When That Rough God Goes Riding (11 page)

“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 Thomas 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.

The black
-and-white photo that appears on the face of
The Healing Game
—and on the disc itself, and on the back of the CD box, insisting that you look at it again and again, that you think about it—shows a short, very stocky middle-aged white man on the street, and a taller black man behind him. Both are well-dressed, in dark clothes, with dark hats. The short man, Van Morrison, is wearing blackout glasses and an expensive white shirt buttoned to the neck; the taller man, the flugelhorn player Haji Akbar, who wears a white shirt and a striped tie, gazes over Morrison’s left shoulder, as if on the lookout for trouble. It is, you can imagine without trying, a mob boss and his number one on their way to settle a score. The expression on Morrison’s face, all stone, is appallingly determined and cold.

If this is the mood you carry with you as the music starts, straight away the music tells you you’re right: the first lines
of “When That Rough God Goes Riding,” the first song, describe “mud-splattered victims ... all along the ancient highway,” and you catch the echoes of a vendetta as old as the highway, some internecine tribal conflict that will never be settled. If as the Sex Pistols rammed it home in 1976 in “Anarchy in the UK” Morrison’s verses call forth the conflict in Northern Ireland between the UDA and the IRA—and London’s war against Catholic Belfast, the war that began with Cromwell and continued, as Morrison sang in 1997, under Tony Blair—the war John Lennon sang about under Edward Heath, the war Gang of Four sang about under James Callaghan—the chorus is mythic, outside of any historical time.

As soon as the scene is set everything changes, even if the story being told holds to its violence. With the first verse done, Morrison, his voice thick and heavy, glides like an athlete into the chorus, and a tremendous feeling of warmth, of being in the right place at the right time, takes hold. It carries the listener into a musical home so perfect and complete he or she might have forgotten that music could call up such a place, and then populate it with people, acts, wishes, fears. The deep burr of Morrison’s voice buries the words, which cease to matter; you might not hear them until the tenth time you play the album, or long after that. “It’s when that rough god goes riding,” he sings, drawing the words both from Yeats and down in his chest, and you might never know it’s the angel of death that has you in its embrace. “I am this serpent filled with venom,” Morrison sings later in “Waiting Game”—but here his voice, like Vito Corleone’s
voice as Robert De Niro plays him, is so filled with quiet, earned authority that you trust it, you ask it to keep speaking to you, to offer you its comfort, even as the man behind it pushes a pillow into your face. The very slowness of the introduction to the song—at first, only piano, the lightest percussion, and Morrison’s slurred harmonica, then the way he waits behind syllables even as he voices them—validates everything to follow: validates it musically, emotionally, morally. These first passages create a setting that allows the singer to contemplate the world around himself, and, perhaps for the first time in Morrison’s music, to judge it. “I am the god of love and the god of hate,” he sings—that is validated. As Morrison all but swallows the words, then lets them shudder in his mouth, it doesn’t feel like a grand claim; it feels like what it means to be in the world.

Nearly all of the songs on
The Healing Game
stay on this plane. The melodies build on themselves until they communicate like rhythms; the rhythms, slow and weighted, create a feeling of a definite pace being kept, a pace of readiness. As with Gene Austin’s unsettled, visionary 1928 “The Lonesome Road”—filled with specters from the oldest Appalachian ballads, and a backwoods, farmer’s kin to “Old Man River,” which appeared in the original theatrical production of
Show Boat
the year before
⁶
—it’s the pace of someone who’s seen almost everything, but who knows there might be someone
waiting around the next turn. The volume is never raised. There’s no shouting. There’s a long walk ahead.

The tunes open up like stories you know in your heart but haven’t thought of for years. This is soul music, with the passion of Frankie Laine’s “That’s My Desire” in 1947, the sadness rolling over a rock ’n’ roll beat in Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in 1952, the sympathy of Bobby Bland’s “I’ll Take Care of You” in 1959, the certainty of Irma Thomas’s “Ruler of My Heart” in 1963, the sweep of Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way” in 1968, the refusal to walk a step faster or a step slower of Sinéad O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U” in 1990—but without glamour, or even a hint of performance, of gestures extended or notes held for effect. The street this music moves on never disappears.

With “Waiting Game” and the title song, which comes last,
The Healing Game
kept company with Neil Jordan’s 1992 film
The Crying Game
, that whole drama of Irish resistance, sexual uncertainty, murderous fate. It was Morrison’s best work in more than twenty years. Go back to 1979, for
Into the Music
, a buoyant, serious, playful, blazingly ambitious testament—against
The Healing Game
it sounds thin, poppy, ephemeral, though it isn’t remotely so when it’s allowed to claim its own air. Morrison’s records of the previous seventeen years fade into irrelevance against what he has to offer here. They don’t even make sense.