Hyndford Street is a brick-built working-class row looking like hundreds of others. Yet it is to this terrain that the almost unbearable nostalgia of Van Morrison's music always returns. The outside world now mainly sees Protestant Belfast in terms of Ian Paisley Snr, a man who believes that bridges are built primarily to let the Devil in. But the bridges of Morrison's music have connected Hyndford Street outwards to a strange semi-mystical realm of angels, children and (ultimately) the Calvinist Nirvana of clear water and silence - Hymns to the Silence was his last double album:

LRB 23 March 1995 | PDF Download