Don McLean interview: Why I had to write Vincent

By Helen Brown Published: 3:11PM GMT twenty-four February 2010

My Beat Club - Vincent (Starry Starry Night) on MUZU Link to this video

In the dirt underneath Amsterdams Van Gogh notable relic waits a time plug containing a set of the artists brushes and the piece strain for Don McLeans Vincent (Starry Starry Night). Museum staff fool around the strain for visitors each day, nonetheless theres no risk of it being forgotten. Indeed, it is expected to be the American singers absolute mural of misunderstood might that brought them there in the initial place. The same is certainly loyal for the thousands who are now flocking to see the Royal Academys hugely renouned muster The Real Van Gogh The Artist and his Letters, that is moulding up to be one of the shows of the year.

Released on the classical 1971 manuscript American Pie, Vincent became a No1 strike in the UK in 1972 and has left on to change an unusual range of musicians, lonesome by everybody from steel punks NOFX to Dame Julie Andrews to Rick Astley. Irish crooner Brian Kennedy sang it at George Bests wake and gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur desired it so most that, after he was fatally bleeding in a drive-by sharpened in 1996, his partner slipped it in to the fasten rug next to his sanatorium bed to safeguard it was the last thing he heard.

You think you know outpost Gogh? Vincent Van Gogh"s letters Van Gogh"s letters Van Gogh"s Provence The Real Van Gogh The Real Van Gogh

But what of the man who wrote it? American Pie was maybe the high point of his career, but McLean is still going clever at 64, with a new manuscript out in Apr and a debate of the UK commencement in May. I held up with him over the phone at his home in Maine to find out how he was desirous to write Vincent and how he felt about the outrageous impact.

"In the autumn of 1970 I had a pursuit singing in the propagandize system, personification my guitar in classrooms," he says. "I was sitting on the veranda one morning, celebration of the mass a autobiography of Van Gogh, and unexpected I knew I had to write a strain arguing that he wasnt crazy. He had an seizure and so did his hermit Theo. This creates it different, in my mind, to the grassed area accumulation of "crazy given he was deserted by a lady [as was ordinarily thought]. So I sat down with a imitation of Starry Night and wrote the lyrics out on a paper bag."

With the bittersweet palette of vital and teenager chords, Vincents balmy tune is one of high tragedy recollected in tranquillity. The musical list of colours the "swirling clouds in violet haze", the eyes of "China blue" the "snowy linen land" elicit a mental slip show of the artists work.

The stop-start of McLeans common smoothness pays loyalty to the stop-start brush strokes of the theme and constraint the paintings clarity of spontaneity, construction toward the impulse of high, regretful fool around the strum when the artist takes his own life.

It starts roughly at once as if McLean is responding to an unheard voice. Theres no instrumental introduction: the outspoken and guitar proceed simultaneously: "Starry starry night/ paint your palette blue and grey/ see out on a summers day/ with eyes that know the dim in my soul." When McLean sings of the passed house painter saying in to the dim of his own soul, hes reporting a reciprocity of creativity, a common attraction to lifes beauty and pain.

Van Gogh embellished the swirling, hyper genuine Starry Night, after committing himself to an haven in St Remy in 1889. He wrote to Theo that he mostly felt the night to be "more richly phony than the day". He believed the souls of the passed dwelt in the heavens. "Just as we take the sight to go to Tarascon or Rouen, we take genocide to go to a star." But whilst in the asylum, he couldnt get outward at night and so embellished his Starry Night from memory.

Like so most of Van Goghs work, Starry Night maintains an electric tragedy in between enjoyment and melancholy. "It creates you blissful to be unhappy," says McLean, who attempted to communicate the same mood with his song. "No make a difference how happy or carefree I am, I regularly lend towards to deposit behind to that. Its underneath all the strain Ive ever written… An artist is perplexing to discuss it you how hes feeling. And if that incidentally becomes entertaining, it becomes a career."

McLean reveals that when he wrote his reverence to Van Gogh: "I was in a bad matrimony that was torturing me. I was tortured. I wasnt as really bad off as Vincent was, but I… I wasnt thrilled, lets put it that way." He has described most of his early hold up as "unbearably blue", following the genocide of his father when he was only 15.

Donald McLean Snr had lambasted his son over a bad propagandize inform progressing on the night he died and, after his collapse, immature Don was sent to stay with friends, crunching by the "snowy linen land". It was an icy transparent and really starry night. And yet, McLean tells me that had his father lived he would not have spin a musician he could not have unhappy him. "Herman Melville was ostensible to be an accountant. Van Gogh was meant to be an art dealer. I was meant to take the sight in to New York and work for a bank. To be an artist you have to contend goodbye to your family."

McLean took the career trail less travelled, and on the American Pie manuscript voiced all his disenchantment with a universe in that rocknroll and JFK were dead, and hundreds were still failing in Vietnam. Its a deeply cross-referential pick up of songs. McLean tells me when listeners fool around the albums love ballad Empty Chairs he equates to them to see Van Goghs portrayal of a chair. And in Vincents starry night, we catch an relate of the Stars and Stripes that had so anxious and unhappy the singer.

Vincent spirals around the actuality that Van Goghs work was not appreciated in his hold up time. That nonetheless he attempted to set his assembly free, "they did not listen, they did not know how". Those who love Vincent have certainly felt undervalued by the world. Perhaps even as well frail for it.

For that reason, McLean in spin became a muse. "He wrote as if he knew me/ in all my dim despair" wrote Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel in their 1971 strain Killing Me Softly that dramatised folk thespian Lori Liebermans burning reply to a Don McLean concert. "He was strumming my suffering with his fingers/ Singing my hold up with his words" they wrote. Roberta Flack done it a strike in 1973 as did the Fugees in 1996. It has given been available in twenty opposite languages. "I thought that was beautiful," McLean says. "I was shamed by it. Im blissful that my strain has helped alternative people as the helped me. It creates me blissful that I did what I did with my life."

Don McLeans British debate starts in Birmingham on May 3, afterwards at assorted venues nationwide. Tickets: donmclean.com