Years later, when his Belfast peers recalled the young Morrison, they stressed his solitary nature as well as his eccentricity. A working-class boy from a Protestant neighbourhood, he had left Orangefield school with no academic credentials, and seems to have been an aloof-to-the-point-of-arrogant teenager an only child who never quite shed his sense of aloneness. Though this anecdote may have grown in the telling, it illustrates the adolescent Van Morrison's otherness. He's upstairs in his room writing poetry.'
'Yer man can't play,' he told the other band members. Van's mother, Violet, answered, and after a few seconds of banter Walsh returned to the minibus alone. Once, before a gig in Derry, the band's minibus pulled up outside his house on Hyndford Street, east Belfast and lead singer Alfie Walsh knocked on the door.
In the early Sixties the young George Ivan Morrison briefly played saxophone in a Belfast showband called the Olympics.
