Van at the Armstrong House in Queens, N
Van Morrison in lockdown: ‘I am trying to get back into writing songs’ | The Independent
by Martin Chilton
strange times. We were due to meet in London, during his Palladium residency, but instead he phones from Belfast, on the dot of the appointed time, joking about how he is “twiddling his thumbs”. He says that “like everyone else, I’m following the guidelines”.
Over the next hour, he talks with passion about books, jazz, blues, his youthful football-playing days and penning his memoir. Morrison, who turns 75 in August, has a sharp memory. Although he has been known to have fractious interviews, I find him friendly and happy to share anecdotes, his voice a mixture of a low drawl interspersed with sudden moments of lightness.Morrison has a new book of lyrics out with Faber called Keep ’Er Lit (the title tips a nod to his first book of lyrics, 2014’s Lit Up Inside). He is disappointed that his appearance at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival was cancelled. I wonder whether the enforced break has at least given him time to pen new songs? “I want to write, but I am kind of getting a bit lazy at the moment,” he says. “I was supposed to be doing six gigs in London, so I went from touring to basically just being at home. I am trying to get back into writing.”
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His friend Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Does Morrison consider lyric writing the equivalent of poetry? “Some of my works are just straight poetry, some could be a song or a poem and some are poetry with a music back-up, like ‘On Hyndford Street’, which was based on my early days, listening to my father’s record collection and Radio Luxembourg,” he replies. Morrison grew up in a street of small, terraced houses barely a mile from the Lagan river that runs through the centre of Belfast. “I have a book of Cole Porter’s songs and his lyrics are just poetry. I don’t think there is a lot of difference.”
Morrison’s work has always been full of literary references, from William Blake to Seamus Heaney, and he sometimes uses book titles for the names of songs, such as “Haunts of Ancient Peace”. He is intrigued when I tell him the phrase was first used by Alfred Tennyson in the 1840s. “Oh, was that a Tennyson thing?” asks Morrison. “I took that from a book title by Alfred Austin, but he must have got it from Tennyson.”
