"It was really strange for me when I started to play concerts in America where the audiences were all sitting down"
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A performer raised on dance floors suddenly faces a carpet of chairs and folded arms. For Van Morrison, whose apprenticeship ran through Belfast showbands, R&B club gigs, and the punchy garage-soul of Them, live music was a bodily transaction: sweat, sway, shouts, the feedback loop of movement and sound. Finding American audiences seated reframed the job. Instead of driving a room to its feet, he was being asked to deliver to a hushed hall.
That shift says a lot about the changing status of popular music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the UK and Ireland, dance halls and pubs blurred the line between stage and floor. In the United States, rock and folk were moving into theaters, college auditoriums, and concert halls built for classical listening. Promoters sold tickets with assigned seats; ushers enforced decorum; the music press began to treat certain performers like serious artists rather than dance-band leaders. The posture of the crowd mirrored this new reverence. Sitting turns rhythm into contemplation, the beat into an object of analysis rather than a cue for the body.
Morrisons art straddles those modes. He can be a call-and-response shouter steeped in blues and gospel, but he also chases trance, circular phrasing, and interiority, as on Astral Weeks. A seated audience can muffle the communal electricity that fuels improvisation, yet it can also intensify the focus he often demanded onstage. The strangeness he names is not just cultural dislocation; it is the performer sensing how architecture and etiquette rewrite the music. Chairs change time. They reset the power dynamic, placing the singer on a pedestal and the listeners in rows, and the songs inevitably bend to that arrangement.
He adapted, channeling stillness into long, rapt passages and saving the swing for nights when the floor would rise. The remark becomes a small history of how pop became concert music and how an artist negotiates that new frame without losing the pulse that made him.
That shift says a lot about the changing status of popular music in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the UK and Ireland, dance halls and pubs blurred the line between stage and floor. In the United States, rock and folk were moving into theaters, college auditoriums, and concert halls built for classical listening. Promoters sold tickets with assigned seats; ushers enforced decorum; the music press began to treat certain performers like serious artists rather than dance-band leaders. The posture of the crowd mirrored this new reverence. Sitting turns rhythm into contemplation, the beat into an object of analysis rather than a cue for the body.
Morrisons art straddles those modes. He can be a call-and-response shouter steeped in blues and gospel, but he also chases trance, circular phrasing, and interiority, as on Astral Weeks. A seated audience can muffle the communal electricity that fuels improvisation, yet it can also intensify the focus he often demanded onstage. The strangeness he names is not just cultural dislocation; it is the performer sensing how architecture and etiquette rewrite the music. Chairs change time. They reset the power dynamic, placing the singer on a pedestal and the listeners in rows, and the songs inevitably bend to that arrangement.
He adapted, channeling stillness into long, rapt passages and saving the swing for nights when the floor would rise. The remark becomes a small history of how pop became concert music and how an artist negotiates that new frame without losing the pulse that made him.
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| Topic | Music |
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