Creativity Quote by Van Morrison

Skiffle wasn’t just a genre for Van Morrison; it was a loophole. In postwar Britain and Ireland, “developing musician” often meant you were talented, broke, and blocked by the gatekeeping machinery of formal training, expensive instruments, and the unspoken rule that real music happened somewhere else. Skiffle, with its DIY instrumentation and borrow-it-or-build-it ethos, offered a workaround: you could be a kid with a cheap guitar, a washboard, a borrowed chord book, and still join the conversation.

Morrison’s phrasing is tellingly practical. He doesn’t romanticize skiffle as a spiritual awakening; he calls it a “platform,” the kind of word you use for scaffolding, not a shrine. The subtext is apprenticeship: skiffle as rehearsal for seriousness. It’s where timing gets learned in front of other people, where confidence is built by surviving the small humiliations of being amateur in public, where you absorb American blues and folk as living material rather than museum pieces.

There’s also an implicit claim about cultural access. Skiffle’s great trick was turning imported Black American music into something local kids could touch, then mutate. It’s easy to sneer at that translation as crude, but Morrison frames it as necessary: a first rung. The intent, then, is quietly autobiographical and faintly political. He’s crediting the rough, communal on-ramp that helped produce not just him, but an entire generation of British and Irish musicians who learned by doing, not by being anointed.