Music Arcades: Van Morrison and The Chieftains: Irish Heartbeat

Sometime in Spring 1988 I spotted in NME that Van Morrison and The Chieftains were doing a tour that took in not just the 4,000-seater Hammersmith Odeon but also the 300-seater Riverside Studios down the road in Hammersmith (they were able to pull off this coup as they had a festival of Irish culture at the same time). At the time Jeremy lived 200 yards from the Riverside (right by the bridge, downstairs from yet-to-be-Sir Ben Kingsley), so I tipped him off and he was able to queue for tickets when they went on sale one Saturday morning, and still pop home for a cup of tea while some kind soul held his place. Inevitably he bumped into Graham Cowdrey in the queue. Both us knew Graham from school, but Jeremy better than I: GC's obsession with Van is well documented, and later extended to become The Man's informal chauffeur.

Jeremy had previous, mixed experience of seeing Van live, but this was my first time. In those pre-www days, we had no idea what to expect from the double bill with The Chieftains: Irish Heartbeat wasn't released, we may not even have known it was coming, and there were no reports or set-lists from other shows on the tour. So Van and his band opened with a 40-minute set exclusively drawn from his 1980s catalogue, with the emphasis on Poetic Champions Compose. I was glad to hear my favourite, In the Garden, played live.

Then Van left and The Chieftains came on and played their set. All very well, but is that going to be it? No, no it's not. Back comes Van and The Chieftains together. They played most of this album, all of which was new to me: apart from Celtic Ray, perhaps, I had little idea whether the songs were originals or traditional folk songs, unless Paddy Moloney introduced them as such.

What happened next has always been in my top three gigs ever, and if I could relive just one show it would be this one. The second song, And She Moved Through the Fair (a ghost-love-song, right?), just transfixed us in its first few minutes, but it was the ending that took the whole experience into another dimension. The band hushed, the lights dimmed to a deep red, leaving Van, just a few yards from us but no longer a human figure; just a dark, heaving blob as he grunted out the guttural coda. Beyond words, beyond notes, but still the most musical sound you could imagine.

A couple of years later I got a cassette of this show from the semi-pro bedroom taper who supplied my Neil Young bootleg contraband. It's a terrible recording (interrupted at one point by "excuse me, I think you're in the wrong seats" — I can almost kid myself that I remember that exchange and can hear my own voice from a few seats away), but it does the dubious job of documenting the magic in two dimensions. That coda to And She Moved Through the Fair , and the similar moments in My Lagan Love, felt like they stretched time, but the tape shows they were all over in a matter of seconds.

…

I'm reading Johnny Rogan's Van Morrison: No Surrender at the moment. In his opening chapters, Rogan seems to be arguing that, to put it crudely, the best way to see Van is as a doggedly stubborn Ian Paisley figure with a Leadbelly fixation. I'm only a quarter of the way through, so still in the days of Them, but I flicked forward to see how Rogan would explain this apparently non-sectarian pan-Irish chapter in his output. He acknowledges the "underlying message of Celtic unity" while pointing out that four of the songs Star of the County Down, My Lagan Love, Carrickfergus and And She Moved Through the Fair have their roots in the Protestant North. Apparently, there's a provocative snatch of The Sash in I'll Tell Me Ma, which I confess I didn't notice (if, indeed, I'd recognise it).

Rogan brings two fascinating new perspectives to bear. First, he points out that Van's treatment of the capital F capital T Folk Tradition was anathema in some circles. Derek Bell of The Chieftains is quoted:

No purist is going to sing things like She Moved Through the Fair repeating 'our wedding day' three times. The repetition and jazz-like style of words for emphasis — that belongs to soul. It has nothing to do with our tradition. What Van does with My Lagan Love is even more grotesque. He virtually makes a Hindu chant out of it in the last note.

That nails exactly the bits I love most. Rogan observes that Van hoped the album would reposition him away from rock and closer to folk; but it the rock audience praised it in equal measure to the disdain of the folk fraternity.

Even more fascinating, and bizarre, is the quote from band member Clive Culbertson:

There was no doubt in my mind that the holier beings were there to help him with his life's mission. His Dharma. Once it anchored in him I could see the rush coming at me. It was like 'Bang!' You could actually feel it coming through your system, like they were anchoring a power source on stage and on those nights he was breathtaking. The voice was incredible. It was amazing, there were sparks and stars, like fireworks, a proper psychic vision. On other nights you could see it coming down trying to get in. It was sparking around his head, and he was almost actively stopping it. I was thinking, 'Come on, send it to me or Derek, let's get a vibe in.' But if it didn't get into him first, it didn't come to me or Derek. Even Derek said to me, 'Did you see the angels last night?' and when it didn't happen, he'd say, 'It didn't get into him tonight, did it?' He had a lot more psychic visions and abilities than he let people know.

Of course Van gave Culbertson short shrift when he mentioned these visions, but I reckon it got into him that night of 7th May 1988, barely two weeks after Van's father had died. This album reminds me of that night.