Читать книгу In Another World - Gerald Dawe - Страница 12

ONE

The radio had a cloth face and was quite an imposing-looking object, sitting in an alcove of the living room, alone, slightly iconic, above the television that was equally sturdy-looking in its timber housing. The furniture of the 1950s remains set in place: the sofa, the presses, the dinner table, the side table, the baize tablecloth with its tassels, the little door under the stairs, the stepdown to the foreboding pantry, the workaday cottage-like air of that kitchen, and the yard with its high walls, mangle, washing line, larder, coal sheds, outdoor lavatory and the door to the entry or alleyway.

The back of the house was the working half, the engine room; the front was for entertainment and, in our case, for business – where my grandmother taught elocution, piano and singing. The rest of the house was all about privacy, rest, dreamland.

It was an unexceptional house, in its own little terrace, a version of grander houses with grander expectations, a different kind of lifestyle than had been lived in the earlier decades of the last century. Now, post-war, post-marriages, in this house of women – grandmother, mother and sister – I was the only man (and a mere slip of a boy at that), notwithstanding the occasional visit of my uncle, stationed in foreign climes, and of my grandmother’s party-going friends – ageing stylists of a bygone time.

I remember it all well. Or maybe I remember well what I think it all was. One way or another, in the regular world of those years, as people got on with their lives as best they could – the experience of the Blitz still very much inscribed on the Belfast landscape of the time – and returned to a normal world of work and play, I was utterly unaware of all this. As a self-absorbed young boy I was, however, fascinated by stories overheard, the hints of a previous world, before ‘my’ world, the way things ‘once were’; my young-boy radar fixed on the songs that came out of the front room, the laughter, the recitations, the piano playing, the singing, but also the music that ‘came over’ the box in the corner, and by decade’s end, the sound of music my mother listened to, from Workers’ Playtime to Billy Cotton, Two-Way Family Favourites, the Broadway hits, swing and trad jazz. And when her brother was home ‘on leave’ from the RAF, the sound of American leading ladies, such as the queen-like Ella Fitzgerald, but also the unmissable, alluring otherness of quite a different voice – rich, exciting and unforgettable – Sarah Vaughan, a familiar name, a name you might hear in the street, and yet so totally unexpected. It was probably from listening to my aunt’s stories of minding Judy Garland during the fading star’s last great hurrah in London’s Palladium, as well as her anecdotes about Frank Sinatra and the swooning English girls who fell head over heels in love with the great crooner of the 1950s that sparked my interest.

Our house always had music somewhere – from piano practice to that big awkward radio set that sat brooding in the corner of the living room: Edmundo Ros gave way on the Light Programme to Nat King Cole and Peggy Lee, and by the end of the 1950s and into the early years of the 1960s, the radio yielded to the transistor, and more emphatically to the glumpy record player that took over the front room.

My mother enjoyed jazz. She listened to it on the radio, and when her brother finally left the RAF and settled briefly back in Belfast, he brought records with him. The television, which formed part of our communication centre, sat there under the radio, and between them both the sounds of British jazz started to filter through: Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’ was a signature tune; Kenny Baker, with his bouncing Brylcreem hairline; George Chisholm, and the cool, perplexing beauty of Cleo Laine’s voice, with Johnny Dankworth, a seemingly shy presence in the shadowy background of whatever show it was we were watching.

Laine sounded so different, when compared to other acts that were beginning to get air time, at that moment with singers such as Helen Shapiro and Dusty Springfield. There was something so utterly contained in her voice that even when she went off on one of those scat-like a cappella riffs – part madrigal, pure invention – I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The calm seriousness, the conviction, the controlled flights of invention – for a young lad, it was all breathtakingly uncertain what was going on.

There was a jazz combo I used to love hearing called The Peddlers, and on one show on which they were guests (when they performed a brilliant version of ‘Misty’), Cleo Laine appeared after their set. The mood she created on our black-and-white TV was haunting and mysterious.

When the chance arose many years later, during the Belfast Festival at Queen’s University, I went along to hear Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth talk about their music and play extracts of it. I think it was in the old Music Room, one of the smaller lecture theatres, and there were about twenty people present. That’s what it seems like in memory, at least; I recall my discomfort at being one of a few and not really knowing where to look; but they talked and joked and we had a session, unplugged before unplugged happened. I’ll never forget that. This is what real artists do, I thought; the size of the audience isn’t important.

Looking out the back window, waiting for Match of the Day or The Day of the Triffids to come blinking on to the television set in the gathering dusk of a Saturday night, a young lad born in the early 1950s hears for the first time Sarah Vaughan sing her great love song ‘Lover Man’, and the 1960s break cover in north Belfast.

What stands out in my mind is that house in which we lived in north Belfast throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s. It overlooked the lough and harbour port. My grandmother was a singer, a light-opera singer, and she used to have these soirées in the front room. I used to stand at the top of the stairs listening to this, and it always fascinated me that it was as if there was a little theatre in the front room.

It was always very well organised, it was good fun and the pupils enjoyed themselves; they would always leave happy. What struck me from an early age (I would have been five or six at the time) about the adult soirées she held at night, and at weekends, was their manner. Everything was contained – nothing ever got out of hand, and even though the people enjoyed themselves and you could hear the laughter, there was something reserved about it all. My grandmother would sing the odd time, but mostly she kept her voice to herself, so to speak.

Later on, with the record player in the front room, my sister and I took over that space and I’d play records by people like Lester Young, George Shearing and Ella Fitzgerald. I used to hear Ella on that gramophone: another woman’s voice to join the voices of the women I lived with. And then one night, Ella Fitzgerald played Belfast. I remember my mother coming back from it – she went to that ‘gig’ with our next-door neighbour, an Austrian woman – and she was very excited and told me it had been an extraordinary experience.

The funny little comment that she made, ‘I’m sent’ stuck in my mind – clearly she was rocking and rolling in the aisles, not literally, but almost. Our next-door neighbour was rather austere about such displays. She was a private woman who had endured a lot during the Second World War in Vienna, where she had met her husband, one of the liberating Allied officers. My mother’s enthusiasm for this music was infectious. What I remember most about those days was a feeling of being underground, though I’m sure there were other houses throughout Belfast where this kind of interest in music was being shown in the parlours and living rooms.

There must have been an adult generation who had done something similar a decade before the 1950s, when all the soldiers had returned from the war. There is an obvious parallel. They had been stationed in Germany, listening to American music, and there had been a whole series of army installations in Northern Ireland. Black guys stationed there must have been playing music. They’d go down to the Plaza Ballroom in Belfast; they’d have been dancing down there too.

There were so many different kinds of music at that time, but the one that seemed to have the biggest impact was jazz, in all its subversiveness. By the early 1960s, a group of little clubs springing up around the town were playing R & B, soul and Tamla Motown. A bridge was built between the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Lester Young, whom I was hearing in the late 1950s, and then, ten years later, with the friends I had in my mid-teens, we started to get into R & B and blues.

The one voice, the one name that summed all that up for us was Van Morrison and Them. There were other very good bands around during the mid-sixties, like The Few, The Interns, Sam Mahood and The Just Five. It seemed there were bands playing every night. I remember clearly that we didn’t get into the pop stuff so much as young teenagers. It was mainly R & B and then acts like the Jimi Hendrix Experience that were popular with us.

Belfast was still open then. Everybody lived in the city and there wasn’t a sense that the city was ghettoised or that there were neighbourhoods you couldn’t move in and out of; the city centre was a home for everybody and it had a marvellous energy to it. There would be dances on a Wednesday night, Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday night, and even Sunday. Everybody went dancing. Around the side of the City Hall, one afternoon in late spring, the weather was good and somebody had a transistor on. We were lying on the grass and we heard Van Morrison with Them, singing ‘Here Comes the Night’. That song became a theme tune, a hymn.

When I started to go to The Maritime (where Them had played), it had changed its name and was called Club Rado, although we all still knew it by its original name. I never saw Them live on stage, though I did hear Morrison on the tiny stage of Sammy Houston’s Jazz Club performing Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ with Frankie Connolly and the Styx, a rare combination for sure.

What I do recall very clearly is the energy in Van Morrison’s voice, a very Belfast voice. That somebody could get up on stage and sing with the accent you heard in the streets was unimaginable. To think that this was a guy from Belfast who was on Ready Steady Go!, a guy who was in a band that was doing well in Britain, and, despite all this, you’d see him around town the odd time. It was a great source of pride.

In those days there wasn’t the hype or the self-consciousness that there is today. Them with Van Morrison gave voice to a generation. I don’t want to put too much on it, but we did not know a great deal about sectarianism. It just wasn’t part of the psychic landscape. I used to date girls from the top of the Falls Road and we’d walk home together. We used to walk everywhere. Everybody used to meet in the clubs; Van captured that defiance in his voice and, with Them, aggressively declared ‘We’re here’, with a kind of dismissiveness, publicly, about being in ‘the business’– the music business. I know now that they had to fight their corner.

I can imagine some would have been badly treated by ‘the industry’, but Morrison stood for a kind of independence. We wouldn’t have been conscious of this at the time, but there was certainly the sense in which he was doing his thing and then just moving on. It wasn’t as if he was being a ‘pop star’ – that wasn’t there at all. This music was something he could ‘do’, something he was brilliant at. He’d get on stage with the band and then go. In a way, he was an anti-hero. Them were anti-heroes and they fitted the mood. But it wouldn’t have been a conscious thing, a pose. Morrison went on to become more sophisticated.

We tried different things and in Smithfield – which was a market, like a casbah – you could buy and sell just about anything, including records, second-hand records. It was magnificent – coins, clothes, old transistor radios, wardrobes, you name it – and there was one shop, the name of which won’t come to mind now, and the fella who had this shop was very interested in music, soul, R & B and blues.

I will never forget going into that shop. To see this guy, you’d think he should be looking under the bonnet of a car, but when he started to talk about blues and R & B, you were in another world. He knew everything: different versions of the same songs – exactly who was who in the States. We used to go in and talk and I remember one time he put on a track – it was a Chess album track of John Lee Hooker. We were all in the shop (it was just a big counter and the records were stacked behind it), and it was extraordinary to hear this guy.

There was the feeling then that music was the counter-culture. Belfast was very much a city dominated by work – that is what you were there for – work, work, work.

When I think of the 1960s, people’s energies were directed at getting out and about; getting into Belfast. Them, the Belfast band that was doing so well, personified this feeling of being able to express yourself ‘here’. They suggested to those of us who were about six or seven years younger that you could do these things, that you needn’t be afraid to set up your own band. We did; just that and we called our band The Trolls.

We played in different places. We were pretty desperate. I think we lasted about six months and that was it. But it was the kind of confidence Them gave myself and a few others I knew which made me start to write. We realised we weren’t singers, we weren’t musicians, but we could move into other ‘art forms’.

In that sense, Van Morrison opened the door for myself and other young men and women to think that ‘work’ wasn’t the only way forward, that there was a different kind of work and you could do it on the stage or with a pen. It was the possibilities Them generated that were so important. They broke the sound barriers of what was often an uptight, class-bound society. By the late 1960s, when Them had broken up, Van Morrison was really on his way out because he’d gone over to the States. We lost sight of him, but then he produced the album that everybody recognises and identifies as being so extraordinary – Astral Weeks. The thing to remember is that Belfast was on the cusp of a whole series of changes. The Civil Rights movement was up and going.

A lot of friends had left Belfast and were now in London or had disappeared elsewhere. When Astral Weeks came out, there were just a few of us still around. To listen to that album, which was a huge poetic shift away from the raucous energies of Them, and pointed in another direction too – towards poetry. For the mood poem that is Astral Weeks – I mean the entire album, but particularly ‘Beside You’ – was so revealing. Here was this strong voice and strong personality that could also move across into something so much more lyrical and moody. That was a big shift too. You can be a Belfast guy and you can still be lyrical.

It seems silly now, but the extent to which Morrison had moved into another mode, another mood, shocked people. Then, of course, the curtain fell with the beginning of the Troubles and by about 1970 it seemed as if Astral Weeks, Them and all that were light years away.

My feeling now is that Morrison’s music ‘disappeared’ because the immediacy of what was happening in Belfast (the terrorism, the darkness) overtook us. We seemed to lose out; the ‘gang’ drifted apart; we went our different ways. I went to college in Coleraine and then eventually moved out of the North altogether, to Galway.

The joy, the pleasure and the energy that Morrison embodied went underground as the heavy political charge of the 1970s took over. It was only later that I heard ‘Listen to the Lion’ from the magnificent It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a double album of his tour with the Caledonian Soul Orchestra. What you had was an artist who could lift the roof and bring together these different forms of music. You had the energy of the voice, the dynamic quality of it, and that marked an entire period for me. That was Van Morrison, doing his thing and not being compromised by ‘pop’. You had the feeling that he was going to produce something quite different.

We had a strong sense of being from Belfast. We didn’t really have a sense of being ‘Irish’ as such. When you think about it, great bands used to come to Belfast – John Mayall, Hendrix, Cream, The Small Faces and Pink Floyd. We didn’t have to go to them. In a way, we were almost arrogant about music. The standards we were used to were phenomenal, so it created the expectation that everything else had to measure up. We really had such a marvellous experience in Belfast. Occasionally you’d get some old fella shouting something at you, and there was always a little bit of tension on the periphery, but we had a wonderful time and it lasted until about 1970 – the dancing, the music, the parties, being able to move throughout Belfast freely. By 1972, that had gone, more or less. When I returned home from Galway, the music seemed to have disappeared underground. It felt like we were old men talking about a period thirty years before, rather than only a few years before. There had definitely been a shift.

The Troubles put into quarantine those kinds of energies, but maybe they are resurfacing now. I don’t know. I can’t stress enough the importance of Morrison’s presence in the clubs and the kind of example he set when he moved away from Belfast. I think he ran out of space in Belfast. He’d done all he wanted to do there and he had to go somewhere else.

Perhaps it’s not sufficiently recognised that it was a huge step for someone to take in those days – a tremendously courageous thing to do – to move from Belfast and head over to New York, not knowing what was going to happen. That was a remarkable achievement. It’s okay now, moving here, there and everywhere; there are huge resources available now. But in 1966, 1967, 1968, that was a big achievement, and of course it paid off, because without the move you probably wouldn’t have had Astral Weeks. He had been writing some of those lyrics in Belfast, but you wouldn’t have had the quality of that magnificent album without the shift and the risk of moving to America and the taking-on of extraordinary respon-sibilities for such a young man. By the late 1970s there were other clubs in the districts, in local neigh- bourhoods where people went, but the notion of Belfast itself as open and available had gone. The violence had put paid to that. I remember walking through the city one night – it would’ve been about 1972 or 1973 – and it was like walking through a ghost town. We’re forgetting these things and maybe it’s no bad thing. The pubs shut at about 6 or 7pm, the cinemas were closed and the buses stopped early. It was like walking through a city at war with itself. People withdrew into their own districts and then, inside their own districts, back into their own homes; they didn’t look out. It was bleak.

During the 1980s, I’d been writing poems in Galway. I remember the sense that I wanted to write about where I’d come from, but I wasn’t too sure how to go about it. Then Morrison’s example kicked in very strongly. The fact that he’d written about the places, streets and avenues of Belfast that I myself knew helped me. It was as if a light went on and I found myself writing a whole sequence of poems about Belfast. I probably wouldn’t have written those without Van Morrison, who had made it possible to write about his own place. It’s difficult to think now about the extent to which Belfast had been perceived as being ‘anti-art’, that you couldn’t write poems out of that place. Yet here was this guy who was singing songs and making music, hymns to the Belfast that I knew well.

I published The Lundys Letter (1985), and in that there are a number of poems about Belfast and its environs. I think it’s very much down to Van Morrison’s example, along with one or two poets whose work I greatly admired, namely Derek Mahon and Michael Longley. What strikes me about his music and influence is his ability to move in and out of different forms. He tapped into a form of expression which drew on poets like William Blake, and at the same time brought together some of the American Beat poets. There’s a freedom in what he does, and that’s exhilarating for a poet. We can get stuck on very narrow gauges, but Morrison’s ability to blend, mix and draw on different kinds of energy and generate writing out of his own self was ‘empowering’, as they say. It was enabling and striking.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Van Morrison was planning a programme on poetry and music and I was involved. We travelled around east Belfast, going to Orangefield – the school that both Van and I had attended. Being with him around that almost ‘sacred’ environment – the streams, the mountains, the hillside, the whole area – was exciting. I also realised the extent to which he was an artist who had a strong commitment to the place, but also to a particular vision. It wasn’t as if he was just documenting this area. He had a powerful sense of how ordinary life is suffused with the spirit of place and, besides the fun that we had, it was intriguing to be with him as he walked through this neighbourhood that he had done so much to praise in his music. Van Morrison’s voice is distinct and unique. It’s like having a presence that is unmovable. And that’s refreshing in this day and age, when people market themselves and put themselves into little slots and niches. Morrison is himself; he does exactly what he wants to do and he’s totally committed to that.

The sense you had in Belfast in the 1950s was that everybody had to be in his or her own place; everything was correct; things were in their spot. Music was the way to break out of that; there was a strong feeling that you could escape that control. This was what I loved about it. By the mid-1960s, Van Morrison, Them and others were breaking through and transgressing, just by the sheer energy of their voices and music. Van Morrison’s music will live for ever. There are so many magnificent albums, from Astral Weeks to the present. Morrison’s music will always ‘be there’ for one basic reason – that he sets out on a journey and he makes a bold statement. The music is not constrained. You can move backwards and forwards through all these different artistic forms: that’s an important lesson, and a fantastic example for future generations.