The star who puts out his own spotlight

Without thought for the audience left searching for a disembodied voice, he continued the rest of the set in darkness.

It could be said that’s exactly how the enigmatic Belfast man has tried to conduct his entire career.

An intensely private individual who has long hidden under trademark trilby and shades — the ones he forgot that night in 1973 — he rations interviews, has little patience for explaining his music and often seems to regard audiences as intrusions on his work.

Think back to last Christmas when a hacker posted a false notice on his official website announcing he had fathered a baby son with a woman clearly not his wife.

So deliberately removed is the singer from all the crass nonsense that is entertainment news, fanzines and celebrity culture that he knew nothing of the incident for days — by which time the story had been carried by credible media organisations the world over.

Of course, that only serves to make him all the more intriguing. Cranky and contrary, yet adored by fans, gruff in looks and manner, yet loved by beautiful women, 50 years in business, yet never ejected from the category of cool on radio playlists ... he’s the kind of subject biographers cross snakepits for a chance to write about.

But anyone hoping for a gossipy read from Greil Marcus’s book is in for a disappointment. The clue is in the title — Listening to Van Morrison — for Marcus is probing the life of the songs more so than the singer, writing not so much about Van the Man as Van the Musician.

It’s not an unusual exercise but the manner in which it is executed is as odd as Morrison himself. Marcus focuses on individual performances by Morrison of keynote songs, analysing the instrumental introductions, the point of entry of Morrison’s voice, his intonation on the given day, his tone and rhythm, his emphasis on specific words and his moments of ad libbing.

For anyone whose knowledge of Morrison extends little beyond Brown Eyed Girl and Moondance, this will be like leaping from a primary school course in nursery rhymes to a PhD in Yeats and Heaney.

It’s no surprise then to find that Marcus is from a scholarly background and has combined a career as university lecturer with that of music journalist, writing extensively on music as political expression as well as art form.

Listening to Van Morrison reads like a spoken lecture with the author throwing out ideas and interpretations — some clever, some barmy — about Morrison’s music and what he was trying to do at the moment he delivered a particular performance. An example is his analysis of a 1971 performance of Friday’s Child when Morrison threw in an extra line that was not in the published lyrics.

“A saxophonist has begun to noodle behind Morrison, like someone wandering in from another room, too stoned to notice he’s barged into someone else’s song. ‘You got,’ Morrison shouts, his volume high, a sense of abandon pushing against his control of every word, the tension between abandon and control turning each word into a bomb, with the feeling that the singer is himself frightened by his own words, ‘to hold on.’’ Hold, Hold, Hold, Hold, Hold, Hold, Hold it.’”

Yes, apparently Marcus did count all the ‘holds’ – a true anorak, or in this case a Vanorak.

But for all the forensics, this is no clinical scientific treatise for Marcus is clearly a fan. As he writes of Morrison’s 1968 masterpiece album: “I’ve played Astral Weeks more than I’ve played any other record I own ... What I value most is how inexplicable any great work really is.” Not bad praise coming from a man who’s been critiquing popular music for over 40 years.

It’s not an uncritical analysis either as he writes of Morrison’s prolifically poor patch between 1980 and 1996: “How do you write off more than 15 albums and more than 15 years of the work of a great artist? ... The tedium was almost heroic in its refusal to quit.” Those who like Have I Told You Lately, and Days Like This, which both appeared during this period, will probably disagree. but Marcus doesn’t write like someone who expects consensus.

Either way, he reckons Morrison redeemed himself with his last studio album, the 2008 recording Keep It Simple, and the song Behind The Ritual of which he writes: “desire bleeds all over the music.”

How to define Morrison’s music is a task in itself. Marcus credits him with “the blues singer’s marriage of emotional extremism and nihilistic reserve, the delicacy of a soul singer’s presentation of a bleeding heart, a folk singer’s sense of the uncanny in the commonplace, the rhythm and blues bandleaders’s commitment to drive, force, speed and excitement above all,” before concluding: “It becomes plain that any summing up of Morrison’s work would be a fraud.”

There are sufficient anecdotes in the book to save it from complete esotericism, one of the most memorable coming from a 1978 concert in San Francisco when Morrison appeared deliberately to try to wrong-foot the clapping crowd by singing out of rhythm before losing his patience with them completely. “ ‘Just shut up,’ he said. ‘Just shut up. We do the work here, not you.’ ”

Marcus puts such outbursts down to an innate distrust of audiences.

“He does his work in public, but with his back turned,” he writes.

Morrison can’t turn his back on time, however. He’s about to become a pensioner, turning 65 next Tuesday.

How he’s feeling about reaching this milestone is hard to gauge — for weeks in the run-up to the event his website consisted of a notice confirming it was the official site and nothing but a black page besides. That was Van turning out the spotlight again. Finding him in his darkness requires a higher wattage torch than Marcus provides, but his book does make for a pretty good candle.