Van Morrison’s voice is so good he could probably sing the official Ulez exemption guidance and make it sound soulful. He’s been singing the same way – loud and raucous, soft and low – for 60 years, and somewhat remarkably it hasn’t appeared to age.
If you compare the voice on his band Them’s version of lt’s All Over Now Baby Blue from 1966, for instance, to Blue and Green from 2008’s Keep It Simple, or compare any recent live performance to his imperious and imperial period with his mighty Caledonia Soul Orchestra in the early 1970s, and you won't notice any change at all. And that is remarkable – more so than even Mick Jagger. The 2023 Van Morrison sounds a lot like the 1964 Van Morrison.
While he obviously no longer looks like the taciturn frontman of the Belfast R&B stalwarts Them, his voice is identical. Just last month he played a barnstorming gig at the Albert Hall – forsaking his greatest hits for a protracted performance of his most recent album, Moving On Skiffle – and for nearly two hours he sounded like a man in the first flush of youth, singing for all the world as though he was going to do it for the rest of his life.
But then he’s already done that, creating a body of work that in his field is largely unparalleled. Van’s voice is not just a thing of great beauty, it’s something to be treasured, a rare jewel of a sound.
This week you can hear its latest iteration on Accentuate The Positive, an album in which Morrison returns to one of his childhood passions: rock 'n' roll. Growing up in Belfast shortly after the Second World War, he was inspired by the heady sounds of 20th century blues and rock 'n' roll.
Listening to artists such as Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and the Everly Brothers, it wasn’t long before Morrison was intuitively reinterpreting these sounds with his own band in local hometown venues. Aspiring to be down and dirty, he inadvertently invented a totally new sound, one born without prejudice in Northern Ireland.
Several decades later, Morrison has now revisited the genre by reimagining some of his personal favourites, infusing them with an energy that belies his age while constantly expanding upon its traditions.
Morrison’s inimitable voice combined with a band that plays the songs as though they were originals, brings a fresh zeal to such great numbers as the Johnny Burnette Trio’s, Lonesome Train, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates’ Shakin’ All Over and Big Joe Turner’s pioneering rock 'n' roll hit, Flip, Flop and Fly (which in Van’s hands sounds a lot less like a weird Disney nightclub tune).
Like many so-called heritage artists – i.e. those masters of the trade who have been around a bit – Van is revisiting his roots less out of a sense of arrogance (“I’m Van Morrison, you’re not, and I can do any damn thing I want to”) and more because of a sense of duty. He grew up with this music, it was the music that inspired him, and he is probably closer to it than many of his peers.
He calls it “spirit music”.
Why? "Well, all you have to do is listen to this type of music, whether it’s Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis or Gene Vincent. There’s no mystery. It’s about spirit. The original rock 'n' roll was rebel music, especially someone like Gene Vincent – most of the others were compliant. Rhythm and Blues and rock 'n' roll were where it all started for me. I always wanted to make the selections more eclectic than they could have been.
"It’s not the stuff you maybe expected to hear. A song like I Want A Roof Over My Head [the best song on the album by the way] might be one they’ve not heard before. I’m not sure anyone was expecting a neglected Louis Jordan song. The selection was trial and error. A lot of these songs were old 45s I bought back when I was young.”
Like other legends who surfaced around the same time, like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and more recently Bruce Springsteen, Morrison has returned to the music of his past because he feels he has as much ownership of it as the people who made it. He was there, after all. And these were the records that encouraged him to become a musician himself.
“I never had any ambition to be a singer at all. It worked out for me because I practiced. I worked at it, stretching my voice, influenced by the vocal gymnastics of Sam Cooke. Before Them I’d been in a skiffle band, an R&B band, a showband, so I’d been around. I only went solo to get out of mycontract. It was about survival rather than ambition. Everything I’ve done since then has been about survival, and then doing what I want to you."
In 2020, Morrison made a direct attack on the government for what he felt were unnecessary lockdowns and restrictions on personal freedoms. At the time he was vilified, but today feels even more justified in his convictions.
“I thought it was odd that so many people suddenly started trusting the government. Again, it was about compliance. I just thought it was propaganda and government overreach. And now it turns out that a lot of people who were telling us what to do were simply lying. Just look at Partygate. As for the current government, at least they’re not imposing restrictions on me.”
As for his voice, that intense, hypnotic, velvet-soft expression of love, passion, belief and style, the voice responsible for Moondance, Crazy Love, Gloria, Have I Told You Lately That I LoveYou, well, it didn't come easy.
"It was all about practice, about getting better at what I did," says Morrison. "My voice evolved through working at it. But when I discovered that I could sing and hold an audience, then comes pressure, a constant pressure to keep coming up with something new. I became competitivewith myself. The difference with me is that I was a singer who started writing songs, not a songwriter who became a singer. I was always a singer first.”
That voice is all over Accentuate the Positive, sounding as urgent and as committed as it was back when God was a boy.
