Exposing a poetic champion

The latest account of the life of Van Morrison reveals him to be a man who was viewed by colleagues as 'a total lunatic, an idiot and a weirdo' and once addressed an audience as 'pigs'. By Tom Galvin

In No Surrender, the new biography of the notoriously media-unfriendly Van Morrison, author Johnny Rogan makes little effort to present Morrison as anything different than what most people already believe him to be: an arrogant, selfish man who is at best remote, possibly shy, and at worst a variety of derogatory terms used by people who have had, by all accounts, the misfortune to cross his path. Rogan appears to relish the fact that he, like the majority of journalists and writers who have received the brunt of Morrison's ire over the years, is equally held with suspicion. The first quote in the book is from Morrison on Rogan: "Rogan's got something to hide. What's he hiding? I'd like to do a book on him."

Rogan's portrait of Morrison is bookended with a a childhood episode that is on first reading seemingly innocuous, but is used effectively as a profile of Morrison in that there was no reason behind it other than a pathological selfishness. It concerns a neighbour, Nancy McCarter, who recalled an afternoon when she was locked out of her home on Hyndfort St in the largely protestant East Belfast, where George Ivan Morrison was born on 31 August 1945. She asked the passing Morrison to climb over the wall and open the back door. "He merely shook his head in silence and coldly walked on," she said.

The event – if it can be called an event – is used again at the conclusion of the book when writer Steve Turner, who once met Morrison while writing Hungry for Heaven, a study of rock and religion, said: If I was to take one theme from his life which summed him up, I'd take that one. Someone is asking for help and it's just… nothing."

Apart from a natural talent at football, Morrison never excelled in school and even at a young age was bereft of social skills. Instead we have the image of a kid in his room receiving songs as if they were signals, which, as he would tell his mother, he had to write down as they came. So much so that when he was playing with a semi-pro band, The Olympics, while still a teenager cleaning windows by day, refused to come down one Sunday morning when the mini-bus arrived to take him to the gig that evening. The driver returned to the bus and told the other members that, "His mammy says he's not coming out… he's upstairs in his room writing poetry". They eventually got him down, but at the end of the night he was fired, with bandleader Walsh later saying, "I considered Van a total lunatic, an idiot and a weirdo and I had no time for the guy at all".

Another of Morrison's early bands, the Monarchs, had fired him early-on but had taken him back through what appeared to be only sympathy and with promises that he would curb his drinking; and he was only 17. But he was far from indispensable — an adequate sax player with cameo vocal slots who had some experience on the showband circuit, popular since the mid-1950s in Ireland.

By the summer of 1962, the band had a decent body of songs other than Showband material and were anxious to shed the silver suits and spread their wings. Trips to Britain and a four-month stint in Germany followed in 1963 with the now International Monarchs, a tour filled with nightmarish and often hilarious episodes that involved starvation, fights, rough accommodation and huge quantities of drink. Drugs were never part of the scene for Morrison and never would be either. Musically something of a shambles, what the tour did do was introduce Morrison to American GIs and their musical preferences, which supplemented his knowledge of American roots and blues music garnered from the records that his dad had taken home from a trip to America to seek work years before. But when the band returned – tired and tired of each other – they soon split.

Musically things were changing quickly. It was approaching the mid-sixties, Beatlemania was happening and the Rolling Stones were causing mayhem on their first tour. Belfast was not exactly the hot spot and Morrison, still seemingly lacking in an abundance of great talent, made up for it through industry and a sense of purpose. His vocal skills were still to be honed and even in the previous band, the Monarchs, was fourth or fifth in line as a singer.

In 1964 another band took Morrison in, The Manhattan Showband, a predominately protestant group who ironically rehearsed at a rented chapel hall in the Republican Milltown cemetery. While the Stones and the Beatles were taking the rest of the world by storm, a showband was the wrong place to be and Morrison, happy with the work, was still desperate to get involved in an R&B band which he believed was becoming the next great trend. He soon became involved with Them and rapidly gained notoriety both on and offstage in Belfast, where he had developed an energetic stage act fuelled by vast quantities of alcohol. They achieved only relative success with John Lee Hooker's Baby Please Don't Go, and their image was not helped by events such as the gig in December of that year at Cookstown, Co Tyrone, when after ignoring requests from the crowd were hailed with a shower of coins. Morrison, who had a reputation, even then, for being aggressive on stage shouted into the mic "Goodnight pigs" and the pennies soon turned to chairs.

How Morrison ever made it out of the mess that Them were in their latter days ,to become the artist he became seems nothing short of miraculous. "With his unattractive personality, plain looks, wavy red hair, pot belly and diminutive stature," writes Rogan, "Morrison was a publicist's nightmare". He was also impossible to deal with professionally, as the head of Decca, Phil Solomon, had said after he had washed his hands of him – and Them – in 1966. He also discredited any rumours that Morrison's behaviour was through shyness. "The man is as thick skinned as a crocodile. Morrison would do these things to suit Morrison because he's not a professional." Morrison's retort at a later date was to call Solomon an "Irish Jew... the worst kind, that's what they say".

Things weren't any easier when he left Belfast for New York, and apart from the success of Brown Eyed Girl struggled with ill-chosen contracts, poverty and even dealings with the mob who had to be paid-off to release him from contractual obligations. Rogan goes on to give us Morrison the musician, but unable to read music and really out of his depth with the professional musicians on the recording of Astral Weeks; Morrison who was so uptight all the time he had severe neck and back problems; Morrison who was so broke that he lived for the first while in New York in a ground floor flat with nothing but a mattress for himself and his first wife, who would later leave him and close the door firmly on the chapter saying, "I couldn't stand anymore of his rage as my daily reality".

Throughout the story of Morrison's life, several close friends and colleagues pass away and not once does Morrison attend a funeral – at least, not any of those mentioned, including that of a former member of Them, the quiet Patsy McAuley. There is the Morrison who in 1977 prompted the well-respected Capital Radio's Nicky Horne to remark after a frightful interview to promote the album, Period of Transition, "I was really upset that a man I had admired for so long could blow it so totally. He really did destroy my feelings for him as a man".

Morrison would later tell a press agent precisely what he was supposed to do and why he was hired. "I'm employing you to say 'No! No! No!'"

In 1978, promoting the album Wavelength, Morrison stormed-off the stage at New York's Palladium, "spooked by a glaring spotlight" and walked back to the hotel. And there is Morrison the deluded, who contemplated becoming a comedian and who once told an interviewer in 1984 that he would like to be a teacher. That same year he believed that Bruce Springsteen had ripped-off his dance movements, and having been refused permission by the Yeats' estate to put music to a poem Crazy Jane on God for his next album, A Sense of Wonder, said, "I thought I was doing them a favour. My songs are better than Yeats'."

Three years later he was invited to appear at a weekend seminar at Loughborough University in England titled The Secret Heart of Music: An Exploration Into The Power Of Music To Change Consciousness. On the final day at a forum in which delegates were invited to file questions to a panel which included Morrison, he was asked about the healing effects of music, the very reason for his being there. "Just read the brochure," was his reply.

Quite how Morrison became the icon he did is, upon Rogan's extensive, brilliantly entertaining, if ultimately tragic account, something of a mystery. While Rogan is seldom flattering, he does acknowledge Morrison's "artistic worth". He then lets those who knew him have the last word.

"Van is not a genius," says his first wife, "he's just completely hooked on what he does".

Cliff Richard, who recorded with him on what would be Morrison's return to form on 1989's Avalon Sunset, remarked that he had never met anyone with a greater sense of self-loathing. Michelle Rocca, who seemed to have charmed Morrison from the outset because she didn't actually know who he was, said that, "He worked very hard from a young age and I don't think he got the chance to get to know ordinary people". One of Morrison's early Belfast colleagues was even surprised he got so far, "I always thought he'd commit suicide because he always seemed so unhappy."p

Johnny Rogan's Van Morrison No Surrender is published by Secker & Warburg and is available from 12 May. Johnny Rogan is the author of Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance and Starmakers & Svengalis, a history of British pop management