Biography: Every Irish music journalist has a story about Van Morrison, usually involving a brief but spectacularly disastrous encounter with the curmudgeonly legend of music and song, writes Kevin Courtney.
There was the unfortunate interviewer (Liam Mackey) who had barely reached his third question before the little big man snorted, "Is it okay if I go to sleep?" And the hapless journo (Liam Fay) who was practically chased down the street by the portly pop star, clutching his C-90 filled with little more than a few non-committal grunts and monosyllabic replies.
Those of us lucky enough never to have met our hero have still heard enough tales about Morrison's unpleasantness to make our newspapers' libel lawyers shudder with fear.
Having previously survived the wrath of Smiths singer Morrissey, following his bestselling biography, Morrissey and Marr: The Severed Alliance (Morrissey famously wished he would "end his days in an M3 pile-up"), author Johnny Rogan is well-equipped to tackle the famously truculent musical son of Ulster, but even he - for legal reasons - couldn't repeat some of the stories surrounding Morrison's petulant persona. He does, however, quote Spike Milligan's verdict on meeting Van - "the man was a pig, looked dirty and scruffy" - and passes on band member Clive Culbertson's warning not to sit anywhere near the singer while he was eating. If Culbertson is to be believed, the spectacularly messy Mr Creosote of Monty Python fame has nothing on Van.
As to Morrison's alleged bad temper, Rogan recounts an incident in 1967 involving Morrison's then wife, Janet Planet, but remains tantalisingly vague about who did what to whom. He recounts numerous incidents where Morrison blanked out friends and former musical associates, and paints a picture of a self-righteous, fiery soul who let nothing, not even personal relationships, stand in the way of his musical ambition. He details Morrison's unlikely, and amazingly resilient, relationship with former Miss Ireland Michelle Rocca with a wry eye, noting the irony of a famously reclusive and unsociable star stepping out in Dublin high society and courting the gossip columns - a long way from his stilted upbringing in post-war East Belfast.
Summing Morrison up, Rogan attributes the following admission to the singer: "I'm not a nice person. I don't expect anyone to say I'm a nice guy. If somebody says I'm grumpy, I'm a c***, or whatever, that's okay because I don't profess to be an angel. I think I'm a loner."
An early acquaintance of Morrison's, Anne Denvir, had a different view of Morrison's gruff, unfriendly demeanour: "He was always a little shit and he still is." Rogan has his own theory about Morrison's mental make-up, and it's the central theme of this remarkably well- researched and deeply engrossing biography. Rogan's premise is that Morrison's upbringing in staunchly Protestant, sectarian East Belfast has informed his life, his music, his work ethic and his intractable personality. His musical purism, his uncompromising stance as a performer, his abrasive attitude and his paranoia about the media and the music industry, are all born of the siege mentality that permeates Ulster unionism. Rogan goes so far as to compare Morrison to that other East Belfast firebrand, Ian Paisley, seeing no coincidence in the fact that young Morrison passed Paisley's house at the bottom of Hyndford Street on his way home from Elmgrove Primary School in Beersbridge Road. To his mind, Morrison and Paisley are two sides of the same threepenny bit - even Morrison's cadence on such songs as Rave On, John Donne resembles Paisley's high-decibel demagoguery. No matter where he went in the world, claims Rogan, Morrison could never escape the chains that tied him to East Belfast and the politics of No Surrender.
For fans of Van Morrison's music, No Surrender might seem somewhat blasphemous, focusing not so much on Van the artist, but on Van the not-very-nice man. But Rogan also pays tribute to Morrison's pure, untainted artistry, and details the development - and subsequent decline - of Morrison's muse over the past 40 years or so. For the serious Van-ologist, Rogan's painstaking research yields an abundance of detail about Morrison's early years: playing sax and harmonica in local showbands, enjoying sudden and short-lived chart success with Them, writing and developing his solo debut and acknowledged masterpiece, Astral Weeks, and living the American dream as a widely admired songwriter and rock star in the 1970s, when he released such seminal albums as Astral Weeks, St Dominic's Preview and Veedon Fleece.
Rogan also gives the reader a learned account of the Troubles in the North, from Home Rule to the civil rights movement and from sectarian violence and IRA activism in the early 1970s to the Downing Street Declaration and the Omagh bombing in the 1990s.
This parallel history serves to put Morrison's life in context, but sometimes it feels as if Rogan is merely using events in Northern Ireland to fill in long gaps in his knowledge about Morrison's life. Equally, there are long asides about various local figures in East Belfast, and a far too long account of Michelle Rocca's assault case against her former lover, Cathal Ryan - the alleged assault happened long before Morrison met Rocca.
Morrison himself will probably dismiss most of this biography as spurious detail, but for all Van's protests that the music is the only thing that matters, it's still oddly fascinating to try and square this Scrooge-like caricature with such beautiful, transcendental songs as Sweet Thing, Madame George, Tupelo Honey, Crazy Love and Into The Mystic. Maybe that's why Van's music has been so great - it's the only way the nice guy locked inside him can get out.
Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist
Van Morrison: No Surrender. By Johnny Rogan, Secker & Warburg, 628pp. £17.99