Van Morrison is 70 today, and all eyes in Belfast are on Cyprus Avenue. A song. A place. The sentiment real yet unreal. 

2015 has already seen an all-star Duets album, a knighthood to follow a few years on from receiving the freedom of the city of Belfast, and plenty of touring besides including a memorable double header with Gregory Porter earlier in the summer. Recent news reveals that most of the singer’s immense catalogue has been signed up by Sony for a major streaming deal.

And today a live broadcast on the BBC marks his birthday in a stroke of promotional creative genius initiated by East Side Arts, putting up a stage on Cyprus Avenue, the street in east Belfast synonymous with one of Morrison’s most evocative songs taken from his greatest album Astral Weeks.

Not many miles away is Hyndford Street the street where Morrison lived as a boy, feeling wondrous and lit up inside as he himself put it, on one of his songs used as the title for his lyrics published in 2014.

“He gets inside people,” wrote Greil Marcus, the writer who understands his music and its impact on people better than anyone, “and he festers there, sparking longings too intense and elusive to satisfy, desires too abstract and ethereal to fulfil, a sense of escape, transcendence, revelation, and ecstasy so deep it can seem to trivialise ordinary life, and thus trivialise whoever has to live that life, which is to say anyone.”

The broadcast is on radio and via the web from 2.45

Top: the scene at Cyprus Avenue earlier (photo: Van Morrison Facebook page). Above: ‘Cyprus Avenue’ performed at the Fillmore East in 1970