Van the Man Contains Multitudes
A Story of Magical Nostalgia and Anger Outbursts
I first encountered Van Morrison back when the continents were still united, and my left knee was never prickly. I got an extensive list of Martin Scorsese’s films (thanks, A.!), and among them was The Last Waltz (the farewell concert of The Band), where Morrison makes a cameo, singing Caravan. Because the ways of my memory are still uncharted territory, what I recall most from that encounter was reading a YouTube comment calling him a fantastic musician, but a horrible excuse of a human being (not a quote). The second notable meeting was years later after reading this article about musical nostalgia by Mikel Jollett (the frontman of The Airborne Toxic Event, among other things). Jollett talks about losing his father and the breath-taking, destabilising effects of sudden nostalgia: “a song will come on that reminds me of him — perhaps it’s even a song I don’t ever remember hearing — and I’m suddenly overwhelmed by such an intense wave of nostalgia, I literally have to stand still and catch myself. Like I can’t breathe.” The song that first triggered that reaction was Morrison’s Celtic New Year, a song he did not remember his father playing. As I battle my own nostalgia, dealing with loss (and potential loss) of parents, memories and irrecoverable times, I also find myself grasping for air from time to time (a more mundane deviated septum plays a role too, but let’s focus). Although it eluded me until I read the article, Celtic New Year is, to this day, my favourite Morrison song. An atemporal love song and story; a harsh voice and an acoustic guitar singing about a couple stranded between hours not measured by a clock, and begging for a comeback between the Indian summer and the Celtic New Year. An eternal golden hour in musical notes. Time bends for the Irish and lovers. Celtic New Year is part of the 2005 studio album Magic Time.
I do not know exactly when my go-to song for Instagram stories, Days Like This, first landed on my radar. But it did, and others followed (or preceded), and in early 2026, I was buying tickets to see Van Morrison live at the Gent Jazz Festival(best Belgian invention after the spa, the saxophone and Jacques Brel).
THEM. And a Brown Eyed Girl
George Ivan Morrison was born on 31 August 1945 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, to George Morrison, a shipyard electrician, and Violet Morrison (née Stitt), a former singer and tap dancer. Little Ivan grew up to become Van the Man, the prolific, irascible high priest of Afro-Celtic blues and expert cartographer of nostalgia.
Widely talented, Morrison began performing as a teenager in the 50s, when he formed multiple bands. Greil Marcus lists them all in his 2010 book When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison. His career took off in 1964, as the frontman of the Belfast group, Them. The moniker is a reference to Them!, a 1954 horror film about giant radioactive ants.
Them had multiple UK hits like Gloria; Baby, Please Don’t Go; and Here Comes the Night, and found fame in the United States as part of the British Invasion. The band had a US tour in May 1966. From May to June, Them performed at the Whisky a Go Go club in Los Angeles. The Doors opened one of Them’s final shows. In 1966, on the album Them Again, the group covered Bob Dylan’s It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Their version is in the soundtrack of the 1996 film Basquiat.
Morrison quit the group shortly after the tour and returned to Belfast. Some of the Them members remained in the United States. Discussing the band’s break-up, Morrison later said: “There was no motive behind anything you did [back then]. You just did it because you wanted to do it and you enjoyed doing it. That’s the way the thing started, but it got twisted somewhere along the way and everybody involved in it got twisted as well, including me. You can’t take something like that, put it in a box and place a neat little name on it, then try to sell it. That’s what they tried to do. That’s what killed Them.”
In 1967, Morrison returned to New York and recorded, working with the producer Bert Berns, an eight-track solo album, including the later hit Brown Eyed Girl. Building on the success of Brown Eyed Girl, Berns released Blowin’ Your Mind!, an album with a questionable title and a cover in summer-of-love aesthetics, including the hit and other songs from the New York recording sessions. Morrison had not been consulted about the release.
Astral Weeks
In 1968, he recorded in three days (according to his official biography) the poetic haze that is Astral Weeks.
In a 2018 article in The New Yorker, Jon Michaud describes the album, which is still widely considered among Morrison’s most important works, as “stream-of-consciousness lyrics about being transported to ‘another time’ and ‘another place’”.
In Astral Weeks, Morrison’s soulful, ragged voice flows into sweet, beautiful laments about a disappeared and disappearing world, about homecoming and leaving the past behind. His yarragh shines. In Listening to Van Morrison, Greil Marcus quotes a review by Ralph J. Gleason of Morrison’s 1970 album, Moondance. Gleason, in turn, quotes John McCormack, the Irish tenor, and describes the yarragh as “the element necessary to mark the important voice off from the other good ones”. For Morrison, he explains, the yarragh is a sense of the song’s own life, of “is the song singing you?” as Morrison himself once said.
My favourite Astral Weeks song? Madam George. A nine-minute stream-of-consciousness ballad about saying goodbye set in Belfast. Uncoincidentally, Astral Weeks was written in the late 60s, the dawn of The Troubles, already announcing the bloody 70s in Northern Ireland. In the 2008 documentary Van Morrison — Under Review 1964–1974, Northern Irish music journalist Gavin Martin explains how the song captures “a fading city, a changing city”, where the train from Dublin would soon no longer arrive in Belfast at Sandy Row.
The Golden Era
In 1968, Van Morrison married Janet Planet, an American songwriter and vocalist. In 1971, he released Tupelo Honey (a bucolic, troubadour-style album) and the single Wild Night. The couple moved to California in the early 70s, divorced in 1973, and Morrison went back to Ireland.
The 1972 album Saint Dominic’s Preview is probably the harbinger of his return to Ireland. Some see it as referencing the conflict that was tearing Morrison’s native Northern Ireland apart in the 70s. Almost Independence Day, another 10-minute-long track (considered a continuation of Madam George, a theory that Morrison vehemently denied), about watching the fireworks across the San Francisco Bay. The beginning of the song is strikingly similar to Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Which came first? Almost Independence Day by about four years. The Man might’ve been onto something when, according to Greil Marcus, in drunken, angry nights, he would say, about the Rolling Stones this time, that they “stole it all from him, from him!”
In October 1974, the initially unsuccessful Veedon Fleece was released, closing a prolific decade (captured in Under Review 1964–1974), in which Morrison established his style and found his interest in esoteric religions and beliefs. During this period, Irish folk and Celtic traditions became more present in his work, and his long-term relationship with myth and memory solidified.
Another Glorious Decade
Nonetheless, Morrison reinvented himself in the late 70s and the 80s.
The documentary Another Glorious Decade: Under Review 1977–1987 looks into it. After Veedon Fleece, Morrison disappeared for three years, secluded himself and claimed he had “fallen out of love with music”. In the winter of 1976, he briefly interrupted this self-imposed absence to appear in The Last Waltz and musically educate me. Almost as important as my musical literacy, the concert sparked a renewed collaboration between Van Morrison and Dr John (who was on the bill of The Last Waltz as well), which put an end to Morrison’s exile. The result was the 1977 album A Period of Transition.
In this period, his reputation as an irascible, paranoid and antagonistic troublemaker became rooted. He had beef and exasperated everyone in the music industry: the then-powerful music media, his label — Warner Bros, music impresarios, etc. I see, I fight.
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In 1978, he released his fastest-selling album, Wavelength. I am pretty sure the homonymous song could wake up the dead, but please do not quote me on that. For now, that is. My friends and family received specific indications to test this theory out when my time comes.
The 1979 universally acclaimed Into the Music album includes Bright Side of the Road and And the Healing Has Begun. Combining nostalgia with hopeful brightness, both songs are on the soundtrack of the 2021 film Belfast.
In the 80s, Morrison’s interest in Anglo-Celtic poetic romanticism peaked. The 15-minute track Summertime in England on his 1980 album, Common One, illustrates this.
In 1988, he released Irish Heartbeat with the traditional Irish group The Chieftains. It includes Raglan Road and the track Irish Heartbeat, which Morrison sang with Mark Knopfler in 2015. As one who thinks that only a cruel whim of fate stopped her from being Irish, I have listened to this album one too many times.
The On-and-off-glorious Decades
In the 90s and the early 2000s, Van Morrison continued releasing albums with the same madcap energy. Greil Marcus talks about “the endless stream of dull and tired albums through the 1980s and ’90s, carrying titles like warning labels — Beautiful Vision; Poetic Champions Compose; Avalon Sunset; No Guru, No Method, No Teacher; Inarticulate Speech of the Heart; A Sense of Wonder; Enlightenment”. The list, Marcus argues, “attests” to the fact that “yarragh is not, it seems, something Morrison can get at will”. I tend to agree, although I do believe Days Like This from the 1995 album is a panacea against bad days. But do not quote me on that either.
In his personal life, Morrison lived between the UK and Ireland, and in 1992 he married Michelle Rocca. The couple divorced in 2018. In 2016, he was officially knighted as Sir George Ivan Morrison, receiving his knighthood from the then-Prince of Wales at Buckingham Palace.
In 2005, he released Magic Time, the album containing Celtic New Year, the song that lets me sheepishly quote American Beauty.
By contrast, in 2020 and 2021, the COVID pandemic hit him hard and exposed a side harder to digest. Morrison released a series of protest songs against the lockdown regulations, and he called the Northern Ireland health minister Robin Swann “very dangerous”. The minister sued; the defamation case settled in 2024. Eric Clapton joined the bandwagon, collaborating on the song Stand and Deliver. In 2021, the album Latest Record Project included a song called They Own the Media, which sparked allegations of antisemitism. The trophy for not ageing gracefully remains with Roger Waters, but he’d better watch out.
Van Morrison continued making and playing music all these years, and on 7 July 2026, he went on the main stage at the 25th edition of the Gent Jazz Festival. A slightly awkward man, with his now questionable but iconic hat and sunglasses; his back mainly turned to the public, no greetings, no words. A man on a mission: get on that stage, and sing. He might’ve been just as happy as the musicians who preceded and followed him to be in Belgium and sing for “these beautiful people”, but he was acting as if the audience was not there (maybe imagining them naked stopped doing the trick). The only words said into that mic that were not song lyrics were “OK” and “Laughing and Clowning”, as he told his own band the title of the Sam Cooke song they were about to cover. Yet, magnetic. You cannot look away, and even if you do, you know exactly who is on that stage: the same complex, idiosyncratic artist and probably very conflicted human with 45 studio albums. His career spans 70 years and rock’n’roll, folk, blues, skiffle, jazz and R&B, while still being, as Nigel Williamson put it, a consistent body of work. Van the Man who could sing one tune, and you would recognise him even if you had just listened to only one of his songs. The high priest who can get you married, buried and anything in between. He might lose his temper and shout at you, but he will deliver in the end, because, in Jon Wilde’s words in Under Review 1964–1974, no one does the heart like Van Morrison.
To Read:
Listening to Van Morrison by Greil Marcus, and this article by the author about how “people take Van Morrison personally”, and whether it is “morally wrong to be moved by the beautiful emotions in a work of art if, in fact, the person who had made that work was not, himself, beautiful”.
Van Morrison: No Surrender, by his biographer, Johnny Rogan, and this article about it.
To Watch:
Van Morrison — Under Review 1964–1974
Another Glorious Decade: Under Review 1977–1987
The BBC documentary Van Morrison and Me
The Last Waltz
Belfast (2021)
Articles and podcasts about the recording of Astral Weeks, a whole other story in itself. One too long to be included in an already too long article.
To Listen:
You know what to do.
