The story of Van Morrison

A record collection on Hyndford Street

George Ivan Morrison was born on the thirty-first of August 1945 at 125 Hyndford Street in Bloomfield, east Belfast. He was the only child of George Morrison, an electrician at the shipyard, and Violet, who had sung and tap danced when she was young. The family were working class Protestants of Ulster Scots stock. What set the house apart was the music. His father had spent time in Detroit in the early fifties and came home with one of the biggest record collections in Northern Ireland. So the boy they started calling Van grew up on Ray Charles, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, Charlie Parker, Hank Williams and Solomon Burke, long before most of Belfast had heard of them.[1] [2] [3]

His father bought him an acoustic guitar when he was eleven, and he learned his first chords from a Carter Family songbook edited by the folklorist Alan Lomax. When Lonnie Donegan turned a Lead Belly song into a skiffle hit, young Van felt he already knew the territory. In 1957, at twelve, he formed his first band, a skiffle group called the Sputniks, named after the Soviet satellite launched that October, and they rehearsed in the alley behind his house. Then he heard Jimmy Giuffre play saxophone and talked his father into buying him a tenor sax. His teacher was a jazz player called George Cassidy, who lived on the very same street.[1] [2] [3]

He left Orangefield Boys Secondary School in July 1960 with no qualifications. In a working class neighbourhood a steady job was expected, and after a few short apprenticeships he settled into work as a window cleaner, something he would sing about decades later. At night he played saxophone, guitar and harmonica in local outfits and in Ireland's showbands, the dance bands that covered the hits of the day. He joined a group that became the Monarchs, and he also played in the Harry Mack Showband alongside his older workmate Geordie Sproule, whom he later named as one of his biggest influences.[1] [2]

At seventeen he went on the road with the Monarchs, rebranded as the International Monarchs, playing rough clubs and American army bases in Scotland, England and Germany, often five sets a night. Van played saxophone, guitar and harmonica and covered bass and drums when needed. In Cologne the band cut a single under the name Georgie and the Monarchs. It was Morrison's first recording, with him on saxophone, and it scraped into the lower reaches of the German chart. Back in Belfast the Monarchs broke up, and Van drifted through the Manhattan Showband and then a group called the Golden Eagles, where he was finally hired to do what he did best, sing the blues.[1] [2] [3]

Them and the Maritime Hotel

In April 1964 a new rhythm and blues club was opening at the Maritime Hotel, an old haunt of sailors in central Belfast, and it needed a band. Morrison teamed up with an east Belfast group called the Gamblers, with Billy Harrison on guitar, Alan Henderson on bass, Ronnie Millings on drums and a schoolboy named Eric Wrixon on keys. Teaser adverts appeared in the Belfast papers asking who, and what, were Them. On the seventeenth of April 1964 the answer took the stage. Within three weeks the two hundred capacity room was packed. There was no set routine. Morrison made songs up as he went, and a number of his called Gloria could stretch to twenty minutes.[1] [2]

A fan's tape of the band reached the Solomon brothers, who brought Decca's Dick Rowe to Belfast. Them signed a two year deal, and because Van was only eighteen, his father had to sign for him. Their second single, Baby, Please Don't Go, came out in November 1964 with Gloria on the B side. Their manager Phil Solomon got it used as the theme of the television show Ready Steady Go, and it climbed to number ten in Britain. Gloria grew into one of the most covered songs in rock, played by the Shadows of Knight, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Patti Smith. In 1965 an American producer named Bert Berns gave them Here Comes the Night, and it reached number two in the UK.[1] [2] [3]

Success did not soften them. Them earned a reputation for sullen, sarcastic interviews, and a reporter from the Irish Independent called them the most boorish bunch of youngsters of a short career. Morrison hated having to mime on Top of the Pops in suits and make up, and later said the band had always treated the programme as a joke. At the NME Pollwinners concert at Wembley in April 1965, sharing a bill with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, they were supposed to play their hit and leave. Instead they rolled into a seven minute Turn On Your Love Light, and the NME wrote that Morrison had more real soul than any of his British contemporaries.[1] [2]

In the spring of 1966 Them toured America. From the thirtieth of May to the eighteenth of June they held a residency at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, and for the final week the opening act was a young band called the Doors. Jim Morrison, no relation, studied Van's stagecraft closely, and on the last night both bands jammed on Gloria together. But the tour ended in a row with manager Phil Solomon over money, the work visas ran out, and the band came home dejected. After two more shows in Ireland, Them split. Morrison later said they had lived and died on the stage of the Maritime Hotel.[1] [2] [3]

Brown Eyed Girl and the Bang Records trap

Bert Berns had not forgotten the singer. He had just started his own label, Bang Records, and he persuaded Morrison to come to New York. Van flew over and signed a contract he had barely read. Over two days starting on the twenty-eighth of March 1967, at A and R Studios, he recorded eight songs meant for four singles. One of them, captured on the twenty-second take, was Brown Eyed Girl, with the Sweet Inspirations, including Cissy Houston, singing backup. Released that June, it reached number ten in America and spent sixteen weeks on the chart. It went on to become his most played song and one of the most played songs on American radio of all time.[1] [2] [3]

The victory was hollow. Without asking Morrison, Berns packaged the session tracks as an album called Blowin' Your Mind, and Van only found out when a friend told him he had bought a copy. He hated the swirling psychedelic sleeve so much he said it nearly made him sick. Worse, the contract made him liable for almost every recording cost before any royalty was paid. Morrison has said he never received royalties for writing or singing Brown Eyed Girl. He and Berns argued constantly, Berns pushing for pop hits, Van wanting to go somewhere deeper.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirtieth of December 1967 Bert Berns died of heart failure at thirty eight, his heart weakened by rheumatic fever in childhood. His widow Ilene, just twenty four, inherited the contracts and held Morrison partly responsible for her husband's death. Bang was known for its links to organised crime, and New York clubs stopped booking him. Ilene Berns then learned that the paperwork keeping Morrison, still a British citizen, in the country had never been properly filed, and she contacted immigration to have him deported. He stayed because his girlfriend, a Californian named Janet Rigsbee, agreed to marry him. The couple fled to Cambridge, Massachusetts.[1] [2] [3]

Warner Brothers wanted him, but first he had to be bought out. The label executive Joe Smith was told to bring twenty thousand dollars in cash to an abandoned warehouse on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. He climbed three flights of stairs, handed the bag to four silent men, took the signed contract and left fast. Asked later whether he ever saw them again, Smith said no, because they were not in the music business. One condition remained: thirty six original songs for Berns's publishing company. Morrison recorded more than thirty throwaway ditties in a single session on an out of tune guitar, about things like ringworm and wanting a Danish. They finally came out officially in 2017.[1] [2] [3]

Astral Weeks

Broke and living in Cambridge, Morrison played small clubs around Boston. He dropped his electric band and started playing acoustic with a Berklee student called Tom Kielbania on upright bass, and soon a jazz flautist named John Payne joined them. At a club called the Catacombs the trio shaped the songs that became Astral Weeks. Warner sent producers expecting to hear another Brown Eyed Girl. Instead, producer Lewis Merenstein sat in a Boston studio as Van played a song called Astral Weeks, and within thirty seconds, he said, his whole being was vibrating. He started crying, and he knew he had to make the record.[1] [2] [3]

The album was cut at Century Sound in New York over three sessions, on the twenty-fifth of September and the first and fifteenth of October 1968. Merenstein brought in jazz players: bassist Richard Davis, who had worked with Eric Dolphy, guitarist Jay Berliner from Charles Mingus's circle, and Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet. There were no charts. Van played each song once on his guitar, went into a vocal booth, and let them follow. Davis recalled that Morrison never introduced himself and that he may not have exchanged a single word with him. Kay said he was told to play whatever he felt. Strings were added afterwards, which Morrison later said ruined his vision.[1] [2] [3]

Astral Weeks came out in November 1968 and sold poorly. Warner gave it little promotion, and British critics compared it unfavourably to José Feliciano. Morrison later said that when it came out he was literally starving. Yet a few listeners fell hard. Greil Marcus praised it in Rolling Stone, and Lester Bangs later called it the record with the most significance in his life. When Moondance came out in 1970, Warner even ran adverts telling fans who could not find Astral Weeks to go and yell at their record store's buyer. The album did not go gold in America until 2001, thirty three years after release.[1] [2]

Its reputation kept growing. Mojo voted it the second greatest album ever in 1995, and Rolling Stone placed it at number nineteen in 2003. Bruce Springsteen said his New York City Serenade would not exist without Madame George, and his guitarist Steven Van Zandt said the album was like a religion to them. Greil Marcus reported that Martin Scorsese based the first fifteen minutes of Taxi Driver on it. Morrison, typically, shrugged. He said the songs were fiction, stitched together from overheard conversations, films and newspapers, and he admitted that for years the record had been suppressed in his memory.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Moondance and the country years

After Astral Weeks, Van and Janet moved to a mountaintop home in the Catskills near Woodstock. According to Janet, Bob Dylan had just left town, and Van would stare down the gravel road toward Dylan's place, hoping to befriend the one contemporary he thought worthy of attention. Stung by the sales of Astral Weeks, he wanted something people could relate to, as he put it, because one has to live. He hired local musicians, took over production himself, and recorded Moondance in New York in the summer of 1969 with two horns and a rhythm section, his favourite kind of band. His daughter Shana was born in Cambridge in April 1970.[1] [2]

Moondance was released in January 1970 and changed everything. Caravan, Into the Mystic, Crazy Love, And It Stoned Me and the title track became staples of FM radio, and Come Running made the American top forty. The album was his first to sell a million and was eventually certified triple platinum in the US. Rolling Stone put him on its cover that July. By the end of the year he had released another album, His Band and the Street Choir, which Warner retitled without his consent. It contained Domino, a nod to Fats Domino, which reached number nine and remains the biggest American hit of his solo career.[1] [2] [3]

When the Woodstock festival and then its film flooded the town with visitors, the Morrisons moved west. In April 1971 they settled in Marin County, California, near Janet's family, and that October came Tupelo Honey. Janet rode a horse bareback on the cover while Van walked alongside, a picture of rural bliss. He later grumbled that it was taken at a stable where they did not live. The album gave him the hits Wild Night, with an intro Ronnie Montrose invented while noodling in the studio, and the title song. Producer Ted Templeman said Van recorded so fast and so live that he went through three engineers who could not keep up.[1] [2]

Saint Dominic's Preview followed in July 1972, pairing the joyous Jackie Wilson Said with two long, searching pieces, Listen to the Lion and Almost Independence Day, that looked back to Astral Weeks. It reached number fifteen in America, his best US album position until 2008. But on stage he was struggling. Playing to thousands instead of hundreds, he developed stage fright, found it hard to look at the audience, and sometimes had to be coaxed on at all. His guitarist said his motto was that the show does not have to go on. He announced his retirement from live performance, then rebuilt his nerve at a small club near home called the Lion's Share.[1] [2] [3]

Caledonia, divorce and the long pause

In 1973 his marriage to Janet broke up, and they divorced that year. He poured himself into a bold idea: a touring band with strings. The Caledonia Soul Orchestra, with a horn section and a string quartet, played across America and Europe from May to July 1973, and Morrison changed his phrasing every night and steered the band with hand signals behind his back. His three year old daughter Shana came along for part of the tour. A new song, I Paid the Price, was his statement on the failed marriage. The recordings became the double album It's Too Late to Stop Now, regularly named one of the greatest live albums ever made.[1] [2] [3]

The tour left him drained. He later recalled sitting in a hotel room in Belgium thinking it was not worth it, and he folded the orchestra. That October he took a holiday in Ireland, his first visit in years, with his new fiancée, Carol Guida. He stayed in the south, away from a North engulfed by the Troubles, and in under three weeks wrote most of the songs for Veedon Fleece. Released in October 1974, it was greeted with a collective shrug. Decades later Rolling Stone called it a height he never reached again, and it is often described as his forgotten masterpiece.[1] [2] [3]

Then he disappeared. After a decade without a break, he said he needed to get away from music completely and stopped listening to it for months. He had writer's block and seriously thought about quitting. His one big appearance came on Thanksgiving Day 1976, at the Band's farewell show in San Francisco, The Last Waltz. He nearly skipped it and refused to go on when his name was announced, until manager Harvey Goldsmith, by his own account, literally kicked him out there. He sang Caravan, kicked his legs high like a showgirl, and Greil Marcus wrote that he turned the whole show around.[1] [2]

His comeback, A Period of Transition, made with Dr. John in 1977, disappointed critics, but Wavelength in 1978 became the fastest selling album of his career so far and went gold within three months. On that tour he played his native Belfast for the first time since leaving for New York. He then moved to England, wrote much of his next album while staying with his old showband friend Herbie Armstrong in the Cotswolds, and released Into the Music in 1979. It introduced a lifelong theme, the healing power of music, and began a long partnership with Pee Wee Ellis, the former James Brown saxophonist.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The mystic in the eighties

In February 1980 he took a band to Super Bear, a studio in the hills of the south of France, and in less than two intense weeks made Common One. It had just six songs, one of them, Summertime in England, running over fifteen minutes. The NME called it colossally smug and cosmically dull. Biographer Clinton Heylin wrote that Morrison was bruised and never again attempted anything so ambitious. Yet Lester Bangs later argued that Van was making holy music and critics had listened too hard to the words. And in 2016 Morrison himself named Common One as his favourite of all his albums.[1] [2] [3]

Through the eighties he chased the spirit. Beautiful Vision in 1982 drew on the esoteric writer Alice Bailey and on a new muse, Ulla Munch, a Danish woman from Vanløse in Copenhagen, who inspired Vanlose Stairway and She Gives Me Religion. The same album gave him the minor British hit Cleaning Windows, about his first job, with Mark Knopfler among the guitarists. The instrumental Scandinavia, with Van on piano, earned a Grammy nomination. For a time he studied Scientology, and on 1983's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart he gave special thanks to L. Ron Hubbard. Later he said he would not touch organised religion with a ten foot pole.[1] [2]

Tired of being labelled, he titled his 1986 album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, borrowing the idea from the philosopher Krishnamurti. He told the Observer that many lies had been told about him, that he had never joined any organisation and followed no guru. One critic called it his most intriguing record since Astral Weeks. The next year's Poetic Champions Compose gave him Someone Like You, later heard in Bridget Jones's Diary. In 1988 he went back to Irish roots with Irish Heartbeat, an album of traditional songs made with the Chieftains. Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains said Van was searching for his Irishness.[1] [2] [3]

By then he was living in England, first in Notting Hill and later near Bath. In 1989 came Avalon Sunset, his fastest selling album in Britain up to then. It opened with Whenever God Shines His Light, a duet with Cliff Richard that went top twenty in the UK, and included Have I Told You Lately, which he wrote as a prayer and which became a wedding favourite. The album was rehearsed in two days and recorded in two more, and on one song you can hear Van calling out the chord changes to the band. It also marked the arrival of the organist Georgie Fame, who would anchor his band for years.[1] [2] [3]

Hits, halls of fame and a peace song

The early nineties were his most commercially successful years in Britain. The Best of Van Morrison, compiled by Van himself, stayed on the UK chart for a year and a half and became the biggest seller of his career. In July 1990 he sang Comfortably Numb at Roger Waters's staging of The Wall in Berlin before hundreds of thousands. Hymns to the Silence in 1991 and Too Long in Exile in 1993 both reached the UK top five. But when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in January 1993, he stayed away, the first living inductee to skip his own ceremony. Robbie Robertson of the Band accepted on his behalf.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the summer of 1992 he met Michelle Rocca, a former Miss Ireland who had co-hosted the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest. The famously private singer suddenly turned up in Dublin's gossip columns. She appeared with him on the cover of Days Like This in 1995, the first woman on one of his covers since Janet on Tupelo Honey. They later married and had two children, born in 2006 and 2007. The title song, Days Like This, was adopted by Northern Ireland's peace movement, and on the thirtieth of November 1995 he sang to a crowd of sixty to eighty thousand in Belfast when President Bill Clinton visited the city.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The honours piled up. In 1994 he received the Brit Award for outstanding contribution to music, presented by John McCarthy, the former Beirut hostage, who said his song Wonderful Remark had mattered deeply to the captives. In 1996 he was made an OBE. His two Grammy wins both came from collaborations: a new version of Have I Told You Lately with the Chieftains, and Don't Look Back, a duet with his hero John Lee Hooker, whose 1997 album of that name Van produced. Their friendship went back to 1971, when they first sang together on one of Hooker's records.[1] [2]

He built his own world to work in. In January 1994 he bought the Wool Hall studio near Bath, and he later set up Exile Productions so he could deliver finished albums to whichever label he chose. The title song of The Healing Game in 1997 was about the lost tradition of Belfast street singing. There were quarrels too. In Dalkey, near Dublin, neighbours took him to court over his plan to widen a driveway, and he lost all the way to the Irish Supreme Court. In 2001 the singer Linda Gail Lewis left their joint tour after nine months and filed claims of unfair dismissal and sex discrimination. Both claims were withdrawn, and his lawyer said she had apologised.[1] [2]

Knighthood and a hometown's embrace

The new century found him playing two or three gigs a week rather than touring, and refusing to become a nostalgia act. Down the Road in 2002 honoured the records of his youth, with its cover shot outside a real record shop in Bath, and included Choppin' Wood, a tribute to his late father, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. In 2008 Keep It Simple debuted at number ten, his first ever top ten album in America. That November, forty years on, he played Astral Weeks in full for the first time at the Hollywood Bowl, with Jay Berliner back on guitar. He even filmed later shows so the actress Farrah Fawcett, bedridden with cancer, could watch.[1] [2] [3]

In December 2009 a statement on his official website announced the birth of a son, George Ivan Morrison the third, to his former tour manager, a Texan named Gigi Lee. Morrison denied the story, said his website had been hacked, and said he was happily married to Michelle with two children. He continued to deny paternity. The story then turned tragic. The boy died in Fort Worth, Texas, in January 2011, at thirteen months old, and a post mortem found extremely high blood sugar. Gigi Lee, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer before the pregnancy, died in a Belfast hospice that October, aged forty four.[1] [2] [3]

Belfast, meanwhile, claimed him. On the fifteenth of November 2013 he became the seventy-ninth person given the freedom of the city, at the Waterfront Hall, with his mother Violet in the audience and Shana in his band, followed by a free concert for residents chosen by lottery. In August 2014 he played three nights in the assembly hall of his old school, Orangefield, before it closed for good, and a Van Morrison Trail was opened through east Belfast. In the 2015 Birthday Honours he was knighted for services to music and to tourism in Northern Ireland.[1] [2] [3]

On his seventieth birthday, the thirty-first of August 2015, he played two concerts on Cyprus Avenue itself, the leafy street he had immortalised on Astral Weeks, for about three thousand fans including Robert Pattinson and Kim Cattrall. That year he also sold the rights to most of his catalogue to Sony's Legacy Recordings, putting thirty three albums on streaming services for the first time. In February 2016 Prince Charles dubbed him at Buckingham Palace, where he was introduced as Sir Ivan Morrison. He called it pretty good for a blue eyed soul singer from east Belfast.[1] [2] [3]

That June his mother Violet died in a nursing home in Holywood. She was in her nineties. Her funeral was held at St Donard's Church in Bloomfield, where she had married George in 1941, and several of her son's songs were listed in the order of service. He postponed shows in Germany to fly home. His marriage to Michelle was also over. A court case she pursued over sea views at a house in Dalkey collapsed in 2015, with Van publicly distancing himself and saying they had been legally separated since 2013. Their divorce was confirmed in March 2018. He kept working at a startling pace, releasing several albums a year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lockdown, lawsuits and the latest record

When the pandemic shut live music in 2020, Morrison became one of its loudest critics. He urged fellow musicians to fight what he called pseudo-science, and in September 2020 announced three protest songs against lockdown, Born to Be Free, No More Lockdown and As I Walked Out, accusing government of taking away freedom. One lyric accused scientists at Imperial College of inventing facts. Northern Ireland's health minister, Robin Swann, called the songs dangerous in an article for Rolling Stone and wrote that Van was no guru and no teacher. A Belfast councillor asked the city to consider revoking his freedom of Belfast. Eric Clapton joined him on the protest single Stand and Deliver.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 2021, after his concerts at Belfast's Europa Hotel were cancelled under Covid rules, Morrison led a chant from the stage that Robin Swann was very dangerous, with the DUP politician Ian Paisley joining in. Swann sued him for defamation that November. In 2022 Morrison sued Swann and the Department of Health over the Rolling Stone article. Both cases were due in court in September 2024, and both were settled on confidential terms just before. In an agreed statement, Van accepted Swann had acted honestly and in good faith, and Swann accepted Van's views were sincere, voiced while he was barred from doing the job he was famous for.[1] [2] [3]

His records from this period split opinion sharply. Latest Record Project, Volume 1, released in May 2021 with twenty eight tracks and song titles like Why Are You on Facebook, took him back into the UK top ten, making it four straight decades with a top ten album. But the Guardian gave it one star and Rolling Stone later listed it among the worst albums by great artists. The following year's What's It Gonna Take became his first solo album in over fifty years to miss the American chart. Yet in 2022 he also earned his first Oscar nomination, for Down to Joy, written for Kenneth Branagh's film Belfast.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then he went back to his roots. In 2023 he released Moving On Skiffle, the music of his childhood, and a rock and roll set called Accentuate the Positive, and began releasing archive recordings on his own label, named Orangefield Records after his old school. Remembering Now, his first album of new original songs in three years, came out in June 2025 and reached the UK top ten. That August he marked his eightieth birthday with a run of shows at Belfast's Waterfront Hall. In January 2026 he released Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge, a blues album with guests including Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal and Elvin Bishop.[1] [2] [3] [4]

As of 2026 he is still recording and performing, more than sixty years after the Maritime Hotel. His legacy is enormous and hard to pin down. He calls himself simply a soul singer, while critics coined the phrase Celtic soul for his blend of rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel and Irish mysticism. Greil Marcus wrote that no white man sings like him. Bono admitted he had to stop listening to Van before recording The Unforgettable Fire so as not to be overwhelmed by that voice. From Springsteen to Ed Sheeran, his echo is everywhere, and a boy from Hyndford Street became Sir Van, still, to his fans, Van the Man.[1] [2] [3]

The people around Van Morrison

Van Morrison and Janet Planet. Janet Rigsbee, a Californian known as Janet Planet, met Van in 1966 and married him in early 1968, a marriage that also kept him from being deported. She wrote the fairy tale liner notes for Moondance, rode the horse on the cover of Tupelo Honey and inspired many of his love songs. Their daughter Shana was born in 1970. They divorced in 1973, and she later said being a muse is a thankless job.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Van Morrison and Bert Berns. Berns wrote and produced Them's biggest hit, Here Comes the Night, then signed Van to Bang Records and produced Brown Eyed Girl. The partnership soured over royalties and direction, with Berns chasing pop and Van reaching for something deeper. Berns died at thirty eight in December 1967. Decades later Morrison called him a genius and a brilliant songwriter with a lot of soul.[1] [2] [3]

Van Morrison and Lewis Merenstein. The jazz trained producer heard Van play the song Astral Weeks in a Boston studio in 1968 and was moved to tears. He assembled the jazz musicians who made the album and was executive producer on Moondance. By then Morrison had grown more confident and took production into his own hands. Merenstein said years later that the record still moved him so much it almost hurt.[1] [2] [3]

Van Morrison and Jim Morrison. No relation, but a real connection. In 1966 the Doors opened for Them at the Whisky a Go Go, and Jim Morrison soaked up Van's brooding stagecraft, his improvised poetry and his habit of crouching by the bass drum. On the final night the two Morrisons jammed on Gloria. The Doors later made the song part of their own set, and Ray Manzarek called Van their favourite singer.[1] [2] [3]

Van Morrison and The Band. As neighbours in Woodstock, Van and the members of the Band got on well and shared a dread of the stage. He co-wrote and sang 4% Pantomime with Richard Manuel on their 1971 album Cahoots, where Manuel called him the Belfast Cowboy. At The Last Waltz in 1976 Robbie Robertson hailed him as Van the Man, and in 1993 Robertson collected his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame award for him.[1] [2]

Van Morrison and Michelle Rocca. The former Miss Ireland and Eurovision host met Van in 1992 and drew the private singer into the gossip columns. She appeared on the cover of Days Like This, and they married in the mid nineties and had two children. They legally separated in 2013, and after a bitter neighbour dispute in Dalkey that Van distanced himself from, their divorce was confirmed in 2018.[1] [2] [3]

Van Morrison and Robin Swann. Northern Ireland's health minister called Van's 2020 anti-lockdown songs dangerous in Rolling Stone. Van answered in 2021 by leading a crowd in chanting that Swann himself was very dangerous. Each sued the other, Swann for defamation and Van over the magazine article. In September 2024 both cases were settled confidentially, with each man acknowledging the other had acted sincerely.[1] [2] [3]

Van Morrison and Eric Clapton. The two had planned to play together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's anniversary concert in 2009 until both pulled out. During the pandemic they found common cause. In late 2020 they released Stand and Deliver, a protest against lockdown, and in 2021, as Slowhand and Van, a version of Where Have All the Rebels Gone. Proceeds went to Van's fund for musicians hit by restrictions.[1] [2] [3]

Van Morrison and John Lee Hooker. The blues giant was one of Van's childhood idols, and they first sang together on a Hooker album in 1971, when Hooker also covered Van's T.B. Sheets. They recut Gloria together in 1993 and it charted around the world. Van produced much of Hooker's 1997 album Don't Look Back, and their duet on its title track won a Grammy.[1] [2]

Van Morrison and Georgie Fame. The English jazz and soul singer, who had three UK number ones in the sixties, joined Van for Avalon Sunset in 1989 and played organ, sang harmonies and helped direct the band until 1997. Fame also worked as his musical producer. On a 2008 song Van sang about no longer running into Mr Clive, a nod to Fame's real name, Clive Powell.[1] [2]

Van Morrison and Shana Morrison. His daughter was born in Cambridge in 1970, and after her parents divorced she grew up between their homes in Marin County, working weekends in her grandparents' record shop. After college she toured with her father for a year, sang duets on A Night in San Francisco and Days Like This, and formed her own band, named Caledonia. She stood beside him at Buckingham Palace for his knighthood.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Van Morrison

• The previous occupant of the house where Van was born, 125 Hyndford Street, was the father of the thriller writer Lee Child. Before the Morrison family moved into the terraced house in east Belfast, it had been home to the father of Lee Child, creator of Jack Reacher. The street now carries a brass plaque for Van.[1] [2]
• The first record Van Morrison ever bought was by the blues harmonica player Sonny Terry. Surrounded by his father's huge collection of American records, the young Van chose a Sonny Terry disc as his first purchase. He had already been hearing Lead Belly before the skiffle craze took off.[1]
• His first band, formed at twelve, was a skiffle group called the Sputniks, named after the Soviet satellite. Sputnik one went up in October 1957, and the Belfast schoolboy borrowed the name. The Sputniks rehearsed in the alley behind his Hyndford Street home and played local cinemas in 1958.[1] [2]
• Because he was only eighteen when Them signed with Decca, Van's father had to sign the contract for him. Decca's Dick Rowe and manager Phil Solomon agreed a two year deal after hearing a fan's tape. The band's schoolboy keyboard player was replaced when his own parents refused to sign.[1]
• Them's first gig was trailed by mysterious newspaper teasers asking who and what Them were. From the fourteenth of April 1964 Belfast papers ran puzzling adverts, until the answer came on the seventeenth: a new band at the Maritime Hotel. By the third week the two hundred capacity room was packed.[1]
• Lulu released Here Comes the Night before Them, and her version stalled at number fifty. Decca rushed out Lulu's recording in November 1964, to the band's bitter disappointment. Them's version then reached number two in 1965, and as of 2026 it is still Van's highest charting single in Britain and Ireland.[1]
• Brown Eyed Girl was captured on the twenty-second take. At A and R Studios in New York in March 1967, Bert Berns's session band ran through the song again and again. The Sweet Inspirations, including Cissy Houston, sang the backing vocals.[1]
• A radio edit of Brown Eyed Girl cut a suggestive line, and that edit ended up on some copies of his greatest hits. Many stations considered one line in the third verse too racy, so a version replacing it with a line from earlier in the song was made. It slipped onto some pressings of his 1990 hits collection.[1] [2]
• When the White House revealed Brown Eyed Girl was on George W. Bush's iPod, Van said he would have preferred a new song. In 2005 the song was reported to be in regular rotation on the president's music player. Morrison told a university audience it was nice to hear, but he wished it had been something recent.[1]
• Gloria was named after Van's cousin Gloria, who was thirteen years older, though the song is not about her. Van wrote the song around the age of eighteen, while with the Monarchs, and first stretched it out live at the Maritime Hotel. According to Songfacts, he borrowed only his older cousin's name.[1] [2]
• To escape Bang Records, Van recorded more than thirty nonsense songs in one session, about subjects like ringworm and wanting a Danish. His release deal required dozens of original songs for Bert Berns's publishing company. Van delivered deliberate throwaways on an out of tune guitar. They were bootlegged for decades and officially released in 2017.[1] [2]
• Nobody knows who played flute on two Astral Weeks songs. At the first session a flautist played on Beside You and Cyprus Avenue while John Payne sat listening. The musician is not credited, appears in no surviving paperwork, and nobody present remembers his name.[1]
• Van carried a poster of Lead Belly with him and hung it on the wall wherever he lived. He revealed the habit in a 1978 Rolling Stone interview, and it seems to lie behind a reference to Huddie Ledbetter in the title song of Astral Weeks.[1]
• Astral Weeks was not certified gold in America until 2001, thirty three years after its release. The album sold poorly at first but never stopped selling. Music historian Andrew Ford compared it to classical music, selling as many copies each year as it did in 1968.[1]
• You can hear Van's tongue click against the roof of his mouth on the Moondance recording of Crazy Love. He sang so close to the microphone that it caught the tiny sound. He sang the song in falsetto, which gave it an unusually intimate feel.[1]
• The close up on the Moondance cover was framed to hide a large pimple on Van's forehead. Photographer Elliot Landy, who had shot Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline cover, took the picture at Morrison's home and cropped carefully around the blemish.[1]
• Moondance was left off the classic live album It's Too Late to Stop Now because of one wrong guitar note. Morrison banned studio overdubs on the 1974 album, so a flawed take could not be fixed. A live Moondance from that tour finally appeared in 2016.[1]
• Van's 1973 concert at London's Rainbow was the first BBC simulcast, shown on BBC Two while Radio 2 carried it in stereo. Viewers could line up their radio speakers with the television for so called stereo TV. The broadcast went out in May 1974.[1]
• Hard Nose the Highway includes Van's version of Bein' Green, the song made famous by Kermit the Frog. It was the first song he had not written to appear on one of his Warner albums. He said it was a statement that you do not have to be flamboyant.[1]
• Van built a recording studio next door to his home in Fairfax, California. Hard Nose the Highway was recorded there in 1972. His parents, who had followed him to America, ran a record shop in Fairfax called Caledonia.[1] [2] [3]
• The name Caledonia runs through Van's life, from his daughter's middle name to his studio, bands and publishing company. The old Roman name for Scotland reflects his Ulster Scots roots. Biographer Ritchie Yorke wrote in 1975 that Van seemed obsessed with the word.[1] [2]
• Wavelength's synthesisers were meant to echo the shortwave radio he listened to as a teenager. The 1978 title song recalls tuning in to the Voice of America in Belfast. It became the fastest selling album of his career up to then.[1] [2]
• Van earned a Grammy nomination for Scandinavia, an instrumental with him on piano. The closing track of Beautiful Vision was nominated for Best Rock Instrumental Performance at the twenty-fifth Grammy Awards. It was inspired by his Danish partner of the time.[1] [2]
• The poet W. B. Yeats's estate refused Van permission to set a Yeats poem, so he used the epitaph on Yeats's grave instead. The gravestone words were considered public, and they turned up in Here Comes the Knight on No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, a pun on the old Them hit.[1]
• Have I Told You Lately borrows its opening line from a William Bell song, and Van wrote it as a prayer. Now a wedding favourite, it was built on his earlier Someone Like You. Rod Stewart's 1993 cover reached number five in both Britain and America.[1]
• Van's Brit Award was presented by John McCarthy, the journalist held hostage in Beirut. McCarthy said Van's song Wonderful Remark had been very important to the hostages. The 1994 award was for outstanding contribution to British music.[1]
• During his 2008 Astral Weeks shows, Van banned alcohol sales so people would stop leaving their seats during songs. The ban made entertainment news. He prefers small venues and concert halls known for their acoustics, and he never plays from a fixed set list.[1]
• The cover of Down the Road shows a real record shop in Bath, dressed up for the photo shoot. Nashers Music Store on Walcot Street filled its window with old blues, jazz and rock and roll sleeves to mirror the album's influences.[1]
• At his investiture in 2016, Van was announced as Sir Ivan Morrison. Prince Charles asked whether he was still writing and whether he planned to retire. Van said no, he would keep going while he could.[1]
• A retired wrestler, Billy Two Rivers, sued Van in 2017 over the cover of Roll with the Punches. The suit claimed his likeness was used without permission. The parties reached a preliminary agreement to settle out of court within weeks.[1]
• Robert Pattinson, Kim Cattrall and Ian Rankin were in the crowd when Van played Cyprus Avenue on his seventieth birthday. About three thousand fans filled the street in east Belfast on the thirty-first of August 2015. Pattinson has said Van was his reason for making music at all.[1] [2]
• His daughter Shana's foundation has bid to turn his childhood home into a Van Morrison museum. In 2025 the foundation put a proposal for 125 Hyndford Street to Belfast City Council. The street is already a stop on the Van Morrison Trail.[1]
• Bert Berns's Bang Records took its name from the initials of Bert and his Atlantic Records backers Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun and Gerald Wexler. The label that trapped Van in a punishing contract was bankrolled at first by Atlantic's bosses. Berns later fell out bitterly with Jerry Wexler.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.