The Maritime Hotel (site) — where Them made their name

The Maritime Hotel on College Square North in Belfast city centre was home to the Club Rado in the early 1960s — a basement club that became the central venue of Belfast's beat and R&B scene in the years before the music industry took any serious interest in what was happening there. Them, the five-piece band fronted by the eighteen-year-old Van Morrison, held a residency at the Maritime beginning in 1963 that built them a Belfast following before they had released a single record. The shows were raw, loud, and occasionally violent in the audience energy they generated — Morrison's voice and the band's grinding R&B drawing a crowd that Belfast's showband circuit was not equipped to contain.

The residency attracted the attention of the British music industry, and Them signed to Decca Records in London in 1964. Their debut single "Don't Start Crying Now" and the follow-up "Baby Please Don't Go" — with the B-side "Gloria," which became the more lasting achievement of the two — were recorded at Decca's studios in London while the band were still playing the Maritime circuit back in Belfast. Morrison was twenty years old. The Maritime shows are the origin point of a career that would span six decades and produce one of the most singular bodies of work in popular music.

The Maritime Hotel building was demolished, and the College Square North site has been redeveloped. The Belfast Music Trail now acknowledges the Maritime's significance in the city's music history, and the block where it stood is documented in local heritage materials. Nothing physical remains of the club itself — only the recordings Them made in London during those years, and Van Morrison's voice, which was already entirely its own thing from the first night he sang into a microphone in a Belfast basement.