Van Morrison is pop’s great mystic — the singer of Astral Weeks, of trances and healers and hymns to the silence. So it remains faintly startling that one of his best-loved songs is a cheerful inventory of a manual job: smoking Woodbines, eating Paris buns, listening to Muddy Waters, and feeling, as he puts it in the refrain, happy cleaning windows. Cleaning Windows, from the 1982 album Beautiful Vision, is a four-minute-and-forty-three-second autobiography of the years just before fame — Belfast, 1961 and 1962, when Morrison was a part-time window cleaner and full-time apprentice musician. It was released as a single, not promoted, and never charted. It became a standard anyway.
Belfast, 1961: The Round and the Saxophone
The song is quite literally a memoir in verse. In the early sixties the teenage Morrison worked a window-cleaning round in Belfast while learning the saxophone, taking lessons from his teacher and friend, the jazz musician George Cassidy, and playing at weekends with showbands — first, in the song’s account, with Clubsound, and soon afterwards leaving boyhood behind entirely when he joined the Monarchs and toured Scotland, Germany and England as one of the International Monarchs.
It is easy to forget, given the voice that made him famous, that Morrison’s first instrument of ambition was the saxophone, and that the window-cleaning years were his conservatory. The routine the song describes — up in the morning, round the houses with ladder and bucket, records and books in the evening, lessons with Cassidy, a dance hall at the weekend — was a self-designed apprenticeship conducted in parallel with a labourer’s job. The showbands were the Irish entertainment industry’s finishing school: gruelling, versatile, unglamorous, and the making of a generation of musicians. Morrison passed through it in about eighteen months and never looked back — except, twenty years later, in this song, with obvious gratitude.
What lifts the lyric from diary to self-portrait is the roll call of influences packed into the working day. The young window cleaner listens to Muddy Waters, to the country singer Jimmie Rodgers and to Lead Belly; he reads Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums, and dips into Christmas Humphreys’s book on Zen. It is, in effect, the syllabus of Van Morrison’s entire art, itemised on a ladder in east Belfast: Chicago blues and country, Delta blues, Beat literature and Eastern philosophy — the same four elements he would still be mixing forty years later. The mundane routine and the inner life are given equal weight, because for the song’s narrator they were the same life. As Steve Turner wrote, in Cleaning Windows “Van sketched the details of his life during 1961 and 1962, and captured the balance between his contentment at work and his aspirations to learn more about music. It conveyed the impression that his happiness with the mundane routine… was made possible by the promise that at the end of the day he could enter the world of books and records.”
There is a deeper poignancy in the timing of the writing. By 1981, when Morrison sat down to memorialise those years, he had been a professional musician for two decades and had grown famously weary of the business of it — the contracts, the touring, the interviews he refused to give. Cleaning Windows looks back across all of that to the last moment when music was still pure appetite, something he did at weekends and in his head while his hands were busy with a chamois and a bucket. The window cleaner of the song is not yet anybody. He has no idea that the band he is about to join will take him to Germany, to London, to New York, to Astral Weeks. That innocence is what the song is really about, and why its happiness has an ache in it that the singer, at thirty-six, could not have faked.
The details do the heavy lifting. Woodbine cigarettes and Paris buns are not poetic abstractions; they are the specific small change of working-class Belfast life, the kind of brand-name texture that novelists use to prove they were really there. Morrison scatters them through the song the way he scatters street names through Astral Weeks, building a world solid enough to stand in. And then there is the central, quietly comic dignity of the thing: this is a song that insists a man can be fulfilled by a job with a bucket. In a catalogue full of seekers straining after transcendence, the window cleaner has already found his — in daylight, up a ladder, whistling.
Sausalito, 1981: A Crack Band Looks Back
The released version was recorded on 27 July 1981 at the Record Plant Studios in Sausalito, California, and produced by Morrison himself. The band he assembled was one of the strongest of his career: Mark Knopfler, then at the height of Dire Straits’ fame, on guitar; Chris Michie on lead guitar; John Allair on organ; Rob Wasserman on bass; Gary Mallaber on drums; Michele Segan on percussion; and a horn section of Mark Isham on trumpet and Pee Wee Ellis — James Brown’s former bandleader — on tenor and baritone saxophones.
Beautiful Vision is mostly an album of spiritual abstraction, which makes this track the exception. As Erik Hage observed in The Words and Music of Van Morrison, the song “is stuffed with images and remembrances… and is therefore somewhat anomalous to the rest of the record, which took up more esoteric and spiritual matters.” Reviewing the album in Rolling Stone, John Milward called it the record’s musical highlight: “Hung on a metaphor as clear as glass, ‘Cleaning Windows’ applies one night’s notions to a lifetime… with a guitar-organ combination reminiscent of the Band, and a jumping sax solo to boot.” Record World judged that Morrison was “at his best, backed by a crack rhythm section.”
The Single That Wasn’t
Mercury released Cleaning Windows as a single in March 1982 — with It’s All in the Game as the UK B-side, Aryan Mist in Spain and Scandinavia on other pressings — but, remarkably, did not promote it as a 45. It did not chart anywhere. It was followed as a single by Scandinavia, the Beautiful Vision track it had backed in some territories, but Cleaning Windows was the song from the album that audiences carried away with them. The writer Howard A. DeWitt was convinced it would have, “because it generated a response similar to Domino in Van’s 1982 concerts” — Domino having reached No. 9 in America in 1970. Denied a chart run, the song did something slower and more durable: it became a fixture of Morrison’s stage show and of his compilations. A live version appeared on Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast in 1984 — the song about Belfast boyhood, performed in Belfast by the returning star — and it has rarely left his concerts since. It was performed in his 1990 video release Van Morrison: The Concert; Morrison chose it for The Best of Van Morrison, his first best-of, in 1990, and it was remastered for Still on Top – The Greatest Hits in 2007. A previously unreleased version surfaced on the 2008 reissue of the live double album A Night in San Francisco, and a performance from the Austin City Limits Festival in September 2006 was issued on a limited-edition live album.
Happy in His Work
Critics keep returning to the song because it sustains two readings at once. The Guardian‘s Paul MacInnis, recommending songs about manual labour, wrote that “the message of the song is simple — the window cleaner’s happy in his work — and the lyrical vignettes combined with delicate, upbeat R&B… convey that feeling wonderfully.” AllMusic’s Bill Janovitz hears something deeper underneath: the literal image of cleaning windows doubles “as a metaphor for Zen-like clarity, seeing the essence of life via the repetition of basic chores” — which would make the most concrete song on Beautiful Vision secretly continuous with all its mysticism after all.
The nicest endorsement came from inside the band. Mark Knopfler, whose guitar threads through the recording, later chose Cleaning Windows as one of his eight records on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs — a session man’s tribute to a session he plainly remembered with affection. The song has been covered, too, by its own saxophonist: Pee Wee Ellis recorded it on his 1994 album Sepia Tonality; Barrence Whitfield and Tom Russell cut it for Hillbilly Voodoo; and it even survived translation into the smooth-jazz world on the 2005 tribute collection Smooth Sax Tribute to Van Morrison.
Morrison has written grander songs, and stranger ones. But none compresses his whole story — the Belfast streets, the records and books, the discipline of ordinary work, and the young man on a ladder already hearing something else — into quite so small and sunny a space. “What’s my line?” the song asks near the end. “I’m happy cleaning windows.” For once, the mystic’s answer and the working man’s are exactly the same.