A sight-seeing trip around east Belfast doesn't sound like one of the hottest tickets of a fledgling arts festival that claims to be a showcase for all things challenging and contemporary. But this was a tour of Van Morrison's Belfast - and just like the organisers of the second Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival promised, it was a Vantastic day.
Around 60 of "the Man's" most ardent fans ("Vanatics", one helpfully pointed out), including some Americans and one Brazilian, gathered in the sun on Saturday afternoon outside the John Hewitt pub to pay homage to their musical hero. The hostelry on Donegal Street, owned by the Unemployed Resource Centre, is one of the main venues of a festival based around an area of the city formerly dominated by warehouses and frequented by prostitutes, which is now being developed as Belfast's funkier answer to Temple Bar.
And it has to be said, strolling en masse down the street where Van lived, to the amusement of locals, was nothing if not challenging. There is a plaque commemorating him outside number 125 Hyndford Street, the two-up, two-down house where Morrison was born in 1945 and grew up listening to his first rhythm and blues tunes. Our tour guide, music journalist Stuart Baillie, told a great story about the musician's mother Violet answering the door to one of her son's mates, only to tell him that Van couldn't come out because "he was upstairs writing poetry". She also said that people used to bow down as they passed the house saying "hail Van, King of the Blues" in mock hero worship.
The tour's first stop was the site of the old Maritime, a sea man's mission on College Square North, where Morrison's band Them had much of their early success in the 1960s. The place crops up in The Story of Them, and the fact that Morrison namechecks dozens of streets, shops and even his old school, Orangefield, in his songs meant there were plenty more sites of Morrison interest where that came from.
The bus station on Great Victoria Street was included because, in Ma- dame George, Morrison sings about catching the bus from Dublin and getting off at Sandy Row. Fitzroy Avenue - where his great Aunt Joy lived - appears in the same song which Morrison has in the past denied was about a local transvestite. Then it was past Morrison's old primary school towards the Beachy River near his house, which appears in On Hyndford Street. The site of Davy's Chipper, whose pastie suppers he eulogises in Sense of Wonder, was also nearby - but it is now a Chinese Restaurant called Good Fortune. In Sense of Wonder he also sings about "snowballs" and "wagon wheels", and the experience was given an even more authentic edge when a biscuit tin full of these snacks was passed around the bus.
As we encountered each new Morrison attraction, the relevant song was blared out on the coach PA, particularly poignant when it came to Cyprus Avenue, the prosperous tree lined street he sings about on the album Astral Weeks. Baillie explained that it was used by Morrison as a kind of shorthand for various spiritual experiences. The fact that Ian Paisley used to live on the Avenue is surely just coincidence.
Later that evening there was a seminar entitled "Van Morrison - Made In Belfast", during which there were robust exchanges about how the city shaped him, and whether his music has deteriorated in recent times. Disappointingly, rumours that the notoriously grumpy artist would make an appearance at a tribute concert held on Saturday night in the John Hewitt were unfounded, but it didn't stop revellers belting out Gloria until the early hours of the morning.
On Friday, the festival highlight was an odyssey to foreign shores when the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set on the Greek Island of Cephallonia, made an appearance. On a stage in the city's art college, Louis de Bernieres read two unpublished short stories about life in the "very rural and very beautiful" Surrey village where he grew up - quite a coup, considering the movie of his award-winning novel was being released the same night. The stories described a world of retired brigadiers and spinsters with large legs who shot squirrels. After the reading, a local musician played Scottish folk tunes on - what else? - a mandolin.
De Bernieres had apologised for the fact that he wouldn't be able to sign copies of his books because of a recent operation on his hand. He made up for this with an entertaining question-and-answer session.
What everyone wanted to know was his reaction to the film. He said giving his book to movie-makers was like "having a baby, giving it to the woman next door and when you next see it, its ear is stitched onto its forehead".
AT one stage, he revealed, the producers toyed with the idea of having Captain Corelli kill his German friend. "I said, you can't do that. It is out of character, and if you do that I will denounce the film," he told the rapt audience. The scenes were shot anyway but they did not end up in the film. "It was worrying. When I first saw it I was sitting there being irritated . . . but the second time I just relaxed and enjoyed it, because it is actually a very good film. Just don't expect it to be the same as the book."
The session also unearthed the biographical nugget that one of de Bernieres' Huguenot ancestors came to Northern Ireland from France and set up a linen factory in Lisburn. He also revealed that he has thought about writing a book set in Monaghan.
The Cathedral Quarter Festival is taking place on the streets and in a number of smaller venues in an effort to make the arts more accessible, according to festival director Sean Kelly, who was manning the festival office in the North Street Arcade on Saturday. The North Street Arcade is also home to a sculpture exhibition by Belfast artist Raymond Watson. His work in bog oak, based on a number of poems, including Seamus Heaney's poem `Maighdean Mara', is just one of a number of the festival's visual art highlights.
One street-based event saw confused crowds gathering in the city's main shopping district, Royal Avenue, during the week to witness the bizarre spectacle of Maynard Flip Flap - a silent clown who somehow managed to squeeze himself into a unfeasibly small box.
"There has been a great reaction from the public, there is a lot more awareness of the festival this year, you hear people talking about it in bars and taxi drivers know it's going on," says Kelly. "It bodes well. Nobody took us particularly seriously last year, but now we are a force to be reckoned with."
The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival continues until Sunday, May 13th. Information from: 04890232403.
