Listen To The Lion: Van Morrison's mystical quest

Henry Blanke in New York

As a young teenager growing up in Belfast in the 1950s Van Morrison imbibed his father’s collection of jazz and blues records like mother’s milk. He went on to discover rhythm and blues and soul music: Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Leadbelly and other Afro-American virtuosos of the sacred and profane ignited a fire in him. In 1964 he recorded Gloria with his band Them and the song’s raw ebullience has inspired and been covered by many rockers. But he was an Irish artist who had to find his own voice. In 1968 he did and recorded the song cycle Astral Weeks. What he found within himself was something singular in the canon of rock music.

The way in which Morrison came to phrase lyrics was wildly idiosyncratic and highly original. Case in point: on Madame George, the centerpiece of Astral Weeks, he sings the words dry and your eye over and over in a swirling melodic arc. Then this: ‘And the love that loves the love that loves the love’ repeated twice more. The way he phrases love sounds like glove and the title character’s name might be Joy.

In the culmination to Cyprus Avenue on the same album Van sings baby at least a dozen times in a descending cadence that sounds like he is blissfully running downhill to his lover. These beguiling lyrical flourishes are all over Morrison’s ouevre, but Listen To The Lion from Saint Dominic’s Preview is a song so strange, incantatory and mystical as to express something deeply spiritual. There is nothing quite like it in rock music.

Listen To The Lion has precious few lyrics, but Van delivers each word, each syllable with mantric devotion. ‘All… my … love/ Come down/ All my love come tumblin’ down.’ The word tumblin’ is stretched out to four syllables. ‘Oh listen listen listen listen to/ The lion/ Inside of me.’

What does the invocation of this haunting leonine beast signify? For the next 11 minutes he cajoles, incants, moans, pleads, whispers and finally speaks in Gaelic tongues to give expression to the ancient bardic lore which is his birthright. ‘I … shall … search … my soul.’ As guitars, piano, vibraphone and jazz master Connie Kay’s drums swell and surge around him: ‘All… my tears… have flowed/ All… my… tears… like water flow.’

We are now already halfway through the song and it is as if with these deliberate, spare cadences Morrison has been trying to conjure a vision. Then it happens. For the rest of the song he can only express his revelation by ecstatic utterances. Perhaps I should not defile this vision by trying to represent it here, but I will say that we hear moans, grunts, bellows, chants, mumbles, stutters, whispers, sighs. And the roar of WB Yeats’s rough beast (from his poem The Second Coming).

This is glossolalia that only Celtic bards can comprehend. Then comes Van’s own strange scat singing as the backing vocals chant ‘listen to the lion’: ‘Diddle iddle yeep diddle e de doo doop.’ And finally: ‘And we sailed and we sailed and we sailed/ And we sailed way up to Caledonia’ [the forests of the Scottish highlands]. Van Morrison’s mystical quest has brought him back to his ancestral homeland. The track ends with his whispers floating on strummed guitar and shimmering cymbal.

Morrison has said: ‘I think Lion is a song that is all of me… probably the only one about me.’ This is an odd statement since Astral Weeks is about Belfast: childhood, initiation, sex, death and rebirth – and jazz maestro Richard Davis’s bass.

On Listen To The Lion, driven by Bill Church’s hypnotic bass, Morrison captures something even more mystical and transcendent: Caledonia, the mythical land of his ancestors. He summons ghosts of Irish bards both ancient and modern: Dállan Forgale, Senchán Torpéist, Tadhg Dall Ó hUiginn, Oscar Wilde and Yeats. And he uses every device in his kit of wild lyrical phraseology to do it. Is there anything more profound in the history of rock?

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