Van Morrison: Beautiful Vision

Prompted by Wednesday's Van album, I got out my copy of Clinton Heylin's Can You Feel the Silence?. I haven't read it (Lucy scavenged it from her office), but I flicked through the passages on Hymns to the Silence and now Beautiful Vision.

The first thing I learnt is that I've been mishearing a mondegreen for quarter of a century or so. In Vanlose Stairway, I thought Van sang, "Send me your bible, send me your Geetar", as in affecting a honky-tonk accent for 'guitar'. Turns out, Van was channelling Hindu scripture rather than redneck goodtimes: it's "gita" as in Bhagavad Gita. I'm sure I must have read that before — but then forgotten it again because my original hearing was somehow more fun.

Then there's the elaboration of the note that I barely noticed on the CD booklet, about the lyrics to a couple of the songs being inspired by the work of Alice Bailey. The pattern of Van's esoteric spiritual readings seems to have been that he would fall hook-line-and-sinker for one Teacher or another, only to repudiate them after a short while when the demands of their teaching started to bite. Hence No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986) could be Van feeling the need to disavow his dabblings with Bailey and L. Ron Hubbard around the time of Beautiful Vision (1982). Heylin writes,

The quest, rather than its resolution, preoccupied him. This very restlessness and a naturally suspicious streak led him to reject each and every path while still in the foothills

I'd always wondered quite what a Celtic Ray could be. This passage provides some pointers. (This version of the song, however, feels limp by comparison with the 1988 version with the Chieftains). Dweller on the Threshold also turns out to be a more or less straight lift from Bailey and Blavatsky. However, as quoted by Heylin, Van insisted that the stairway that "reaches up to the moon" in Vanlose Stairway "had absolutely nothing mystical about it whatsoever —it was just a block of flats" in the Vanløse district of Copenhagen, where there was no lift.

Vanlose gets a throwaway recording on Beautiful Vision, with little hint of the live staple it would become. At the Botanic Gardens show in 1998, an extended version of Vanlose was the showstopper right before the encore. Wonderful, it was.

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