Van Morrison has announced back to back Hollywood Bowl shows on November 7 and 8 at which he’ll perform his classic Astral Weeks album in its entirety.
Foy Vance, Bap Kennedy, The Four Of Us, The Winding Stair and Tom McShane are among the artists set to re-interpret Van Morrisson's classic album Astral Weeks at a special event next month.
Van Morrison fanatics – and there are plenty around – will want to grab hold of tickets for the June 9 show he’s playing at High Lodge, Thetford Forest nr. Brandon in Suffolk.
Van Morrison is Los Angeles bound on February 22 for a star-studded Hollywood shindig that’ll see him presented with the US-Ireland Alliance Award by Al Pacino.
Despite the passing of time, Van Morrison’s album has lost none of its elusive mysticism, its lyrics open to as many interpretations as there are listeners.
Kenny Rogers and Van Morrison are the headline attractions at Midlands, a two-day country festival taking place on July 29 and 30 in Ballinlough Castle, County Meath.
It is one of the perverse facets of contemporary music that there is a constant demand that artists have to re-invent themselves. I’m all for it if it’s what a band or a performer either needs or wants to do, in order to give renewed sparkle to the muse. But it isn’t something that we ask of poets or writers. Would we want or expect John McGahern to produce a sci-fi thriller set in an imaginary bog landscape five hundred years into the future?
"Astral Weeks came out of this desire to break out of this rigidity, you know, to extend the lines, and chop it up and move beyond this 1,2,3,4, beats to the bar. "
Like its weirder twin, the Velvet Underground’s debut, Astral Weeks was a seminal album dealing with adult themes of darkness, mortality and deviance. And like the Velvets, its influence vastly overshadowed its meagre sales.
Released in March 1970 and produced and arranged entirely by Morrison, Moondance was much closer to Stax soul and hippy folk than the jazz and orchestral leanings of its predecessor.
It’s the title of his new album, his first on the legendary jazz label, Blue Note. it’s also an apt introduction to an interview in which Van Morrison talks freely about his work, his background in Belfast, his brushes with the music industry – and about what made him what he is.
Still making great music after all these years, Van Morrison is an Irish genius worthy of comparison with the most enduring ’60s legends such as Bob Dylan and Neil Young
Van Morrison and Linda Gail Lewis
What next for Van Morrison? Already this year he's gone back to his skiffle roots with The Skiffle Sessions, hauling on board for that project the great Lonnie Donegan. And now Van-the-man returns to a time when he was Van-the-boy, digging the kind of pure country music made by Hank Williams and the frenetic rock 'n' roll sounds fashioned by Jerry Lee Lewis.
You look up 'skiffle' in the Chambers 20th Century Dictionary and it says "a strongly accented jazz type of folk music, played by guitar, drums and often unconventional instruments etc. popular about 1957".
There's this idea abroad that Van Morrison has been working the same groove too often over the past few years. The purpose of this paragraph is simply to state that this is a misapprehension.
Hymns To The Silence, seeking higher planes, sometimes soars, occasionally strikes a flat note, but always repairs its errors with an offering pitch-perfect and ravishingly beautiful to the ear.
No disco, no party, no foolin’ around – here we find Van Morrison by turns enraptured and embittered, on an album that is never less than engrossing and which is occasionally sublime.
"Hey Jimmy, I want to go home! Hey Jimmy, I been away too long…" And you feel like shouting yeah to the way he sings it, to the way the voice reaches into your soul like only the most expressive instrument can, like Muddy Waters' slide, or Charlie Parker's sax, or Mavis Staples' voice… but you know what he's talking about as well.
The over of Van Morrison's new LP immediately brings to mind a controversial poem of William Wordsworth's called the Leech Gatherer, later retitled 'Resolution and Independence'.
