Can You Feel the Silence? Van Morrison: a new biography by Clinton Heylin

The leading player in the Awkward Squad

Some years ago, Van Morrison wandered into a press launch as the party was breaking up. The receptionist took one look at the stout, truculent figure in battered tweed jacket and flat cap, and called out, "Anyone order a minicab?" Never a rock Adonis, Morrison would be the last Sixties survivor who could be accused of sliding through life on his good looks. Or on his sweet, warm personality.

George Ivan Morrison, born in Belfast in 1945, is one of the most perplexing and contradictory individuals ever to participate in the music business. The unique quality of his work, summarised in the album title Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, is his ability to communicate what feels like enlightening spiritual truth through the mere sound of his voice, using fragmentary lyrics or none. As an improvising vocalist he has few equals; with the passing of John Lee Hooker, his only real peers are Diamanda Galas and Winston "Burning Spear" Rodney.

Through his art, Morrison has communicated profoundly with millions. However, according to most of Clinton Heylin's interviewees (not including his privacy-obsessed subject), the singer experiences intense difficulty communicating with individuals. Can You Feel the Silence? is spattered with ghoulishly funny instances of its subject's misanthropy.

Very few artists invited to dinner at the home of their record-company boss would end up throwing an ashtray at their host. Or demand that a musician show up at the artist's home to rehearse at 3pm on Sunday, and then slam a door in the muso's face when he presents himself at the appointed time. Or tour with the distinguished Irish folk group the Chieftains and tell them, moments before taking the stage, that they'd be nothing without him.

Morrison began his career as lead singer with Them, Belfast's own contribution to the early-Sixties R&B era. Despite scoring a Top 10 hit with their second single (albeit burying Morrison's first enduring classic, "Gloria", on its B-side), and another with "Here Comes the Night", Them's career was messy, with a constant turnover of personnel.

Morrison relocated to the US, signing with a producer reportedly so mobbed-up that when Warner Bros attempted to buy out his contract, they did so with a briefcase of used notes. The Warner years, commencing with the epochal Astral Weeks and Moondance albums, established him as one of the Seventies' front-rank artists, with an utterly personal blend of folk, blues, soul and jazz. Since then he has pursued his various muses, with varying degrees of success, through a variety of idioms. A great artist: yes. A well-rounded and fully-developed individual: no.

Heylin is a thorough biographer, if not a sparkling stylist. Yet despite his clunky prose, a picture emerges of a man to whom the world is either an audience, or it is nothing. There is a select bunch of musicians – Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Lou Reed among them – whom we might call the Awkward Squad. They set their faces against the demands of the marketplace, the media and (sometimes) their own audiences, not to mention fellow players. Van Morrison takes pride of place: he's indubitably the most awkward of them all.