Squaring the circle with skiffle: Van Morrison on returning to the music that inspired him
Van Morrison recently released Moving On Skiffle.
Past the red carpet, next to the main reception, a door opens at Belfast’s prestigious Europa Hotel. Van Morrison exits the lift and a 70-year-old lady’s day has been made. “My two sons won’t believe I’ve shared a lift with Van the man,” she tells me in a friendly Scouse accent.“They both picked Van songs as the first dance at their weddings.”
We are here to see the Belfast Cowboy launch his 44th long-player, Moving On Skiffle, a tribute to the movement that inspired Morrison, as well as The Beatles and many others, all introduced to the idea of forming a band when Lonnie Donegan released ‘Rock Island Line’ in 1956. Originating in the US, skiffle became hugely popular in the UK in the 1950s, as British musicians melded jazz to a genre that hitherto had a distinctively folkish feel.
Morrison has long been paying homage to the style, even releasing The Skiffle Sessions – Live in Belfast 1998, recorded with Chris Barber and Donegan. The Belfast man explains that he has more material in the vaults that hasn’t been released yet.
Donegan is still a major hero of his. “He opened the door for kids like me to walk through. Instead of doing just the folk music thing Lonnie Donegan showed us you could actually have a band or group instead of being the lone folk singer.
“I intuitively understood what he was creating, I knew that it was what I wanted to do. It was like an explosion.” While Donegan passed over twenty years ago, he still feels present at the Europa gig. The band features Alan ‘Sticky’ Wicket, who has returned to Morrison’s current line-up on washboard and percussion, sporting one of Donegan’s colourful old stage shirts. Along with Wicket, the group features Irish guitarists Crawford Bell and Dave Keary.
“The band bring their energy and enthusiasm and put themselves into it,” says Morrison of the vibrant live show, perhaps tuning into the inspiration he first found on a Belfast street. “I had a neighbour Jim Tosh, when I was a kid. He would sing a lot of Hank Williams, he was popular in that area, and people had old 78 recordings, it was all part of the backdrop that influenced me personally.” Among the cuts included on the new album and setlist are Williams’ ‘Cold Cold Heart’ and ‘I’m So Lonesome’.
Morrison was not yet a teenager when he formed his first band, The Sputniks, but he was already well on his way to a life in music. Opening the recent set and his new album with ‘Freight Train’; originally by Elizabeth Cotton, Glaswegian singer Nancy Whiskey had a top 5 hit with the track in 1957 when Van was still at school.
Moving On In Skiffle closes with ‘Green Rocky Road’, another set highlight that saw Morrison deliver spontaneous instructions to the band. The track features a guest spot on fiddle from Seth Rogan who brings a beautiful Celtic quality to the cut (“Well that’s Seth, he doesn’t sound like anyone else as far as I’m concerned.”) The record celebrates an eclectic range of songs, several learned from American Folk Guitar, a book by Alan Lomax and Peggy Seeger that Morrison picked up back in 1957 at age 12.
His father’s tastes in music were influenced by time spent working in Detroit and other US cities, and young Van also absorbed tunes from his mother Violet at an early age. She would be regularly “tuning up the wireless” throughout his childhood, playing an instrument or leading family sing-songs.
Post-war and pre-Troubles Belfast was in many ways an idyllic childhood that Morrison has managed to distil the rawness of those records and captures a potent live sound on gospel classics such as ‘This Little Light of Mine’. The 1960s’ Civil Rights anthem in America has been renamed ‘This Loving Light of Mine’. “Most of the album is recorded live,” explains Morrison. “There are some overdubs but I always record as much live as possible; that’s my M.O.”
Before finding chart success with Them in the mid-1960s, he became part of the Irish showband phenomenon. “Well, that was more about the endurance of playing the average gig which was about three hours, the extreme version was five hours long,” Morrison recalls. “There would be dancing and you had to learn a lot of material people knew, and we also began to play rock’n’roll. It was fairly new and was really fresh, the show bands took over because of the ballrooms and big dances.
“The promoters didn’t want four-piece bands, they wanted horns and more of a show with a whole variety of stuff. There would also be different singers, some would sing country music, others would do the rock’n’roll stuff and you would have a Perry Como type of singer so you had about three different styles at least.” While Morrison is enjoying his current return to skiffle, he’s continued to write songs late into his career inspired by his hometown. ‘Down to Joy’ was written for Kenneth Branagh’s 1960s coming-of-age film Belfast.
“I had seen part of the film and I went over to where Ken is from in north Belfast,” says Morrison. “I drove around the area and remembered that I used to visit that area in the 1960s. I had some friends there and wrote it from what I remember of that time hanging out and playing music.” Unlike many musicians, Morrison has a strong recollection of the past. Not least the work he did with David Bowie’s side-man Mick Ronson. “
There’s some great stuff we recorded, I don’t know if we have the tapes but there’s some bootleg stuff on the internet that is very good. It was more spontaneous stuff.” Before he died, Bowie also told Morrison he was rehearsing ‘Into The Mystic’, with plans to record the classic track from the Moondance album. The late legend had already paid a tribute to Van on his 1973 album Pin Ups when he cut ‘Here Comes the Night’, the tune made famous by Them.
It all makes for a remarkable music legacy through the decades, one that is now reaching further back to the past with the skiffle album.
- Moving On Skiffle is out now
