Van Morrison
Van Morrison
Sir George Ivan "Van" Morrison, OBEis a Northern Irish singer, songwriter and musician. He has received six Grammy Awards, the 1994 Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and has been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2016 he was knighted for his musical achievements and his services to tourism and charitable causes in Northern Ireland...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth31 August 1945
CityBelfast, Northern Ireland
Illusions and pipe dreams on the one hand And straight reality is always cold
You can call it nostalgia, I don't mind Standing on that windswept hillside Listening to the church bells chime Listen to the church bells chime In that magic time...
There aren't any labels - all jazz means is improvization and you can never play a tune the same way twice. So jazz spills over into everything.
There's no difference between lyrics and poetry. Words are words. The only difference is the people who are in academic positions and call themselves poets and have an academic stance. They've got something to lose if they say it's all poetry; if there's not music to it, and you have to wear a certain kind of checkered shirt or something like that. It's all the same. Lyrics are lyrics, poetry is poetry, lyrics are poetry, and poetry is lyrics. They are interchangeable to me.
Once in a blue moon someone like you comes along.
I've been in America for almost ten years. I've had many parts of the American experience. I've been all over this country and seen many different parts of it. It's just that I'm not an American. I've never become an American. I'm talking about the whole thing-psychologically, citizenship, the whole trip. Of course I've definitely been influenced by America-I'm definitely influenced by the music and the culture.
It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down.
Being famous was extremely disappointing for me. When I became famous it was a complete drag and it is still a complete drag.
Every performance is different. That's the beauty of it.
Basically I got an insight into what it really was through Alcoholics Anonymous. One day the switchboard lit up and I saw where it was all going. I saw what alcohol could do to people and I saw that it wasn't a good thing anymore. Plus I wasn't a teenager anymore myself.
My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.
I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.
My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.
When I first started drinking, everybody was doing it. That was before they discovered marijuana and all that. It was the late 50s, early 60s - it was the beginnings of the rock 'n' roll era. The main drink was like wine. And even that was a romantic throwback to something.