Cutting his teeth on the stage
How a teenage Van Morrison made his way on the Irish showband circuit
The modern Van Morrison might defiantly follow his own muse – with unpredictable setlists to prove it – but that wasn’t always the case.
As a teenager, he was a member of an Irish ‘showband’. This was the phenomenon that saw teenagers in the mid-50s, turned on to the emerging pop scene, usurp big bands by forming their own groups of six or seven members. The kids were taking matters into their own hands!
“Basically,” Van says, “if you were a professional musician then you could either be in a group or a showband.”
Despite the incendiary nature of this musical uprising, however, the musicians played by the rules: “You had to sort of play what the public wanted to hear. So if you’re in a rock’n’roll band and then rock’n’roll went out of fashion, then people usually joined a showband where they have to do music for dances.”
A showband’s repertoire, then, was necessarily diverse: “It was various kinds of music – rock’n’roll, country and western, pop, ballads, some jazz, some trad jazz, you know?”
Van’s journey took him from skiffe to rock’n’roll, followed by the showband scene. “And then, he notes, “it became an R&B band.” That R&B band, of course, ultimately led to Them, the ragged upstarts with whom he made his name. Without the insurgent showband movement to resist the status quo, though, he might never have got there.