Van Morrison’s Madame George remains a work of great poignancy

The flashy Belfast Grand Central Station, open to rail service since last autumn, really is like something you’d find in a major city at the emerging middle of the 21st century. It’s huge. It’s buzzing with staff. It’s got two Starbucks! Two! The station also gestures back to a now impossibly distant version of Belfast and, in so doing, re-establishes connection with one of the greatest artworks to ever emerge from the city.

For close to 60 years, when passing over the Boyne Viaduct at Drogheda, fans of Van Morrison have recalled a famous passage from the old grump’s indestructible Madame George. “And you know you gotta go,” he sang. “On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row, throwing pennies at the bridges down below. And the rain, hail, sleet and snow.”

I was once among many sad maniacs who cued a Walkman to play that line as we reached the bridge. Writing for this newspaper in 2008, Frank McNally pondered a disappointing notion that the penny-throwing – over a waterway of some historical significance – was an act of unionist defiance but ultimately concluded that the “jury is still out” on what Morrison meant.

That jury is still out on any explicit explanations of the 1968 song. Morrison himself, like Bob Dylan, quite properly refuses to solve his lyrics as if they were problems in calculus. “Something I wrote 10 years ago means different things to me now,” he told Rolling Stone a decade after the song emerged. “It means what it means now.”

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By then one line had already ceased to mean what it once meant (or at least communicate what it once communicated). As I was, on the way back from university in the 1980s, getting my cassette properly spooled, the train no longer took me from “Dublin up to Sandy Row”.

In the mid-1970s the grandly named Enterprise service moved its northern terminus from Great Victoria Street, abutting the largely Protestant neighbourhood of Sandy Row, to the newly built – actually less central – Central Station at Laganside.

Urban planning is an arcane religion. Half a century after the Enterprise ceased to bother Sandy Row, it has returned to a site immediately adjacent to the old Great Victoria Street Station. One bit of the song now makes sense again.

Rebounding from a famously fractious first album, product of a contentious contract with the independent Bang Records label, Van Morrison arrived, in the autumn of 1968, to Century Sound Studios in New York with few clear plans. “It was just done on a basic pure survival level. I did what I had to do,” he said in 2009.

What he had to do, it transpired, was improvise a melange of rock, folk, soul and jazz that nobody had before contemplated. No other album by Morrison (or anyone else) sounds like Astral Weeks. Connie Kay, drummer with the Modern Jazz Quartet, lays down fluvial rhythms. The bassist Richard Davis, legendary collaborator with Stan Getz and Andrew Hill, winds sinuous submelodies throughout.

Morrison, his accent forever unsure whether to settle in Detroit or east Belfast, meanders through a clatter of puzzling variations on a half-glimpsed memory space: Cyprus Avenue, Ballerina, Sweet Thing.

Madame George forms the spine of Astral Weeks. Eulogising an apparently mystical figure – who may or may not literally be in drag – the song takes its singer through a series of urban confusions before ending with murmured repetitions that suggest a drift into sleep. “The love that loves to love the love, the gloves,” one might splutter as eyes sag before a too-warm fire.

As noted earlier, no “solutions” will be tolerated, but we can say that the song is soaked in a then-voguish taste for nostalgia. This is a mourned Belfast of the dreamt past.

What a strange thing. Paul McCartney was 24 when, a year earlier, he wrote Penny Lane. John Lennon was just a year and a half older when he wrote the equally Proustian Strawberry Fields Forever for the flip. Morrison was 23 when he blearily said “goodbye to Madame George”. These are young men looking back at the relatively recent past as if it were a long-vanished aeon.

One struggles to imagine any contemporary artist eulogising 2010 in similar fashion. The earlier era’s musicians grasped the significance of contemporaneous cultural changes and understood how quickly, to quote Madame George, “the kids out in the street collecting bottle tops” would be swept away by ... what?

There lies the great poignancy of Madame George. Released in September 1968, the song accidentally marked the last point at which such a dozily peaceful evocation of Belfast would seem feasible or polite. Terrible things were about to happen. Necessary changes were to take place. The least significant of which was moving the train away from Sandy Row.