It looks as if there may be fewer Irish people at the Oscars than we originally hoped. Last weekend, Kenneth Branagh and Ciarán Hinds, nominated as respectively director and star of Belfast, tested positive for Covid. At time of writing, they are isolating in New York. It remains to be seen if they will make it.
It was also confirmed that only four out of the five tunes nominated for best original song will be performed at the ceremony. Van Morrison, whose Down to Joy closes Branagh’s film, was not on the list circulated by the academy. Thus vanishes an opportunity to tip hats at the most important Irish performer of the rock era. The song had little chance of winning, but an appearance at the Oscars would have been a sweet way to crown an extraordinary career.
Not everyone saw it that way. Morrison, never the cosiest of characters, has been kicking up controversy throughout the pandemic. “Come forward, stand up, fight the pseudo-science and speak up,” he said in protest at the restrictions on live music. In September 2020 he released a song unambiguously entitled No More Lockdowns. “No more government overreach,” he sings in the chorus. “No more fascist bullies, disturbing our peace.” There was more where that came from.
Enthusiasts enjoy arguing over which Morrison era is the best. Once unpopular albums rise in estimation, while others slip away a little
The supposedly prescient “never liked him anyway” mob were, thus, much in evidence on social media when Belfast, set in the late 1960s, emerged drenched in Morrison’s back catalogue. There is not quite enough there to define the film as a juke box musical, but the soundtrack did remind us how much of Morrison’s inimitable Celtic aesthetic is rooted in his Northern Irish upbringing. “He was a great cultural ambassador for that part of the world, at the time of the events of this film,” Branagh told Hot Press. “So although there’s beautiful music in all parts of the island, and contemporary and many other classics, it was hard to think of doing a film about Belfast without acknowledging that particular voice.”
Much has been written about the singer’s alleged awkwardness. “Every Irish music journalist has a story about Van Morrison, usually involving a brief but spectacularly disastrous encounter,” Kevin Courtney wrote in The Irish Times some years ago. A fascinating interview in the Guardian from 2019 finds Laura Barton, who describes Morrison as “my favourite songwriter in the world,” receiving repeated curt replies that recall those offered by director John Ford to Peter Bogdanovich in a famous 1971 documentary. “There’s not really any great intellectual Bernard Levin debate, you know. It’s just, it’s just … it’s just music, that’s all it is,” Morrison said.
None of this should alter the reputation of the work. Like Ford, Morrison is a singular myth maker who has manoeuvred within existing genres to create his own unique space. He grew up in the Protestant community, but, long before some such people ceased to “identify” as Irish, positioned himself in a nether region that married American rhythm and blues to the Celtic fringes. In the twist of a phrase, the songs move from Lead Belly, legendary Louisianan folk bluesman, to the delicacies enjoyed after a day cleaning the windows of East Belfast. One of his best albums, Irish Heartbeat, found him collaborating with The Chieftains.
It is hard to name any other musician who produced albums of such quality for such a long time. From Astral Weeks in 1968 to Hymns to the Silence in 1991 there is scarcely a dud. Bob Dylan couldn’t quite manage that. Nor could David Bowie, Joni Mitchell or Stevie Wonder. None of which is to suggest that he then slipped into irresistible decline. Several reviews of last year’s enormous, belligerent Latest Record Project Volume 1 – sample titles They Own the Media and Why Are You on Facebook? – had to admit that musically it wasn’t at all bad. “For his 42nd studio album, stuffed with a bumper 28 tracks, Van Morrison has written some of his most compelling bluesy melodies in an age,” Joe Breen wrote in this newspaper.
Receiving a musical education through his dad’s massive record collection, Morrison began his career with the notoriously raucous Them. Hits such as Baby, Please Don’t Go; Here Comes the Night and the imperishable Gloria – later covered to skull-shaking effect by Patti Smith – propelled them to success before Morrison spun off in his own eccentric direction. Early solo sessions spawned Brown Eyed Girl, still a staple on American radio, and the hastily recorded debut LP Blowin’ Your Mind.
The story really begins with the succeeding Astral Weeks. There are few records so perfectly and originally formed that, even after decades of study, they fail to lose their miraculous quality. It hardly seems possible that something so singular – recorded with top jazz musicians, but not jazz; attuned to the counterculture, but no part of the hippy rearrangements – could have sprung complete from someone so young. Madam George, the album’s rolling, cinematic centrepiece, plays like sad lament for a Belfast long, long past. Yet the composer had not yet attained his 24th birthday. This writer was among the many who repeatedly set their Walkman (or whatever that machine later became) to play a particular snatch as the train to Belfast passed over the Boyne Viaduct in Drogheda. “And you know you gotta go, on that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row,” Van sings. “Throwing pennies at the bridges down below. And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow.”
What a shame Morrison won't be there to wave at the fans. Not that he would dream of doing any such thing
More miraculously still, Morrison came close to maintaining that quality through subsequent albums such as Moondance; St Dominic’s Preview; and His Band and Street Choir. Emerging from someone with such an angular reputation, the music, without ever tending to the sedative, had extraordinary healing powers. Even at a growl, Morrison’s voice bubbled with warmth. To paraphrase John Peel on The Fall, a very different group who also sustained excellence over decades, Van Morrison was always different, always the same.
Enthusiasts enjoy arguing over which era is the best. Once unpopular albums rise in estimation, while others slip away a little. Timothy and Elizabeth Bracy, in a near-definitive 2014 ranking for Stereogum of every LP then released, dared to put Veedon Fleece, a poor seller from 1974, just ahead of Astral Weeks at number one. A perfectly reasonable view. One might also consider the rambling Common One from 1980 or the eccentric Inarticulate Speech of the Heart from 1983.
At any rate, whatever the awkwardness of recent outbursts, and, notwithstanding the claims of a certain Dublin band that shares its name with a spy plane, Morrison can boast a status unchallenged by any other Irish artist on the rock and pop spectrum. It will require divine intervention for him to triumph on Sunday – Billie Eilish, 56 years his junior, is the favourite for No Time to Die – but an Oscar nomination counts a fitting late garland. Martin Scorsese, for one, will not begrudge him the honour. You can hear Van’s Wonderful Remark in the master’s King of Comedy and his TB Sheets, an undervalued pre-Astral Weeks epic, in Marty’s Bringing Out the Dead. There is no better record of Morrison’s live act than his version of Caravan on Scorsese’s concert movie The Last Waltz.
What a shame he won’t be there to wave at the fans. Not that he would dream of doing any such thing.
