by Greil Marcus
———Common One (Warner Bros., 1980).
———Beautiful Vision (Warner Bros., 1982).
———Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (Warner Bros., 1983).
———Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast (Mercury, 1984).
———A Sense of Wonder (Mercury, 1984).
———No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (Mercury, 1986).
———Poetic Champions Compose (Mercury, 1987).
———and the Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat (Mercury, 1988).
———Avalon Sunset (Polydor, 1989).
———Enlightenment (Mercury, 1990).
———Hymns to the Silence (Polydor, 1991).
———Too Long in Exile (Polydor, 1993).
———A Night in San Francisco (Polydor, 1994).
———Days Like This (Polydor, 1995).
———with Georgie Fame & friends, How Long Has This Been Going On (Verve, 1996).
———Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison (Verve, 1996).
LINDEN ARDEN STOLE THE HIGHLIGHTS. 1974
“Do you hear that? That’s a prayer,” Jonathan Cott said to me as we listened to the second cut on Van Morrison’s 1974 Veedon Fleece. The first song, “Fair Play for You,” a harmlessly slow reverie, was no preparation.
What Cott was talking about was the piano piece that opens “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights.” It seemed to begin and end the song—to be utterly complete in itself—before Morrison sang his first word. I’m not sure what I heard that day—I remember saying Yes, yes, as if Cott had unlocked the song, and so fully it didn’t matter whatever “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights” meant. What I hear now is a long series of earned wishes, the plea—if it’s a prayer, it’s the Platters’—of someone who knows what he or she wants, knows what he or she deserves, has little or no expectation of getting any of it, and who is absolutely at peace with such a life, or such an ending. The knowledge is enough. I don’t hear a door anymore; I hear a pool that you dive into simply by listening.
There’s no need to come up. I didn’t catch the words that day, or for years to come. It didn’t occur to me that the song needed them—or maybe it was that even as Morrison sang the words, the song itself forgot them.
As Morrison slides back and forth along the planes of the melody, as if he were a drop of mercury and someone were tilting a hand mirror now up, now down, he slides past the literal story he’s telling—a crime story, as it turns out—into a tale of thought, dream, desire, where the claims of each shift in primacy. Passion rises and his voice fills up, and you are in the moment, but when Morrison lets his voice fade, as if he can hardly bear to listen to himself, because the thought he’s trying to bring into view is so elusive the act of listening will break it, there is the feeling of someone looking back at himself from a future that has itself already passed. This is a greater kind of slowness. Whatever movement the music makes, it also pulls against itself: not yet.
It was hundreds of listenings to this song later, decades after listening to it with Cott, that, driving in a car, the radio on, I heard the story the song was carrying—I can’t say, about. With a speaker a few inches from your face, words come across like traffic reports: out of the Druidic forest of the music comes a killer. Other killers track him from Ireland to a bar in San Francisco. He faces them down and kills them all. Dirty Harry straight off the boat.
The pool is always there, though. What happens in those first seconds with the piano, then in the way Morrison high-steps across an arc in the melody that has only just appeared to carry the listener across the first line, “Linden Arden stole the highlights”—if that was his crime, what kind of crime is that? When you kill someone, do you not simply put out their lights but take them?—returns the song at any time from its words to its music, the words remaining only as a signifier that a particular person is singing the song.
It’s the quieting of the music that’s uncanny. With Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway”—the kind of deep blues, constructed with an art so realized it conceals itself, that’s one source of “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights”—there’s nothing you can do to quiet it. The more you turn the volume down, the more the irreducible loudness of the song, its nightmare desolation and fright, creeps forward. But with “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights,” the louder you try to make it, the more it recedes, until it reaches as far as it will go toward silence, making you lean into it.
When the Miracles’ “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage” appeared in 1967, it radiated a sublimity that made everything that surrounded it on the radio sound faintly obscene. This song can do the same to whatever you happened to be doing with your life before you heard it, for the first time or the thousandth. Whether that is art ennobling life or corrupting it I don’t know.
Robert Johnson, “Stones in My Passway” (1937), collected on Robert Johnson—The Complete Recordings (Columbia, 1990).
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, “The Love I Saw in You Was Just a Mirage” (Tamla, 1967).
Van Morrison, “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights,” on Veedon Fleece (Warner Bros., 1974).
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO. 2005
In Neil Jordan’s 2005 film Breakfast on Pluto, the young transvestite Kitten, who was raised with the name Patrick Braden, has left her hometown in Ireland to find the mother who abandoned her at birth: “She went to London, the biggest city in the world,” Kitten says to anyone she meets, “and it swallowed her up.” But now Kitten has discovered where her mother lives. Flamboyant, shrieking, weepy, yet with the self-possession of someone with an infinite sense of irony, she sits in the dressing room of the Soho peep show where she works, surrounded by women from the club. She’s wearing a short blond curly wig and a demure suit, applying light makeup, speaking in a quiet, careful voice; a folded newspaper propped up against the mirror, with a laughing photo of Margaret Thatcher and the headline “VICTORY,” tells us the year is 1979. Then we see the movement of an escalator, with people emerging from a tube station, and as Kitten’s face comes into view Van Morrison’s “Madame George,” from eleven years before the historical moment of the film, creeps almost imperceptibly onto the soundtrack. It sounded like an invocation loosed from time when it first appeared, and it does now.
Breakfast on Pluto floats on a sea of music—a sea wide enough to make plain both the world in which Van Morrison has since the mid-1960s done his work, and how different and deep that work has been. A product of the ear as much as the eye, the film opens with “Sugar Baby Love,” a 1974 hit by the made-up group the Rubettes—a delirious producer’s fantasy of the Diamonds’ 1957 doo-wop parody “Little Darlin’,” which was so good it turned into the real thing, as this does. “Bop she-waddy, bop she-waddy,” goes the chorus behind the falsetto lead, which dives down on Kitten as she pushes a stroller on a London street while a construction worker hoots at her, as she invites him “and all the boys” back to her place as his face falls, as she begins to tell the baby in the pram the story of her life—and the movie ends the same way, with Kitten pushing the same stroller, the same baby, which by now we know is the child of her best friend, Charlie, and Charlie’s murdered boyfriend, Irwin, the song simultaneously homing in on Kitten like something out of The Birds and lifting her feet off the ground. It’s the most glorious, irresistible sound imaginable.
Yes, Cillian Murphy’s Kitten tells the baby, my mother left me on the doorstep of my father, the local priest, for whom she kept house. Yes, I grew up with a foster family, but when I put on my foster mother’s dresses and lipstick, and when I wrote stories in school about my father Father Liam and my mother Eily Bergin and where could I get a sex change, I got in trouble, and I ran away. To join the circus, of course! And then I went to London—
In the circus, or rather with the band Billy Hatchett and the Mohawks, there’s Gavin Friday’s madman lead singer with his outrageously camped-up version of Johnny Preston’s 1960 Indian epic “Running Bear” (“Loved little
White Dove,” the Big Bopper wrote before stepping onto the plane that would take him, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens to the Happy Hunting Ground), then Kitten onstage as a squaw to Hatchett’s chief for Sweet’s 1973 “Wig Wam Bam,” then Hatchett railing from the stage over “Thirteen dead in Derry” and the evil of British rule and Protestant barbarism in Northern Ireland. There’s one of Kitten’s favorite songs, Bobby Goldsboro’s 1968 “Honey,” playing on the radio, entering a scene like weather; there’s a generic version of Cole Porter’s “Why Am I So Gone (About That Gal?).” As Kitten arrives in London to search for her mother the film offers her Harry Nilsson’s 1971 “The Moonbeam Song”; sleeping in doorways, waiting in government offices, wandering the streets with her cardboard suitcase, she’s picked up by a man in a car, and it’s Bryan Ferry, with sallow, oily skin and a moustache like dirt, who plays Kitten Morris Albert’s sallow, oily 1975 “Feelings” on his cassette machine before shoving her head into his lap. She’s taken under the wing of a magician (“She came to London, the biggest city in the world,” she tells him almost before she tells him her name, “and it swallowed her up”); for his act he hypnotizes Kitten to Dusty Springfield’s shimmering 1969 “The Windmills of Your Mind.” “I think I see your mother over there,” the magician crows, sending Kitten hurtling across nightclub floors to embrace laughing men with the insensate cry of “Mummy!” and then again, “No, over there—” In England to abort the baby she’s carrying, Charlie tracks down Kitten and drags her away from the magician, appalled at his cruelty; as they dance in a nightclub, a soldier hits on Kitten. You’ll be Bobby, she tells him, as “Honey” plays again; the club is blown up by an IRA bomb and as an Irish survivor, a man disguised as a woman, Kitten is arrested and tortured to the sounds of Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 “For What It’s Worth.” Released, she stares into a store window full of TV sets all playing the theme to the 1955 Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, and the song swallows her as London does. One of the cops who beat her finds her turning tricks on the street, and takes her to the peep show emporium for honest work. A client demands she sing Patti Page’s 1953 “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—the one song, it will turn out, that everyone in the film knows, as Kitten and Charlie and eventually Father Liam struggle continually over whether it’s “the one with the waggedy tail” or, as the client first screams at Kitten, “‘Waggley!’” When Father Liam—played by Liam Neeson, who years before had recorded a version of Van Morrison’s spoken-word piece “Coney Island”—appears in her booth, to tell her who her mother is and where she lives, “The Windmills of Your Mind” rises up once more. But it’s all prelude.
“I want English,” she says as she makes up in her backstage mirror, using Margaret Thatcher’s picture in the paper as her model. “I want conservative. I want East Finchley”—Thatcher’s constituency. “I want powerful—do you think it works?” She looks hard at herself. “I think I look better than she does,” she says. She is about to step out of her picaresque adventures into tragedy, into a real life she has no idea how to make real.
When Van Morrison recorded “Madame George” in 1968, it opened with thirteen seconds of the lightest strum on an acoustic guitar, the quietest fanfare, the most modest and thus the most fatal foreshadowing, as the theme is stated twice: a sense that the story is over before it begins. In the way the film has taken the song into itself, it is over. “Madame George” tells the tale of a Belfast drag queen who with the promise of the forbidden, of drink and cigarettes, drugs and music, sex and fantasy, gathers young boys around herself to stave off a killing burden of loneliness and difference; the song has been placed in the film for those who already know it, for those who will bring the whole of it instantly to bear on who Kitten is and what she is about to do. Its rightness in this moment is so absolute the frisson of the song’s appearance creates a kind of swoon. It is so right you can imagine that, at bottom, it is the song that wrote the film, adapted by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe from McCabe’s novel, which, not having a soundtrack, did not include “Madame George”: that the film was made to reach the moment when “Madame George” could play the film rather than the other way around, the song sucking the film into itself, to reveal the pathos of its heroine’s quest as nothing else could.
As the first faces come up on the tube-stop escalator, you hear this first body of the song before Kitten’s face appears in turn. There is a dream-like synchronicity in the way that Kitten’s suit—soft black dots on a white-gray background, black pumps, a small black hat, and strong black vertical stripes on the skirt—matches the silver panels and black borders of the escalator, the panels moving as if of their own will as she, still on the steps, seems pushed by another’s hand. Everything moves slowly, inexorably, inevitably.
Like a broom sweeping, a single note from Richard Davis’s double bass, the note bending like a finger, beckoning, opens the door of the song—before, the song was poised on the front steps, not ready to enter, not ready to leave. “Down Cyprus Avenue,” Morrison sings—but that’s not what you hear, and that’s not what the scene was made to capture. All the gravity of the moment is in the first word, down, itself bent like Davis’s first note, into a dow-nnn, the tail of the syllable rising; not exactly a word at all, but an exclamation somewhere between a reverie and a curse, a sound that despite the instant it takes to sing or hear contains as much time as you might want to let it echo. The word isn’t stretched out but lifted, curled, suspended in the air, something the singer himself can throw out in front of himself and watch.
The song remains on the soundtrack for forty seconds, as Kitten reaches her mother’s street and begins to look for her address, the tempo not changing but doubled notes from Davis pressing a single five-line verse in which the listener barely glimpses the figure behind the curtain of the song. As Kitten begins to talk to a pleasant boy of about ten—her half-brother, named Patrick as she was—the music drops down and continues almost silently under the dialogue. The drummer Connie Kay has come in, playing a martial roll with brushes for six seconds, but you can’t hear him. Pretending to be an agent for British Telecom, conducting a survey, Kitten begins to ask the boy questions about telephones in his house. “Shouldn’t you be asking my mother?” he says.
She’s frightened; she’s not ready for this, but the boy brings her into his house, and after thirty seconds in the deep background of the film the music lifts sharply up again. From behind, in counterpoint to Kitten’s rise on the escalator, we see the back of Kitten’s mother’s head as she descends the stairs of her house to the foyer, and as you hear Morrison sing “That’s when you fall,” Kitten sees her mother and crumples to the floor. “That’s when you fall,” Morrison repeats, but from a distance, as his slightly distorted, echoed voice vanishes into the soundtrack equivalent of a dream dissolve, and as the screen goes black the music goes silent. The match of Morrison’s words to the action on the screen would be a cheesy literalism but for the way that, here, the feeling is not that the song is singing the movie, but that the movie is singing the song.
The whole story, the whole quest—Kitten’s quest, and Van Morrison’s—is in that first word, that single down. It’s not a studio effect. As Morrison sings certain words, as he finds them, as they find him—“In some ways,” he said in 2009, “I’m picking them up from under the surface”—they contain their own echoes, and they echo in other voices. There is Sinéad O’Connor in 1990, twenty-two years after Astral Weeks changed the landscape in which she grew up. Now at twenty-four, a year older than Morrison was when he made his album, she is herself crossing from Ireland to London to pronounce, in her soft, thoughtful, steely way, that “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses / It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.” In the silent places in Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s repeated incantation, “London, the biggest city in the world, and it swallowed her up,” combines with the sense of utter devastation and loss that is the engine of “Madame George” to call up T
homas De Quincey in 1803, walking “up and down Oxford-street” with the teenage prostitute Ann, herself then swallowed up by London. In the way that Kitten never reveals herself to her mother, only gazes at her, seated in her mother’s living room after her faint and talking about telephones, from two feet away maintaining the distance of her whole life, De Quincey’s Ann can hover in the dim shadows of the film, to remind you of how close Kitten comes to refusing her brother’s entreaty and walking away, back to her life on the streets of the city, sooner or later turning up dead, never to see her mother, as De Quincey never saw Ann again: “If she lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes in search of each other, at the very same moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London; perhaps even within a few feet of each other—a barrier no wider than a London street, often amounting in the end to a separation for eternity!”
As Morrison sings the first word of “Madame George,” all of that can be contained in his down, and all of that can be released. It is at the heart of Morrison’s presence as a singer that when he lights on certain sounds, certain small moments inside a song—hesitations, silences, shifts in pressure, sudden entrances, slamming doors—can then suggest whole territories, completed stories, indistinct ceremonies, far outside of anything that can be literally traced in the compositions that carry them. Those moments can travel, as the pacing of “Madame George” makes its Cyprus Avenue, a four-block stretch of Belfast, into a thoroughfare as endless as De Quincey’s Oxford Street. They can transfer themselves; they can be transferred; they can transfer situations they might inhabit, as “Madame George” briefly inhabits a film about a young Irish transvestite, into realms outside their own literal space—as with, in the long fade of Morrison’s down, Kitten’s rising on the escalator suggests someone rising from the dead, that moment itself rewriting the song, even if Neil Jordan could only afford a little more than a minute of it.