In 1974 Time magazine placed Van Morrison fifth in a curious little league table of ‘Greatest Living Songwriters’ behind Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen. This in itself has little value and probably less meaning but serves to illustrate a point; one could in all probability fill this room with books and critical articles which have been written about Bob Dylan, and while the scholars have not spent so much energy upon Lennon and McCartney, popular approval of their work is perhaps greater than that for Dylan – we all ‘know the story’ of The Beatles. Leonard Cohen, the most ‘cultish’ among Time magazine's Gang of Four is perhaps closest to Morrison in terms of reputation, but is known also as a literary figure with some record albums and volumes of poetry issued under the same title. Some might argue that this is just a glorification of a lyric sheet; this observation may be made flippantly but does actually lead to a problematical but fascinating relation between what is written and what is sung – to which we shall turn later. My point is that in comparison to this quartet and on these terms, Van Morrison is almost invisible. There have been only two published studies of Morrison, both long out of print. The first was a piece of well-intentioned but now rather dated hagiography, Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke (1975). However, this book has the great advantage of being written with the co-operation of its subject. The second was produced by Johnny Rogan, a professional biographer of rock musicians.

In 1993 several of the British national newspapers published obituaries of a Liverpool schoolteacher, Alan Durband. He had been a key figure in the establishment of the Everyman Theatre in the city and he was the former head of English teaching at the Liverpool Institute, the school which is shortly to be reopened as the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Among Durband's students in the 1950s were Paul McCartney and George Harrison. ‘His love of the English language was infectious’, wrote one of Durband's obituarists and it is tempting to imagine a link between this enthusiasm and the lyricist who produced ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘For No One’.

In his comprehensive celebration of women singers in the twentieth century, Wilfrid Mellers proposed a three-stage socio-musical evolution from the jazz, blues and gospel songs sung by black women, through the black-inspired white singers who followed them, to a new synthesis of singing poet-composers (Mellers 1986). Within this third category, very much the main point of the book, Mellers deals in considerable detail with a range of singer/song writers, from Joni Mitchell and Dory Previn to Rickie Lee Jones and Laurie Anderson. In this article I should like to take this concept of the woman singer/song writer as a point of departure from which to look at two very different kinds of singer: different, that is, both from each other and from any of the singers dealt with in the Mellers book. It has always seemed to me to be characteristic of much of Wilfrid Mellers' writing (and certainly of Angels of the Night) that he never lets his musicological agenda get in the way of his fundamental enjoyment of the music as a fan trying to make sense of his own taste. The reader can accept or reject his thoughts about the significance of it all, and not get so blinded by musicology that you cannot face listening to the songs: that, after all, is in the end what we are supposed to do. In what follows, I, too, write as a fan, but since performers do not often get the chance to bite back at musicologists, I should also like to take the opportunity to question from a singer's point of view a certain kind of performance analysis used by many musicologists. The subject is fraught with ideological booby-traps, so I should confess right away that I am a middle-class, middle-aged English married father.