Van Morrison has never had a number one single in Britain or Ireland. The closest he ever came was in the spring of 1965, when he was nineteen years old and fronting a Belfast rhythm and blues band called Them. Here Comes the Night climbed to No. 2 in the UK and No. 2 in Ireland, sold sixteen thousand copies on its first day of release, and remains, six decades later, the highest-charting single of Morrison’s entire career in his home markets. Yet the strangest thing about the record is that Them very nearly did not get to release it as their own hit at all. Their record company first gave the song to a teenage Scottish singer named Lulu, and the band had to stand by and watch another artist take the first shot at their breakthrough.
A New York Songwriter Comes to Belfast’s Band
The song was written by Bert Berns, a New York songwriter and producer who had already co-written Twist and Shout and would soon write Piece of My Heart. Berns had an instinct for raw R&B voices, and in Them — a fierce, unsmiling band formed in Belfast in 1964 around Morrison’s voice and harmonica — he heard exactly the kind of group he liked. Berns travelled to London to produce them for Decca Records. The band’s second single, a growling version of the blues standard Baby, Please Don’t Go backed with Morrison’s own Gloria, was the first fruit of the partnership. Here Comes the Night would be the second track Berns produced with them, and the first time they recorded one of his own compositions.
Berns arrived at the session with little more than a riff. Guitarist Billy Harrison later remembered the scene at Decca’s studios in West Hampstead: “I remember sitting in Decca when Bert said he had this song, and he came out with ‘Here Comes the Night’. He had a riff and that’s all he had, and we sat and we worked on it, and we came up with what you hear. We worked at it sitting in the studio — but no engineers or anything.” The band rehearsed the song for four days before cutting it in October 1964, in the same sessions that produced Baby, Please Don’t Go and All for Myself.
The recording had some distinguished help. Session guitarist Jimmy Page — then a jobbing London musician, years before Led Zeppelin — played guitar on the arrangement. Andy White, the drummer who had famously deputised for Ringo Starr on the Beatles’ Love Me Do, sang backing vocals alongside Tommy Scott, and Phil Coulter, later one of Ireland’s most successful songwriters, played keyboards behind drummer Ronnie Millings. Coulter recognised what they had immediately: “I knew I’d heard a smash. It was the first time I’d ever heard a hit record in its emerging state.”
It is worth pausing on how unlikely a vehicle Them were for a smash. The band had formed in 1964 around Belfast’s Maritime Hotel, a rough blues club residency that became the stuff of local legend, and they cultivated an image — sullen, long-haired, dressed down — that made the Rolling Stones look house-trained. Morrison, the son of a shipyard electrician whose record collection of jazz, blues and country had been his real education, was a rhythm and blues fundamentalist at nineteen. Berns, the Brill Building professional, was in theory everything such a band should resist. In practice the friction was the point: Berns supplied the pop architecture, Them supplied the menace, and Here Comes the Night is where the two first fully met. The riff Berns hummed in the studio became a churning, circular guitar figure, and over it Morrison delivers the lyric with a coiled intensity that no other British singer of the beat boom could match — less a performance than a surveillance report set to music.
The Lulu Affair
Them intended Here Comes the Night to follow Baby, Please Don’t Go up the charts. Decca, however, had other plans. Without warning, the label rush-released a recording of the same song by Lulu — then a fifteen-year-old Glaswegian with a huge voice — in November 1964. According to Coulter, the members of Them were bitterly disappointed by the decision, which came from Decca and the band’s manager Phil Solomon, but they kept their anger private: “They bitched to me a lot but they wouldn’t dare to have said anything to Solomon.”
There was, as the band’s circle later admitted, a “certain grim satisfaction” when Lulu’s version stalled at No. 50 in the UK and fell off the chart, having failed to chart at all in America. The song was still available. When Them’s own recording was finally released on 5 March 1965, the contrast was total: sixteen thousand copies sold on day one, and a record that moved with a confidence Lulu’s version had not found. Beneath its breezy, bold surface, the song is a study in obsessive jealousy — a rejected lover watching his girl go out with someone new, narrating his own humiliation as night falls. Morrison sings it not with sorrow but with a kind of snarl, and that tension between the jaunty arrangement and the voyeuristic lyric is what makes the record endure.
Number Two, and Top of the Pops
Here Comes the Night peaked at No. 2 in the UK, No. 2 in Ireland, No. 8 in Canada, No. 17 in Australia and No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for ten weeks. It was Them’s third single in both Britain and America, where its release followed the success of Gloria. Success brought the machinery of mid-sixties pop with it: the band was sent on a promotional push through Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops, an experience the blues purist Morrison found absurd. “Them were never meant to be on Top of the Pops,” he later said. “I mean miming? Lip syncing? We used to laugh at the programme, think it was a joke. Then we were on it ourselves. It was ridiculous. We were totally anti that type of thing. We were really into the blues… and we had to get into suits and have make-up put on and all that.”
The trade press, at least, understood the record. Billboard called it an “intriguing teen rouser with an equally intriguing vocal performance,” while Cash Box praised a “funky, twangy blues-tinged opus with an infectious rhythmic back-beat.”
By year’s end the song ranked among the forty best-selling UK singles of 1965 — no small feat in the year of Satisfaction, Yesterday and You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’. In America it was included on the Parrot label’s version of the album THEM in July 1965, and it also appeared on the EP Mystic Eyes. Decca’s Deram imprint reissued the single in 1973, by which time its singer was a solo star and the record a period piece; it did not chart again. But the original achievement has never been surpassed. As of today, Here Comes the Night remains the highest-charting single of Van Morrison’s career in both the United Kingdom and Ireland — higher than Brown Eyed Girl, higher than anything from Moondance — and he has never had a No. 1 single in either country.
The Song That Would Not Go Away
Them did not last — the classic line-up fragmented within a couple of years, and Morrison decamped to New York to work with Berns as a solo artist. But Here Comes the Night followed him. He revived it, dressed in a string arrangement, on his celebrated 1974 live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now, and the original recording has anchored his compilations ever since, including The Best of Van Morrison in 1990 and Still on Top – The Greatest Hits in 2007.
Other singers kept finding it too. David Bowie covered it on his 1973 album Pin Ups; Dwight Yoakam recorded it for Under the Covers in 1997; Canadian rockers Streetheart took it into their national chart in 1979; and Rod Stewart — no stranger to Morrison’s songbook — included a version on the special edition of his 2013 album Time. A punk band called the Rivals covered it in 1980 under the impression they were covering a David Bowie song, which may be the most backhanded compliment a standard can earn.
For Morrison himself, the song stands as a permanent reminder of a road not taken: the pure pop career that might have followed a No. 2 hit, had he wanted it. He did not. Within three years he would be in a New York studio making Astral Weeks, about as far from Top of the Pops as a singer can travel. But every account of his career has to start where the charts peaked — with a borrowed riff, four days of rehearsal, a rival version that flopped, and a teenager from Belfast watching the night come down. The American critic Dave Marsh, compiling his thousand greatest singles, found room for it in The Heart of Rock & Soul — a judgement that has only grown easier to defend. Strip away the suits and the make-up Morrison hated, and what remains is the record where British R&B first found a voice of its own: his.