DAYS LIKE THIS
Sometimes fate can arrive as casually as an afternoon tea and that is exactly what happened this past Saturday when myself and Rickshaw went to meet with our old friend Columba (son of director Michael Powell) at the Jolly Nice Cafe up at Frampton Mansell. Driving to our destination, Rickshaw and I were met with a Hebridean-like storm that felt like it could have been a deleted scene from Powell and Pressburger's 'I Know Where I'm Going' (1944), that cinematic fantasia of remote Scottishness. It should have been dispiriting but somehow it felt more invigorating, an elemental shower to stir us both from recent malaise.
Taking refuge in the farm shop cafe/yurt with the rain thundering down like a million nails being hammered against the white canopy roof, there was something both cosy and dramatic about Rickshaw's choice of location. I half expected a drenched Roger Livesey and Wendy Hiller to enter the place, galoshes filled to the brim with rain water while splashing their soggy footprints on the wooden floor and apologising profusely in an old fashioned British kind of way. It was inevitable I had Powell and Pressburger films on the brain, especially as the last time I had spoken with Columba was just after I'd attended a screening of 'A Matter Of Life And Death' held in Avening Village Hall as part of a nationwide celebration of the duo's cinematic legacy organised by the BFI which I wrote about in my piece 'Honouring The Past' (21st November, 2023).
After the three of us had spent a few hours chatting about film, preferred Mediterranean holiday destinations and Columba's new paintings, the artist randomly asked Rickshaw how to access an e-ticket on his phone as he was intending to see Van Morrison perform the following night at Westonbirt Arboretum in Tetbury. Letting slip he had a VIP ticket spare, I could see the cogs in Rickshaw's mind turning and a plan being hatched and so there it was, 24 hours later, we found ourselves (including my mother) on a perfectly contrasted summer's evening approaching the foresty stage like a county fair where the sound of support act 'Hothouse Flowers' echoed all around the tree-lined outdoor venue, greeting us like some unseen musical Ents.
Having seen Van Morrison a few times before in my life, I must admit I had minimal expectations about what to expect from a man who was now in his late 70s and who is renowned for being notoriously grumpy. In no way questioning his recorded legacy, exceptional musicianship and lyrical poetry, it was simply more that his legend is so secure in my mind I didn't feel any need to detract from it based on what I assumed would be the law of Rock 'n' Roll's diminishing returns.
It was incredible then to realise within a few seconds into the bluesy opening number that Morrison's voice sounded as powerful as ever and his band as synchronised to his idiosyncratic performance quirks as to appear a perfectly seamless extension of his unique musical mind.
Ah, Mr. Thomas, let us ramble through the midnight fair
Let us throw old bottles at the ferris wheel
Let us paint library on the library, let us raid the moonlight
Let us steal away whatever we are supposed to steal
But it was when he sang, by way of mumbling introduction an obscure Robin Williamson song 'For Mr. Stewart' that the fate I spoke about earlier suddenly seemed strikingly evident to me. Hearing the song instantly brought back memories of my dad, who was both a huge Van Morrison fan but an even bigger Robin Williamson devotee. The unexpected union of these two musical heroes from the Great British isles joined by way of a song about Dylan Thomas caught me unawares and a lump suddenly developed in my throat. Looking across to my mother's bobbing mop of curly hair where she was standing with others closer to the stage, I wondered how she felt about such serendipity imagining she was equally amazed. I should state for the record that as of just a few minutes of writing this, I discovered that Morrison had recorded the song in the studio featured on an album of outtakes recorded between 1969 to 1988 called 'The Philosopher's Stone' which I had never properly listened to, explaining why his Williamson cover hadn't struck a chord before.
A mellow sunny evening outdoors with a musical legend singing his heart and soul out and I was reminded of what a visceral force of nature Van Morrison is, like a Celtic Orpheus awakening a deadened spirit such as mine back to life. Hearing 'Enlightenment', 'Day Like This', 'Into The Mystic' and 'Wild Night' again was like old friends calling me home, I was beginning to look at the Bard of Belfast as a member of my very own family.
Perhaps, then, it explains why a few days after losing my father back in 2022 I found the only music that offered some form of mystical comfort was Van. At that time 'A Sense Of Wonder' in particular gave me what felt like a musical hug or what might have been an invisible cloak of spiritual solidarity wrapped around my shoulders.
It's a writer's prerogative to weave these strands of fate together and once again I find myself spinning a few more like an ancient Norn.
With Michael Powell still fresh in my mind, having re-united with his son through rain, sunshine and Van Morrison, I couldn't help but think of Columba's connection to film director Martin Scorsese, who brought his late father Michael out of obscurity in Avening in the late 1970s to enjoy something of an Indian Summer revival, working in America as senior director-in-residence for Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios and acting as a creative consultant to Scorsese himself on films such as 'Raging Bull' and 'After Hours'. Scorsese also collaborated with Van Morrison who guested on his concert film of The Band's final performance 'The Last Waltz' (1978) and provided the song 'Wonderful Remark' for the director's 1983 'The King Of Comedy' and so somehow, standing in the fields of Westonbirt in the fading dusk of midsummer, the connectedness of so many things around me became somehow miraculous.
And as Morrison and his band played an ebbing transcendent rendition of 'Green Rocky Road', I felt as if I was experiencing a lazy, temporary enlightenment and found myself going once more back to the well of memory where I recalled myself drifting down the river in a canoe with my eldest brother somewhere in the Forest of Dean, listening to 'Avalon Sunset' on a ghetto blaster and later, playing Van over tea and biscuits with friends such as Gorodish and Rickshaw's older brother listening to 'Enlightenment' and 'A Night In San Francisco' as we small talked and dreamed big in our small Cotswold town on similar summer nights.
Getting older now, I realise more and more why music is so important for our personal timeline of memories. They help us locate moments in life that might otherwise be less easily remembered without them.
Certainly, watching Van last night with Rickshaw, Columba and my dear mother I felt indebted to this Belfast miracle who performed the jewels of his back catalogue; these musical memories we all shared together as if it was the first time he'd sung them.
Didn't I come to bring you a sense of wonder
Didn't I come to lift your fiery vision bright
Didn't I come to bring you a sense of wonder in the flame