Van - the Man and the Devil

By JOHNNY ROGAN

Secker & Warburg, 628pp, 17.99

NO WONDER VAN MORRISON IS SUCH AN angry old curmudgeon. As Johnny Rogan tells it, when young Van was growing up in East Belfast he had an absolutely awful time on Sundays. The pubs and cinemas and shops were shut, and there were precious few people on the streets unless they were on their way to church. Some God-fearing folk would go so far as to chain up the swings in the park - dour Ulster people who wanted to discourage fun, it being the Sabbath.

They were people like Ian Paisley, who was 19 when he began his firebrand preaching in East Belfast. A year or so later he set up home around the corner from the infant Van Morrison’s house on Hyndford Street.

It may be that Paisley had to stomp past number 125 every Sunday as he headed off to deliver a weekly assault on the Pope for his Free Presbyterian congregation. If so he must have been horrified to hear the sounds that came through the front door. For it was nothing but the devil’s music. George Morrison, head of the household, had a formidable record collection: swing, country, jazz and, Lord save us, even rhythm and blues. Van’s mother loved the music too. She sang in the kitchen and at parties - she played the bagpipes!

Johnny Rogan tells us a good deal about the Belfast of that era in this biography of one of the more baffling characters in recent pop history. He believes this is necessary to achieve a better understanding of the cultural hardwiring that informed the singer known as Van the Man, sometimes dubbed The Belfast Cowboy.

Rogan’s theory is this: The capital of the North has bred touchy, defensive, constantly wary and rather ugly Ulstermen, always primed to lash out at any threat, real or imagined, and Ian "No Surrender" Paisley is its apotheosis. Now, think about the brooding Van Morrison for a moment. Which are his most reported character traits? Well, as Rogan’s relates it, any and all of the above. So it’s obvious. Van Morrison is none other than the Rev Ian Paisley, slightly fatter and with a guitar.

Though bonkers, the theory does work well on the level of passion. Both men made their early names with extraordinary displays of fierce, fervent abandon. While Paisley knocked them dead from the fiery pulpit, Morrison made them gasp and scream as he thrashed madly about the stage of Belfast’s Maritime Hotel on the nights when his group Them owned the town.

Where it doesn’t work so well is more important. For all Morrison’s many social faults he has generally striven to grow, both as an artist and as a thinker.

And where Paisley’s unswerving stance bled vitriol into the fabric of his community, Morrison has always been able to quell the demons inside for at least as long as it takes to write another song.

There is an irony in this book. Rogan hopes the passages on Belfast’s troubled history will shed light on the crucible of Morrison’s particular art. They do not do that. Nonetheless, they are the most successful aspect of this work. The Belfast strand of the narrative concerns the lives of Morrison and his friends, family and contemporaries. We watch the dark clouds of the Troubles gather and flash and hear the stories of young, hopeful people as their world, a few miles from mainland Britain, tips into madness.

A committed Van Morrison fan knows two things. First, that his music can be a transcendant experience, an astonishing recognition of art springing from nature. Second, that as easy-going Irish fellows go, he isn’t one. Rogan dedicates almost 500 pages to lurid evidence of the latter, with a few passages that never quite seem to explain the former. It is a compendium of detail, a neck-aching triumph of research pinned together by a prospectus that fails to convince.