invisible

I had breakfast with Van Morrison. Twice. Once was in my internal greasy ladle in London. That was a essential mid-morning repast. Both of us regulars in that close establishment, we mostly happened to find ourselves there during a same time so naturally we had a bit of a discuss over a crater that cheers.

Another important arise was some-more of a late night-early morning event in Dublin when we was pouring something Russian-flavoured from my teapot.

If we pronounced I’d brunched with a cryptic William Blake or producer WB Yeats, you’d substantially design me to share a few retaining yarns about astronomical visions and out-of-body experiences. You competence even design to hear a same about Van. But you’d be wrong.

The Belfast Cowboy is different.

He’s not a guru. Or a shaman. He’s a sax-player first. So a review was ideally normal. A bit about song and this and that.

He can be a humorous guy, too. Off-the-wall humour. Like John Cleese, he’d have desired The Goons.

Of course, he’s also a means songwriter. And a performer who possesses a strenuously fluent voice that combines many of a excellent traits listened in rock’n'roll, rhythm’n'blues, jazz and folk music.

Van has been releasing annals given 1964 when he was a member of Them. That’s 48 years ago. In a business that thrives on compelling a latest low-pitched fad, Van is one of a few vital artists to have endured. Bob Dylan is another. Both group have their low-pitched roots low in tradition. And, remarkably, both group evade publicity.

While Paul Simon and Neil Diamond are happy to share their thoughts in a media, Van prefers, as he has always done, to equivocate traffic publicly with reporters and broadcasters.

And if he’s not going to pronounce afterwards anguish betide those who do. Salman Rushdie got a lash from Van when he suggested sum of a late-night event in Bono’s gaff.

Ironically, this deficiency from a media spotlight creates a open even some-more penetrating to hear news about him.

Astonishingly, in an age when each second chairman has entrance to present communication technology, camera phones, Twitter feeds, online blogs and so on, Van still manages to make Howard Hughes and a Scarlet Pimpernel seem as entire as Simon Cowell.

Van has an ability to turn invisible in a crowd. He doesn’t chuck luminary shapes. He blends in and could be mistaken for a smoothness male or, even a window cleaner, one of his aged jobs.

Some folk with a special talent, either they be sports people, painters or carpenters, turn idle and exhaust their gift.

Others, like Van, feel compelled to demonstrate themselves by their work. In Morrison’s case, that’s essay songs and behaving in concert. He knows when a recording is to his satisfaction. He doesn’t need critics to indicate out where they consider he went wrong.

Life in a open eye had turn intolerable for Bob Dylan prolonged before he detected fanatics rummaging by his balderdash bins. In Van Morrison’s case, inspection of his private life by open commentators continues to be a means of personal dismay. And who can censure him?

But in an epoch that has spawned a pervasive enlightenment of celebrity, where Andy Warhol’s prophecy of 15 mins as a timespan for celebrity seems overly generous, Van’s surreptitious inlet itself becomes a centre of attention.

It’s not only a chattering classes and report columnists who crave insights into his life with mythological Irish beauty Michelle Rocca, a lady many trust has been his troubadour given a early ’90s. But what do they know of his family life, his children and amicable habits? Precious little.

It’s not been for wish of perplexing by a horde of biographers and amicable diarists. Unfortunately for Van, a oddity extends over his song and into personal and private matters. It’s a credit to his firm fortify of privacy that a new tragedies in his life, a genocide of a baby son and a child’s Texan mother, should have wrongfooted a newshounds until utterly some time after a awful events.

consolation

Over a decades, Van’s song has been a source of good satisfaction and condolence for many people. From Gloria to Madame George, Coney Island to Behind a Ritual, listeners can clarity that a song has been a recovering relief in a writer’s private romantic life. And, many expected it’ll be by his art that Van will find a approach to come to terms with a grief and misunderstanding of a new past.

Indeed, a aged tragedian is already behind on stage. For many good actors and artistic artists, a theatre is a place they can put themselves in hold with something transcendent. It can be a place of countenance and redemption.

As a former Miss Ireland, Michelle Rocca, Van’s partner for roughly 20 years has written, “He is a kind of loner who finds genuine assent and waste in front of an assembly of thousands.”

It puzzles Van that he can’t be left to do his pursuit but penetration and determined media surveillance. But were things any opposite for his beginning influence, blues thespian Huddie Ledbetter? Of march not. Even behind in a day, newspapers were concerned to write about Lead Belly, “the singing convict”.

It stays a source of good distrurbance to him that commentators analyse, disintegrate and afterwards erect weird theories around a songs that came from his heart. Over a years he has railed during being called a “rock star”. He despises a wanton broad-brush mythologies that figure a public’s notice of what he is and what he does for a living.

While he stays an conundrum and a demure star in this Pop Idol world, Van is zero if not consistent. In 1970 he was already revelation Rolling Stone how most he hated doing interviews.

“I did about 4 a day and we only got so pi**ed off we was prepared to . . . Everybody only asked me reticent questions and they had reticent faces.”

There we have it. Anything Van wants us to know is in his music. And I’m good with that.

Van Morrison plays a O2 on Saturday

- Eamon Carr