Van Morrison

“I learnt from Armstrong on the early recordings that you never sang a song the same way twice.”

“I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.”

“When I started studying tenor saxophone as a kid in Belfast, I did so with a guy named George Cassidy, who was also a big inspiration.”

“I went back to Belfast and started a club, the Maritime. No one had thought about doing a blues club, so I was the first.”

“The first piece of music that captured my imagination was probably Ray Charles Live At Newport.”

“I deliberately try not to cater for the commercial market, so I can't see myself in competition, you know, with second or third generation rock stars.”

“My records do not require a lot of thought of 'What is this?' and 'What is that?' That would be too contrived for me.”

“You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.”

“I just need somewhere to dump all my negativity.”

“My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.”

“A famous person to themselves, they don't get up in the morning and think, I'm famous. I'm not famous to me. Famous is a perception.”

“Skiffle was a name that was attached to what was, in essence, American folk music with a beat.”

“My ambition when I started out was to play two or three gigs a week. And that's what I'm doing.”

“You learn to read the audiences after a while, and there are all different kinds of gigs.”

“For a long time, I couldn't actually deal with playing concerts; it was a totally alien concept to me, 'cause I was used to playing in clubs and dance halls.”

“There is no black-and-white situation. It's all part of life. Highs, lows, middles.”

“I've never felt like I was born with a silver spoon at all, although I've felt like howling at the moon a lot of times!”

“Large audiences did not suit my low-key approach.”

“These days politics, religion, media seem to get all mixed up. Television became the new religion a long time back and the media has taken over.”

“I don't think nostalgia has to be negative.”