Music Arcades: Van Morrison: Hymns to the Silence

Since basing himself in the UK with Common One, he's made 11 albums… which have, whatever their other characteristics, exhibited a lack of ambition unparalleled among his contemporaries… Morrison has eased himself into the role of grand old actor-manager at the head of a company specializing in a standard repertoire and impervious to the changing textures of music elsewhere. (David Hepworth's review of Van's The Healing Game, quoted in Johnny Rogan's rather one-eyed No Surrender)

Hepworth is absolutely correct. And yet. Something funny happens with perspective on Van's output. When you look from a distance, from above, his work over the last couple of decades looks pretty homogenous and dull. When you look from up close, however, each individual album somehow has its own character, its own patina of detail. Yesterday I was reading a fascinating presentation about (among other things) the macroscope, which "helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together." You don't want a macroscope with Van's stuff, because you'll just see the repetition; you want a microscope, to see the differences.

The comment about ambition deserves a second look, too. There I was last Saturday praising James Blackshaw's "massive ambition." He does look ambitious after six or seven albums, but perhaps when James is in his 40s, on album number 22, and still playing his 12-string in a vaguely Eastern style, he too will be charged with lack of ambition.

Hymns to the Silence is a double album in, well, two halves. The first half backs up my charge that "grumbling about his shoddy treatment by industry, media and other artists took over" as a preoccupation in Van's songwriting. Moan after bloody moan, with the celtic R&B soul backing machine on autopilot. But maybe the problem lies with our preconceptions as listeners, as much as with the songs. We hear old black guys from the southern United States moaning along to a 12-bar formula and we laud their existential spirituality: we call it the blues. We hear a contemporary Presbyterian guy moaning, and we just dismiss him as one more sour and tiresome Ulsterman.

The other half has some pretty perfunctory love songs (several of which Van had given to Tom Jones) but also some old hymns and several reprises on the zen nostalgia theme that started with Wagon Wheels and pastie suppers at Davey's Chipper and worked its way on through Coney Island. Can you guess where I'm heading here? Sure, if some old dude from the 18th century says he sees heaven in a wild flower and eternity in a grain of sand, we acknowledge him as a Romantic and a visionary mystic. When a contemporary does it, we smirk. I mean, have you seen East Belfast?

And Van does gift us plenty of ammunition for this smirking. Following his sanctification of Hyndford Street in song, the Belfast Blues Appreciation Society put a brass plaque on Van's old house on that road. He castigated them citing invasion of privacy. I guess he was safeguarding his privacy by not including his house number in the song.

More recently, David Hepworth's Word magazine adapted and updated On Hyndford Street, actually quite affectionately in this slice of "pre-emptive nostalgia", re-imagining the present through the rheumy eye of a Future Van:

Three or four of the Hymns to the Silence songs were staples of Van's set in the early- to mid-nineties, and for years that was the only way I got to know them. Three or four Christmases ago, Lucy's older brother, who had been sneaking a look at my Van collection, was going to get me It's Too Late to Stop Now. Fortunately he checked with Lucy first: the reason he'd missed Too Late was that my CD carousels wouldn't accommodate double CDs and they were kept on another shelf. So I made a request for Hymns instead.