Word: belfasts
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...nine minutes of guttural rantings--the archetypal early Van Morrison song, embodying everything anybody'd ever called him, and all the while intensely creative. Astral Weeks moved away from all that, not so much in Van's writing, for the words still come from his troubled days in Belfast, as in its music--loose and light, reminiscent of cool jazz...
...like the music he's made since the album Astral Weeks. At one point during his performance of "Cypress Avenue," the strongest song on that album and the one closest to his work on Blowin' Your Mind, he said, "I don't wanna tell you about all of that Belfast pain and suffering." With that statement he summed up his music after Moondance: a more joyous, tighter, harder rock music, like his early music, but much more secure lyrically. There have been two solid albums since Moondance, His Band and the Street Choir and Tupelo Honey, and Van Morrison...
...dead man was Joseph McCann, 25, commander of the first battalion of the I.R.A.'s Marxist-leaning Official wing in Belfast. A semilegendary hero to the I.R.A. gunmen, he had eluded capture by the British for more than two years-a fact that spawned his nickname, "Joe the Fox." It was said that he had shot as many as 15 British soldiers. McCann's luck ran out when police plainclothesmen spotted him in a narrow Belfast thoroughfare called Joy Street. As he tried to run, he was shot and killed by soldiers...
Public Drama. The I.R.A. extracted a maximum of public drama from his funeral. Gunmen patrolled the Turf Lodge area of West Belfast where McCann's body lay in state in an apartment. The Irish News ran an entire page of messages of sympathy, many from interned I.R.A. fighters. An estimated 2,000 mourners-including black-bereted I.R.A. fighters and uniformed girls of the Fianna na Eireann, a sort of junior I.R.A.-marched in the funeral cortege, while another 3,000 watched from the sidewalks. Civil Rights Firebrand Bernadette Devlin, who had been sentenced in absentia the day before...
McCann was buried in an I.R.A. plot in Belfast's big Catholic cemetery, next to the graves of two teen-agers who were killed when a bomb they were making exploded last year. Around the grave was a huge pile of flowers, and all 21 I.R.A. companies stood silently at attention as a bugler sounded the Last Post. Cathal Goulding, the Dublin-based chief of staff of the I.R.A. Officials, delivered the funeral oration. Clad in a red sweater, his long hair blowing in the breeze, Goulding declaimed that McCann had been "shot like a dog by the agents...