you, and there was always a little bit of tension on the periphery, but we had a wonderful time and it lasted until about 1970 – the dancing, the music, the parties, being able to move throughout Belfast freely. By 1972, that had gone, more or less. When I returned home from Galway, the music seemed to have disappeared underground. It felt like we were old men talking about a period thirty years before, rather than only a few years before. There had definitely been a shift.
The Troubles put into quarantine those kinds of energies, but maybe they are resurfacing now. I don’t know. I can’t stress enough the importance of Morrison’s presence in the clubs and the kind of example he set when he moved away from Belfast. I think he ran out of space in Belfast. He’d done all he wanted to do there and he had to go somewhere else.
Perhaps it’s not sufficiently recognised that it was a huge step for someone to take in those days – a tremendously courageous thing to do – to move from Belfast and head over to New York, not knowing what was going to happen. That was a remarkable achievement. It’s okay now, moving here, there and everywhere; there are huge resources available now. But in 1966, 1967, 1968, that was a big achievement, and of course it paid off, because without the move you probably wouldn’t have had Astral Weeks. He had been writing some of those lyrics in Belfast, but you wouldn’t have had the quality of that magnificent album without the shift and the risk of moving to America and the taking-on of extraordinary respon-sibilities for such a young man. By the late 1970s there were other clubs in the districts, in local neigh- bourhoods where people went, but the notion of Belfast itself as open and available had gone. The violence had put paid to that. I remember walking through the city one night – it would’ve been about 1972 or 1973 – and it was like walking through a ghost town. We’re forgetting these things and maybe it’s no bad thing. The pubs shut at about 6 or 7pm, the cinemas were closed and the buses stopped early. It was like walking through a city at war with itself. People withdrew into their own districts and then, inside their own districts, back into their own homes; they didn’t look out. It was bleak.
During the 1980s, I’d been writing poems in Galway. I remember the sense that I wanted to write about where I’d come from, but I wasn’t too sure how to go about it. Then Morrison’s example kicked in very strongly. The fact that he’d written about the places, streets and avenues of Belfast that I myself knew helped me. It was as if a light went on and I found myself writing a whole sequence of poems about Belfast. I probably wouldn’t have written those without Van Morrison, who had made it possible to write about his own place. It’s difficult to think now about the extent to which Belfast had been perceived as being ‘anti-art’, that you couldn’t write poems out of that place. Yet here was this guy who was singing songs and making music, hymns to the Belfast that I knew well.
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