In 1974, with eight albums behind him, Van Morrison was asked to name his finest single track — the one he enjoyed most. He did not hesitate: “Definitely ‘Madame George’, definitely. I’m just starting to realize it more and more. It just seems to get at you… it just lays right in there, that whole track. The vocals and the instruments and the whole thing. I like that one.” He was talking about the nine-minute-and-forty-five-second centrepiece of Astral Weeks, a song that was never a single, never a hit, and never explained — least of all by the man who wrote it. It is simply the track by which Van Morrison, and a remarkable procession of other musicians, have measured everything else.
Madame Joy, Recorded Live
The song began, like most of Astral Weeks, in Morrison’s Bang Records period. An earlier version, recorded for Bert Berns’s label in 1967 at a much swifter tempo and with slightly different words, takes the scene from the point of view of a partygoer and sounds almost joyful; it surfaced in 1973 on the compilation T.B. Sheets. The definitive version was cut a year later, on 25 September 1968, during the very first Astral Weeks session at Century Sound Studios in New York, with Lewis Merenstein producing.
“Madame George was recorded live,” Morrison told biographer Ritchie Yorke. “The vocal was live and the rhythm section and the flute too, and the strings were the only overdub.” Around him stood the extraordinary pickup band Merenstein had assembled through bassist Richard Davis: Davis himself on double bass — acting, in effect, as musical director — Connie Kay of the Modern Jazz Quartet on drums, John Payne on flute, Warren Smith Jr. on vibraphone, and Larry Fallon’s string quartet arrangement added afterwards. It is the sixth of the album’s eight tracks, and its longest by some distance. The result is less a performance than a slow procession: the song drifts through its verses on a tide of bass and flute until it arrives at the long leave-taking of its close, the singer urging his subject to “get on the train” and say goodbye.
Context matters here. The 25 September session was the first time Morrison had ever recorded with these men. Davis, a jazz bassist of formidable pedigree whom Merenstein had asked to assemble the group, led the ensemble through material they had never seen — anchored, as Davis liked to say, by Connie Kay, the drummer he called his “Security Officer” for the secure feeling he gave a band. That Madame George, the longest and most demanding piece on the album, was captured essentially complete on that first day, with a twenty-three-year-old singer performing his vocal live alongside the band, remains one of the great feats of studio improvisation in rock. Nothing in the song is hurried. Davis’s bass walks and broods; Kay brushes time rather than keeping it; Payne’s flute curls around the vocal like cigarette smoke in the room the song describes. The strings, added later, do not sweeten the track so much as embalm it — the sound of memory being preserved while it is still warm.
Even the title was an accident of handwriting. “The original title was ‘Madame Joy’,” Morrison said, “but the way I wrote it down was ‘Madame George’. Don’t ask me why I do this because I just don’t know. The song is just a stream of consciousness thing, as is ‘Cyprus Avenue’… ‘Madame George’ just came right out. The song is basically about a spiritual feeling.”
A Movie of Belfast
The song’s geography is precise even when its meaning is not. It opens “down on Cyprus Avenue” — the tree-lined, wealthy street in east Belfast, a short walk from where Morrison grew up on Hyndford Street, and the title of the album’s other great Belfast reverie. It remembers children “throwing pennies at the bridges down below,” a practice of Northern Irish passengers on the Dublin-to-Belfast train as it crossed the River Boyne, and it name-checks Sandy Row and, probably, Fitzroy Avenue. Whoever Madame George is, she keeps her salon in Morrison’s home city.
Who she is has been argued about for half a century. The lyric’s glimpse of “the one and only Madame George” “playing dominoes in drag” persuaded many listeners — most famously the critic Lester Bangs — that she is a drag queen. Morrison denied it in a 1970 Rolling Stone interview and later said the character was a composite of six or seven people: “It’s like a movie, a sketch, or a short story. In fact, most of the songs on Astral Weeks are like short stories. In terms of what they mean, they’re as baffling to me as to anyone else. I haven’t got a clue what that song is about or who Madame George might have been.”
What the song is doing, though, is clearer than what it is about. For most of its length it simply observes: a room, a party, a figure holding court, children on the street below, a train waiting somewhere offstage. Then, in its final movement, observation gives way to a single repeated act — the goodbye. Morrison sings the farewell over and over, to Madame George, to the city, to his own youth, until repetition turns it into ritual. It is the same technique he would use throughout his career, worrying a phrase until it stops being language and becomes feeling, but he never used it to more devastating effect than here. The party ends; the guest of honour is left alone with the dominoes; the train pulls out. Everyone who has ever had to leave a place they loved is in that carriage.
The Whirlpool
Bangs, in his celebrated 1979 essay on Astral Weeks, called the song “the album’s whirlpool. Possibly one of the most compassionate pieces of music ever made, it asks us, no, arranges that we see the plight of what I’ll be brutal and call a lovelorn drag queen with such intense empathy that when the singer hurts him, we do too.” The artist Mark Wallinger heard in it “the sense of desire and loss… so sad because it dares one to try to hear it again as if for the first time. It describes our exile from our past. Radical, allusive, heartbreaking, and the ultimate three-chord trick.”
The song was admitted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, and listeners at Philadelphia’s WXPN voted it into their all-time greatest songs countdown twice — at No. 467 in 2004, climbing to No. 356 a decade later, a reputation still rising nearly fifty years after the session. Morrison reprised it on Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009, and Steve McQueen placed it on the soundtrack of his 2018 thriller Widows.
The identity debate, meanwhile, has acquired a life of its own. The comedian Frankie Boyle has proposed, only half in jest, that Madame George is Morrison’s mother — reading the song’s “childlike vision leaping into view, clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe” as a small boy walking behind his mother down a Belfast street. Morrison, characteristically, has never confirmed or denied it. The ambiguity is not a puzzle to be solved but the song’s engine: everyone who hears it casts their own farewell in the title role.
The Echo in Other Writers
No song on Astral Weeks has echoed more audibly through other people’s work. Sinéad O’Connor borrowed the figure for Black Boys on Mopeds: “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses.” David Gray closed White Ladder by ending his cover of Soft Cell’s Say Hello, Wave Goodbye the way Madame George ends — “through the rain, hail, sleet and snow, say goodbye” — and David A. Stewart name-checked it outright: “Madame George got played today, she almost forgot she could feel that way.”
Above all there is Bruce Springsteen, who chose Madame George as one of his eight records on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in December 2016, calling it his favourite cut from an album that had been transformative for him, and saying his own New York City Serenade would not have existed without it. Writers have traced its fingerprints across his early work — in the repeated “backstreets” of Backstreets, in the long culminations of Drive All Night, even in the string figure that closes Born to Run. Joan Armatrading, choosing her desert island records back in 1989, picked Madame George as the one disc she would save above all others; Harry Styles has called it one of his favourite songs, on his favourite album. Marianne Faithfull sang it on the 1994 tribute album No Prima Donna: The Songs of Van Morrison — her version also plays over the closing credits of the 1995 film Moondance — and Jeff Buckley, Phoebe Snow and Belfast’s own Energy Orchard have all recorded it too. Eric Bell, who had played guitar in a later incarnation of Them, released a live version, closing a circle that began in the Belfast clubs where the song’s world was first imagined.
Nine and three-quarter minutes, three chords, one unresolvable character — and a farewell repeated until it becomes a kind of blessing. Morrison said the song is “basically about a spiritual feeling.” Fifty years of listeners, from Lester Bangs to Bruce Springsteen, have simply agreed with him.