Van Morrison on Astral Weeks (No. 1/100)

"I just wanted to break away from this kind of structured thing at that point, em, cos I didn’t realise that all these records I was hearing, like Aretha Franklin, the R n B stuff, Wilson Pickett, I didn’t realise that that was so structured and so tight and so arranged. It didn’t sound that way but in actuality, those kind of sessions were very uptight and very structured, almost like a showband, you know. And to me that didn’t make sense because I was listening to Sam Cooke, and also to a guy called King Pleasure and Bobby Blue Bland. And the slow stuff that King Pleasure was doing, he stretched the words, everything was extended and also Sam Cooke was doing it, that s what I was into.

"I just wanted to get back to playing and singing really, so it was like getting rid of everything and starting again. It was just guitar, voice and singing the songs. So 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. That s what that was all about."