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Country and family are messy
Dispatch from Belfast: What Van Morrison tells us about in ‘The Healing Game’
Today, on the eve of the Van Morrison concert at the Europa Hotel in Belfast, I took a tour they call “The Mystic of the East,” the tour of his childhood haunts. I saw where he was born on Hyndford Street, his elementary school, Orangefield Academy and Cyprus Avenue, where I was to learn later from two other fans at the piano bar, corroborating my cabbie’s story, Van Morrison gave a street concert a fan would die for. (Zoom in on the plaque on this lead photo…)
In this video that I share, “The Healing Game,” Belfast’s most soulful warbler sings about the hold home has on you, whether you grant it permission to have that lock-hold on you or not. I invite you to click and sink into some mellow time with it and go home again.
Here I am again
back on the corner again
back where I belong
where I’ve always been
Everything’s the same
It don’t ever change
I’m back on the corner again
In the healing game
The voice of Belfast, the voice of the Muse
Morrison says he wrote “The Healing Game” as a homage to Belfast street singing, an oral tradition that has disappeared.
Three Irish people told me today he’s called “Old Grumpy,” and yet they absolutely adore him.
