BIOGRAPHY: The1960s in Belfast were full of music. The city centre had many clubs and dance halls, pubs and "hops" where an extraordinary variety of performed music was on display.
From traditional Irish music to "trad" to music hall (the dying embers) to showbands and the proliferating urban sound of r 'n' b - that rawer, passionate bluesy encounter that became a signature of the times. Certainly for many of the young generation born in the postwar provincial city, venues such as the Maritime (at the side of Inst' school) or Sammy Huston's Jazz Club in Great Victoria Street became meccas of dance and live music. Before the curtain dropped in the late 1960s and the city, despite the best efforts of thousands of ordinary men and women who braved the terror, fell for over a decade into a kind of fragmented darkness, Belfast's vibrant music scene was a liberation.
In record shops like Dougie Knights, in boutiques like John Patrick's or Dukes, in clubs like the Maritime (and its successor, Club Rado) you could live in Belfast's city centre and bypass the sectarian bile. People really did get on with it; and get it on. The names of the illustrious blues, rock, r 'n' b artists, who played the city during the 1960s is literally legion - from (at random) John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, the seed-bed out of which so many top names emerged from Cream to Fleetwood Mac, to blues men like Champion Jack Dupree, to Hendrix and "pop" groups like The Small Faces, Pink Floyd . . . the list goes on and on.
This choice was matched by the quality and energy of a cluster of very talented local bands whose intimate, sometimes macho, ironic but always powerful performances meant that in Belfast you could dance or get to a "gig" every night of the week. And twice on a Wednesday (at the Plaza) or Saturday (at Sammy Hustons) if you had a mind to. One singer-songwriter emerged out of this fascinating time with his own fascinating confluence of musical inheritances and energy: Van Morrison. Performing in a number of bands from skiffle bands in the late 1950s through showbands like the Monarchs and ultimately to Them in the 1960s, Morrison embodies much of that eclectic and free-formed time in his own singing, early lyrics and musicianship.
But his real achievement was to take this legacy of home, family and "internationalise" it, when he took the brave solo steps in 1967 to the US, and to create for himself his own tradition. No one should underestimate that achievement. It sits alongside the achievement of the older generation of northern poets who rose to pre-eminence (but in a somewhat more sedate commercial-cultural mileu than the music business) at roughly the same time. Morrison's contribution in the following 30 years and more is astounding. Critics differ on the gold standard Morrison. For this punter, It's Too Late to Stop Now has to be in any final shake-up for the greatest live album recording of our time; Morrison has written some really great love lyrics ; his mood poem of Astral Weeks (and Moondance?) is immaculate and he can produce some of the most surprising, sublime and curt performances before an often changing band. Of the almost 30 albums, Healing Game stands out in recent times, and then there's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, or going back a bit, Wavelength, or . . . The thing about Morrison is that he carries within his music and lyrics an inescapably distinctive vision and landscape that is utterly unique.
This "new" biography of Morrison is a snooty, prickly affair based upon endless interviews (many already published) and characterised by what seems like the author's preoccupation with pyscho-babble. There are some fanzine moments for those so disposed but by the time the bloated book had collapsed into tabloid gossip this well-disposed reader had lost any interest and wanted out.
Gerald Dawe's new collection of poems, Lake Geneva, will be published next year by Gallery. He is also preparing a new edition of The Rest is History, his book on Belfast. He teaches at Trinity College, Dublin.
Can you feel the silence? Van Morrison: A New Biography. By Clinton Heylin. Viking/Penguin Books, 560pp. £18.99.