Lord Byron learned to love despair. I wish I could

Van Morrison talked to Ian Rankin about songwriting and Edna O'Brien read Madame George in a special event at London's Lyric Theatre

Van Morrison was celebrated in a night of words and music at London's Lyric Theatre, featuring Edna O'Brien (far right)

Irish poet Michael Longley promised a unique night, and "Van Morrison presents an evening of words & music" was certainly that, not least because we heard Edna O'Brien reading Madame George as a poem.

The event, at London's Lyric Theatre, was to mark a new book brought out by Faber, Lit Up Inside, which contains the lyrics to nearly 200 Morrison songs, presented as poems.

So was Van the Man lit up? At times, definitely, but there were also moments of vintage deadpan Morrison. The second half of the evening was a concert. He introduced Foreign Window by saying: "This was partly based on a documentary about Lord Byron in which he said 'I have learned to love despair'. I wish I could."

It was mainly chatty Van rather than grumpy Van treading the boards, though, and novelist Ian Rankin did a good job of drawing out anecdotes during a 25-minute question-and-answer session. We had listened to Dr Eamonn Hughes talking about Morrison and watched film footage of Morrison singing with Bob Dylan, and when Rankin asked him how many people have had Dylan as an accompanist, Morrison said: "Harry Belafonte, for one." Asked by Rankin about shows like the X Factor, and whether they were for people "selling their souls", Morrison replied: "Nothing has changed. I wish it had."

The thing about Morrison is that he adores music. Old jazz musicians who know him will tell you that he is passionate about the music of his youth – Morrison is 69 – and he was fulsome in his praise of blues musicians such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Leroy Carr and Lightnin' Hopkins. "It's difficult to understand how people supposed to be so uneducated, like Lightnin', were coming up with Elizabethan language and imagery in songs that were like poetry," Morrison said. He talked here with real fondness about the jazz and blues he had heard as a boy, both from his father's record collection and by listening to AFN radio. "Ray Charles, Sidney Bechet, Mahalia Jackson singing the Lord's Prayer. It was only years later I realised that wasn't normal. I heard Lenny Bruce doing a sketch about Stars of Jazz when he was an in-thing."

Longley, 75, told the audience that what he and Morrison talked about most was jazz: Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith – "where it began" – and the man known as Dr Jazz of Belfast, the late Solly Lipsitz, who ran the Atlantic Records shop on Belfast High Street.

If there was a point to the evening, and to the book, it seemed to be to place Morrison among the literary figures of Ireland. Morrison compared himself to William Blake (he had London, I had East Belfast seemed to be the gist) and used the term 'Blake-ian' three times. But it wasn't all portentous. Morrison has a funny side (he is a fan of Spike Milligan and The Goons and is good at impersonations) and this came across in a few replies to Rankin. After Morrison said that "I wrote poems before I ever picked up a guitar", Rankin asked if a young boy in Belfast would have had to hide his poetry writing for fear of being beaten up. "My first poem was about a shipyard and you wouldn't have been beaten up for that," Morrison joked. He was also witty when Rankin listed the writers Morrison had name-checked in a song (Beckett, Joyce and Wilde), with the singer saying: "Yes, and George Best and Alex Higgins, too."

But both Longley and O'Brien repeatedly described the songs they were reading as poems. O'Brien admitted that she has always been "a little stuck on him" and said she thought he was "in the business of making magic". The 83-year-old author of The Country Girls read his Astral Weeks song Madame George particularly well – and it would be easy to trip up over the lines:

'And the love that loves to love,
That loves the love that loves,
The love that loves to love,
The love that loves to love,
The love that loves.'

Morrison, dressed in his John Lee Hooker outfit (dark hat, dark suit, sunglasses), had already left the stage at that point to prepare for his concert.

^{Edna O'Brien said: "Like everyone, I was a little bit stuck on Van Morrison." REX}

^FEATURES

So what did we learn?

• That he connects with Samuel Beckett, especially in a love of repetition of words and an agreement about having to go on despite a "sense of despair and futility".

• That the song Moondance started as an instrumental, which he had been playing as far back as 1965, when he used to jam on saxophone in Notting Hill with Mick Fleetwood on conga drums. Have I Told You Lately (that I love you) also started as an instrumental.

• That Tore Down a la Rimbaud took eight years to finish – the longest it's ever taken him to complete a song.

• That part of his early song Mystic Eyes was inspired by the scene in Dickens's Great Expectations in which Pip meets Magwitch.

• That he was a big fan of Sixties English folk singer and guitarist Steve Benbow.

The concert, just under an hour, was enjoyable. This was gentle Van with a tight, acoustic, four-piece backing band (piano, double bass, drums, guitar) featuring brief, chatty explanations of the songs he played, including Alan Watt Blues, Wonderful Remark and Why Must I Always Explain. There was a jazzy version of Into the Mystic.

 ^{Van Morrison in 1965 REX FEATURES}

The highlight, showing Morrison at his PLAYFUL best, was a version of Coney Island. In the foreword to the book, Rankin says of Morrison's music: "There was a search for the spiritual in the commonplace . . . But there are also stories teeming with incidents and characters and grand travelogues, and extolling of life's simple pleasures."

That's true of the spoken song Coney Island, which Morrison said had a significance because as a boy, around 1959, he helped deliver bread in the van for Stewart's bakery in East Belfast and he would have to get up at 5am to make deliveries at the beach in Coney Island. Belfast, of that time, resonates in some of his best songs about Orangefield, which was still almost a village with cobbled streets when he was growing up.

 ^{Van Morrison inscribed a copy of Lit Up Inside to writer Ian Rankin, who wrote the foreword PHOTO COURTESY OF IAN RANKIN}

Although Coney Island had been read out earlier by Longley, Morrison played around with the composition, telling the affluent audience that "jam jar" was "Cockney rhyming slang for car" and, with a grin, changing the emotional end to the song, which is about a car journey across the glorious countryside of Northern Ireland, to include the joke:

'And all the time going to Coney Island I'm thinking,
Shall I drop you off at the next corner?'

For Morrison fans the book is interesting (although for the £500 deluxe version you might want your own Van the Man house concert), not least because you can finally learn some of the lines to songs such as Bulbs, in which I now know he sings about someone called Ada:

'Now Ada was a straight clear case of,
Havin' taken in too much juice.'

You also get a sense of the range of his writing and some of the bleakness in lesser known compositions such as Not Supposed to Break Down:

'Fifteen families starving,
All around the corner block.
Here we're standing so alone,
Just like Gibraltar Rock.'

But Longley was right. This was a unique event, right down to Morrison, no isolated rock for once, exiting stage left, whispering like a revivalist preacher, as he sang a line about crossing a river.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/11237541/Van-Morrison-Lord-Byron-learned-to-love-despair.-I-wish-I-could.html#