What Do Van Morrison, the Godfather of Punk and Seamus Heaney Have in Common?

[additional-authors]

Lisa Ellen Niver

March 3, 2014

” title=”Northern Ireland Coast by Deetrak, on Flickr”><img decoding="async" align="left" alt="Northern Ireland Coast" height="213" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7091/7273199492_195ef04d03_n.jpg <view-source:http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7091/7273199492_195ef04d03_n.jpg>” width=”320″ /></a>                 Northern Ireland may be the poster child for Mr. Gladwell's theory. About the size of Connecticut, with less than half the population (about 2 million people), it has a wildly disproportionate number of fearless creatives and original thinkers. Yes, it is as far from “primitive affluence” as can be found. The land has few natural resources. Everything from coal to timber to iron has to be imported. For much of the year, the weather is cold and dank. And, for years, the region endured ethno-nationalist and sectarian strife. One rumor has it that when archeologists broke into King Tut's tomb they found a newspaper with the headline, “Irish Problems Still Unsolved.” The exceedingly carbonated era that began in 1969, known as The Troubles, ended with the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998, an accord that brought the Peace Dividend, a surge in cathexis with the land, and the beginnings of a surprising renaissance.  Yet, throughout its fractious history Northern Ireland has continued to unleash unreasonable creativity. The Kelvin scale was invented by a Belfastian; the ejection seat, portable defibrillator, modern tractor, the safety lamp for miners and chocolate milk by engineers from County Down. It could be argued distilled whiskey was concocted here, as the flush toilet. On the entrepreneurial side, Northern Ireland, despite its challenges, became the largest linen producer in the world. And had the largest ropeworks. It was the largest manufacturer of fizzy drinks; largest shirt maker; had the largest flax machine works; largest tobacco factory; largest handkerchief factory in the world. For a time, a century ago, it was the world's leading industrial city, anchored by the biggest shipyard in the world, and there it created the biggest man-made moving object in history: the ocean liner Titanic.<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nr8hh7V9dkM <view-source:http://www.youtube.com/embed/nr8hh7V9dkM>” width=”560″>

And then the arts. This matrix of Anglo-Catholic alchemy spawned such as John Butler Yeats, C.S. Lewis, Jack Higgins (who was raised here), Oscar Wilde (who schooled in County Fermanagh), Sir Kenneth Branagh, Patrick Magee, Sam Neill, Liam Neeson, and the most famous film star of the land, The DeLorean. There is not so much sun in this northern clip of the world, so folks are often inside sipping the hot cup of creativity, fanning the flames of magic turf. When I read, then, that one of my teenage heroes, Van Morrison, was being awarded “The Freeman of Belfast” honor (which allows him to drive his herd of sheep through the center of town), I knew I had to go and jump into this place. So well I remember standing on the sidelines at a high-school mixer, too shy to cross the room and make the ask. But when Gloria, performed by Them (named for the 1954 horror movie about giant radioactive ants) with the deep burr of Van Morrison's voice slashing through paper walls, came on the record player, I found a beat and a gift of confidence I never knew I had, and strutted across the floor and asked the most beautiful girl to dance. And she said, “yes.” I won't commit the crime of cliché and say his songs were the soundtrack of my life, but there were milestones marked in the Druidic forest trails of his music. “Moondance,” for instance, enabled my own passage to freemanhood, and I'm sure I am not alone in that refrain.” title=”Van Morrison in Belfast by Deetrak, on Flickr”><img decoding="async" align="left" alt="Van Morrison in Belfast" height="213" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7404/12814647835_d3c9f6f2c8_n.jpg <view-source:http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7404/12814647835_d3c9f6f2c8_n.jpg>” width=”320″ /></a>                 But at 68, after 50 years as a fiercely prolific artist, he still summons the nerve to sing about the world as if it remains to be made, or as if it could be unmade, something he's witnessed in his hometown. As so many in Northern Ireland, he rattles the door of convention in its frame. And as he growls his lines, making himself into a sea monster, his daughter Shana swoops over him and digs into the songs, adding fervor in a glittering dress. Just before Into the Mystic, The Belfast Cowboy sits down and jests: “This is the part where I hide behind the piano.” A German journalist next to me, who has been to a score of Van's concerts, turns to me shocked and says “that's the most he's ever said at a concert.” Then the piano takes off, like a boat untied, into waves of melody. There is the feeling that Van is looking back at his dock from a future already passed. This is a “hand of history” moment in Belfast. We're immersed in something called “yarragh,” — fleeting elusive moments of transcendence, when the sense of an unrepeatable event is present. Like the city itself, this is an irresolvable adventure, someplace between the breaks and holes in the music. He ends the municipal tribute with a muscle and fiber rendition of “Gloria,” and I am transported back, as no doubt many in the audience, to teendom, to that moment when we loosed ourselves from words and floated on the bowers of his music. Van is now a Freeman of Belfast, which is doubly significant, as just a few years ago men were not free to walk this city, and now they are. — The day after the concert I head out to meet another cyclone-in-residence, Terri Hooley, the “godfather of punk,” at the latest awakening of his record shop, Good Vibrations, with its 1955 Elvis effigy out-front. He is still, after all these years, hawking vinyl, posters, and the trending whiffs of the '70s. He insists we head over to the pub for a pint of Guinness with a brandy chaser, his preferred poison for the last half century. He lost an eye with a stray arrow as a boy, and has a reputation for plucking out his glass eye and dropping it into a drink, so I keep my pint out of reach. After a sip or few he shares, “I honestly believe punk bands saved countless lives, keeping impressionable young people away from the paramilitaries and giving us all something exciting to focus on.”<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Y2TNSorNNcg <view-source:http://www.youtube.com/embed/Y2TNSorNNcg>” width=”560″>

Terri Hooley first opened his record shop on Great Victoria Street in 1976, at the time the most bombed piece of real estate in the world. It quickly became a safe haven, a neutral harbor, at a time when things were very thin on the ground. Teens and lost tribes from all sections and classes, from both sides of the divide, joined by a love of music, hung out in peace, preferring tunes to stones, music and culture more than the dead hand of sectarianism. It was a firefly of light in the blackness of Belfast at the time. Though a Hank Willliams fan in a polo neck, when he heard Punk it screeched his being. “To be a punk was to be different from the past.”

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