Did Van Morrison pioneer the musical equivalent of method acting when making ‘Astral Weeks’?
For someone so acutely aware of love and all its guises, Van Morrison was a notoriously miserable bastard.
Rare is he ever seen in industry photos, with his head back, letting out a bellow of laughter or basking in the unbridled glamour that comes with being a music icon in the 1970s. In fact, he had the sort of permanent frown of someone with a stone stuck inside their shoe, and so it was odd to imagine him as one of the greatest love song writers in music history.
Because he was. Cillian Murphy may have described Astral Weeks as the distillation of Ireland into a record, but to the rest of the world, it was the perfect romance album. A collection of songs that captured the true human essence of falling in love and laying that on top of carefully constructed folk-tinged melodies that gave the world a rose-tinted vignette.
So for Morrison to attain that sentiment, you would imagine he would have had to eke out any sense of optimism that hopefully existed somewhere deep beneath the surface. But in contrast to the finished product of the album, Morrison went the other way and sank further into his own mind in order to truly tap into his loving ways.
Jay Berliner, who played guitar on the record, remembered the Irishman being particularly aloof during the recording: “This little guy comes in and goes straight into the vocal booth. He doesn’t have any contact with anyone. We could hardly see him. He must have been smoking something, because all you could see was white smoke in there! He sang and played in the booth, we followed, and these things just happened.”
Morrison went full method actor on his session musicians, who understood that his coldness was all part of the genius. By the end of the day, they had four of the album’s very best tracks and the swift realisation that they had a masterpiece on their hands.
Berliner continued, “We cut ‘Cyprus Avenue’, ‘Madame George’, ‘Beside You’ and ‘Astral Weeks’in four hours. It was totally off the cuff. We couldn’t make eye contact, but we were hearing each other through headphones and playing off of each other. Van said nothing. Lew did all the communicating, and he seemed to be very happy.”
He added, “Tunes like ‘Madame George’ went on a long time, which was a chance to really open up. It was a very free session. On ‘Beside You’, I was thinking of Rodrigo’s ‘Guitar Concerto’, it had a similar kind of feel.”
While we may have wished for more from him, Morrison didn’t need to waste too much of his energy portraying the part of a charming lover. Because his songs did all the talking for him. He may have rarely been seen outwardly sporting a smile, but on the inside was a writer who had the ability to dig deeper than anyone else and uncover the true transcendental meanings of life’s experience through the lens of love.
