I recently took a fortnight’s holiday in Dublin and took the opportunity to visit Titanic Belfast. After that I couldn’t resist visiting Van Morrison’s birthplace in East Belfast. I’ve never seen so many Union Jack flags in my life. A small brass plaque by the door of the terraced house where he was born in 1945 is almost the only public evidence of his Belfast roots (he left in 1966, after the breakup of the band Them, best known for their 1964 song Gloria). It was only through reading his Wikipedia entry today that I learned he was knighted in 2016 for services to the music industry and to tourism in Northern Ireland. He’ll be 80 in 25 days’ time.

In the possibly unlikely event that the BBC pleads with me to appear on Desert Island Discs (the first hosts of which were Roy Plomley and Michael Parkinson, later ones Sue Lawley, Kirsty Young and Lauren Laverne) I’d probably choose a couple of Van the Man’s songs including Streets of Arklow from Veedon Fleece (1974), his eighth studio album. From the Wiki entry on the album:

“Morrison recorded the album shortly after his divorce from wife Janet (Planet) Rigsbee. With his broken marriage in the past, Morrison visited Ireland on holiday for new inspiration, arriving on 20 October 1973 (with his fiancée at the time, Carol Guida). While there he wrote, in less than three weeks, the songs included on the album (except “Bulbs“, “Country Fair” and “Come Here My Love”).^[2]

It has been compared to Astral Weeks (1968) with the same “stream of consciousness” lyrics but musically it is more Celtic, acoustic and heavily influenced by Morrison’s Irish trip. It has been called a genuinely underground album that he seemed to disown quickly after recording and has been referred to as Morrison’s “forgotten masterpiece”.

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