Van Morrison reissues

[BlueChair]

Here's a press release for the upcoming reissue campaign of the Van Morrison catalogue. It'll be cool to have albums like Tupelo Honey fleshed out with bonus tracks - but where are the titles that need it most, like Astral Weeks, Moondance and His Band And Street Choir?

SAN DIEGO, CA -- 12/19/07 -- Van Morrison and Exile Productions in association with Polydor/UMe are pleased to announce the worldwide release of Van Morrison's back catalog beginning in January 2008.
This worldwide exclusive reissue program covers 29 albums from 1971's "Tupelo Honey" through 2002's "Down The Road," and also includes the 1997 2-CD collection "The Story of Them." All of the albums have been remastered and each will include bonus material, none of which has been previously available.

Additionally, each album will feature its original artwork and include complete lyrics to Morrison's compositions. The first series of 6 albums will be released on January 29, 2008, followed by three additional release dates with the remaining titles.

The first set in January includes:

"Tupelo Honey" "It's Too Late To Stop Now" "Wavelength" "A Sense Of Wonder" "Avalon Sunset" "Back On Top"
The bonus recordings are of particular interest since this is the first time Morrison has authorized any unreleased material since "The Philosopher's Stone" in 1998. Each album will include exclusive, unreleased recordings from their respective time period -- giving a unique insight into some of his most revered songs. The bonus content for the initial titles can be seen below:

"Tupelo Honey," 1971 -- "Wild Night" (alternative take) and a reworking of the traditional "Down By The Riverside"

"It's Too Late To Stop Now," 1974 -- a live take on "Brown Eyed Girl"

"Wavelength," 1978 -- "Kingdom Hall" and "Wavelength" (Live at the Roxy Theatre, L.A., Nov 26, 1978)

"A Sense Of Wonder," 1984 -- "Crazy Jane On God" and "A Sense Of Wonder" (alternative takes)

"Avalon Sunset," 1989 -- "Whenever God Shines His Light" (alternative take) and "When The Saints Go Marching In" (with additional lyrics by Van Morrison)

"Back On Top," 1999 -- "Philosopher's Stone" (alternative take) and "Valley Of Tears" (a completely new arrangement of the Fats Domino song)

[Who Shot Sam?]

Can't happen soon enough. I can't decide whose back catalog is in more dire need of remastering - Van's or Springsteen's.

I think those two early ones are the only ones I'd be interested in out of this bunch.

[martinfoyle]

Van doesn't own the rights to those 3 albums so thats why they haven't been included in the latest set of re-issues. He was allowed include tracks from them on the new Still on Top compilation, and the sound is amazing, all collections should have it, try and get the limited edition triple disc version. Since he also doesn't play Dublin anymore I haven't seen him years. I saw him around twice a year back in the 90's and they were some of the best shows I've seen. Not too pushed about the bonus tracks on the first set of re-issues, I'll be defintely keeping an eye out for what's on Common One, his finest album, imo.

(Everything coming out all-centred, whats that about, mods?)

[Otis Westinghouse]

Agree Common One is fantastic. Spirit, etc. I'd like St Dominic's Preview.

[BlueChair]

Picked up the Avalon Sunset remaster on a whim the other day. The production takes a bit of getting used to, but I like it. Definitely more pop oriented than a lot of the Van I know and love, but some great songs in "Whenever God Shines His Light" and "I'm Tired Joey Boy." I'm looking forward to picking up the rest of these reissues, though I'll probably skip Tupelo Honey and Back On Top for now since I already own those.

[so lacklustre]

I picked up Tupelo Honey fairly cheap as I have never had it. I can't therefore compare to previous releases of the album, but I can say that it sounds good, and very typical of that period of Van.

[BlueChair]

Picked up It's Too Late To Stop Now, a live record that has been on my "To Buy" list for years. Now that it's been remastered, I'm thrilled to own it. Excellent stuff, with great sound. It's nice to hear the Van that once was.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Great rendition of Listen To The Lion, among other highlights.

[BlueChair]

The second slate of Van Morrison reissues comes out tomorrow:

SANTA MONICA, Calif., June 4 CA-UMe-Van-Morrison

SANTA MONICA, Calif., June 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Following the successful
release of the first six titles in January 2008, Van Morrison and Exile
Productions in association with Polydor/UMe are pleased to announce the
worldwide release of more classic albums from the Van Morrison back catalogue
on July 1, 2008.

The albums are being remastered and will include bonus material, none of
which has been previously available. Each album will include original artwork
and full lyrics (those noted) to Van Morrison compositions.

The second series is as follows:
* includes lyrics

*VEEDON FLEECE
LIVE AT THE GRAND OPERA HOUSE BELFAST
*NO GURU, NO METHOD, NO TEACHER
*ENLIGHTENMENT
A NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO
*THE HEALING GAME

The bonus recordings are of particular interest and, with the exception of
LIVE AT THE GRAND OPERA HOUSE BELFAST, each reissued album includes exclusive
unreleased recordings from each respective time period, giving a unique
insight into some of his most revered songs. The bonus tracks are outlined
below.

VEEDON FLEECE
Twilight Zone (alternative take)
Cul De Sac (alternative take)

NO GURU, NO METHOD, NO TEACHER
Oh The Warm Feeling (alternative version)
Lonely At The Top

ENLIGHTENMENT
Enlightenment (alternative version)
So Quiet In Here (alternative version)

A NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO
Cleaning Windows (bonus track)

THE HEALING GAME
At The End Of The Day (bonus track)


SOURCE UMe

[johnfoyle]

http://weblogs.variety.com/thesetlist/2 ... on-to.html

The Hollywood Bowl was where the complete "Pet Sounds" concept was birthed,making it a suitable home for Van Morrison to revisit "Astral Weeks."

Morrison will perform "Astral Weeks," his 1968 solo album, at the Hollywood Bowl with a band featuring the musicians who appeared on the landmark album. Morrison used a rhythm section of jazz players on the album, among them the great bassist Richard Davis who's now 78.

This event, being held Nov. 7 and 8, is being recorded for an “Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl” DVD. Like Brian Wilson did with "Pet Sounds," it's likely a tour of the work will follow.
This clip gives you an idea of what he sounds like singing 40-year-old songs.

http://vanmorrisonnews.blogspot.com/

[Otis Westinghouse]

AWsome! Can't wait to hear the bootleg. Sounds from the Gavin Martin (I remember him from the NME for 28 years ago!) review like the old songs are sounding excellent. I've never heard him play most of those songs live, There was a nice torrent on Dimeadozen of 'Moondance through the years' which contained renditions of all the songs off the LP played live at different stages, though I think one or two were from sessions as they have never been played live. I wonder if any AW songs haven't ever been played live before.

[johnfoyle]

scheduled for LP / vinyl release in time for Christmas 2008, followed by a CD release in January.

Hmmm........now where did he get that idea.

Peter Erskine - takes the place of the late great Connie Kay on Drums
Peter is drums regularly for Diana Krall.


Oct. 1, 2008

MUSIC LEGEND VAN MORRISON TO CLOSE OUT HOLLYWOOD BOWL 2008 SEASON WITH "ASTRAL WEEKS LIVE" IN NOVEMBER

Hollywood, CA. - Multi-award winning musical legend Van Morrison will take to the Los Angeles concert stage for "Astral Weeks Live" at the Hollywood Bowl on November 7 and 8, closing out the 2008 season of the famous venue. Van Morrison has over 150 songs featured in major motion pictures--with the latest being featured in the Scorsese film "The Departed". Tickets for the concerts go on sale 10 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 5, with Citi pre-sales beginning 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1 through 10 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 4.

While the first half of the show features Morrison and his band playing the timeless classics that have made him a legend, the second half is a breathtaking cover to cover recreation of the "Astral Weeks" album. The Astral Weeks band will be a different line up and include band members from the original sessions. The seminal astral weeks recordings established Van Morrison as a great solo artist and has consequentially changed the face of music.

"This is a welcomed opportunity for me to perform these songs the way I originally intended them to be," says Morrison. "It's about the world of creation and of the imagination: That is what a song is, a little movie with melodies and music built around it, poetry in moving pictures in the mind". In the 60's and 70's the record companies did not support the music, so I never got to take these songs on tour, and I certainly did not have the money to do it. These songs are as timeless and fresh right now as the day they were written and I am happy about taking them to the Hollywood Bowl."

"Astral Weeks" is timeless music from the soul. It is ranked the #2 greatest album of all time in the Mojo list, and it ranks #19 in Rolling Stone. Britain's The Times lists it #3 in its all-time rankings. Morrison has said the album was "a little about Belfast, but it has never been about any person or thing as these works are channeled works of the imagination.. the keyword being work.. it was a lot of hard work"

The November concerts will be recorded live for the upcoming album "Astral Weeks Live At The Hollywood Bowl." This album will be released on Morrison's new label, Listen To The Lion Records, scheduled for LP / vinyl release in time for Christmas 2008, followed by a CD release in January.

For the concerts, Morrison will be joined by a band that includes world-class musicians including band-leader / pianist Roger Kellaway (former band leader of Bobby Darrin) and guitarist John Platania who has played with Morrison since 1970. Other members, guitarist Jay Berliner and bassist Richard Davis, played with Morrison on the original "Astral Weeks" sessions 40 years ago.

Set 1 -Classic VM Material

The Band:

Van Morrison - Musical Arranger / Director, Guitar, Saxophone, Harmonica, the Lion and Vocals

Roger Kellaway - former Music Director for the late great Bobby Darrin is the Straw Boss and on piano

John Platania - from Van Morrison bands 1970 to present, on Lead Guitar

David Hayes - from Van Morrison bands, 1973 to present on Bass

Paul Moran - on Organ and Trumpet

Rick Schlosser - on Drums

Richard Buckley- on Flute and Saxophones

Tony Fitzgibbon - on Violin / Viola



Set 2- Astral Weeks Live, cover to cover

The Band:

Van Morrison - on Guitar and is The Poet, The Sorcerer and The Arranger

Roger Kellaway - former leader of the late great Bobby Darrin Band and is the Straw Boss for the band and on Piano

Jay Berliner - Guitar - Original Astral Weeks band member

Richard Davis - Bass - Original Astral Weeks band member

Peter Erskine - takes the place of the late great Connie Kay on Drums

Richard Buckley - from The Common One Band is on Flute

Paul Moran - on Organ and Harpsichord

Tony Fitzgibbon - on Violin (And Possibly Viola)


The original line up -

http://www.timepieces.nl/Albums-M/VanMo ... lWeeks.htm

Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Morrison sings in his elastic, bluesy voice, accompanied by a jazz rhythm section (Jay Berliner, guitar, Richard Davis, bass, Connie Kay, drums), plus reeds (John Payne) and vibes (Warren Smith Jr.), with a string quartet overdubbed.

[blooch]

Why no mention of Into The Music and The Healing Game? probably(in my opinion) two of his greatest albums alongside Back On Top.

[BlueChair]

Why no mention of Into The Music and The Healing Game? probably(in my opinion) two of his greatest albums alongside Back On Top.

They haven't reissued Into The Music yet. I did pick up The Healing Game though, and I enjoy it... though not nearly as much as Van's earlier work.

[martinfoyle]

Into The Music is out as well,

http://www.amazon.com/Into-Music-Van-Mo ... 437&sr=1-1

and well worth getting, sounds great.

The next batch of reissues were to be released September 2008, have now moved to January 2009.

- A Period of Transition: Expanded Reissue
- Beautiful Vision: Expanded Reissue
- How Long Has This Been Going On: Expanded Reissue
- Hymns To The Silence: Expanded Reissue
- Poetic Champions Compose: Expanded Reissue
- St Dominic's Preview: Expanded Reissue
- Tell Me Something: Expanded Reissue
according to this

http://vanmorrisonnews.blogspot.com/

[johnfoyle]

All you can ever need to know about Astral Weeks.

Van Morrison's full Q&A on 'Astral Weeks' - LA Times

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_b ... ons-f.html

I love the album , even after a over-exposure too it once, in the late 1980's, on a bus to Glastonbury. After the driver played it something like four times in a row ,as we crawled through the night time roads of Wales, a particularly hairy bloke ran up from the back of the bus and Van's plaintive tones ceased with a brief screech as the tape was ripped from the player. I couldn't listen to it for years.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/no ... popandrock

Is this the best album ever made?

On its release in 1968 Van Morrison's second album, Astral Weeks, baffled both the public and his record company. Now, 40 years later, it's regarded as unique - a mystical, dream-like blend of spontaneous blues, jazz and folk. And Van himself is finally ready to play it live...

Sean O'Hagan
The Observer,
Sunday November 2 2008

In the early Sixties the young George Ivan Morrison briefly played saxophone in a Belfast showband called the Olympics. Once, before a gig in Derry, the band's minibus pulled up outside his house on Hyndford Street, east Belfast and lead singer Alfie Walsh knocked on the door. Van's mother, Violet, answered, and after a few seconds of banter Walsh returned to the minibus alone. 'Yer man can't play,' he told the other band members. 'His ma says he's not coming out... He's upstairs in his room writing poetry.'

Though this anecdote may have grown in the telling, it illustrates the adolescent Van Morrison's otherness. A working-class boy from a Protestant neighbourhood, he had left Orangefield school with no academic credentials, and seems to have been an aloof-to-the-point-of-arrogant teenager; an only child who never quite shed his sense of aloneness. Years later, when his Belfast peers recalled the young Morrison, they stressed his solitary nature as well as his eccentricity. 'Van was his own master,' his boyhood friend George Jones told biographer Johnny Rogan. 'People didn't understand him.' Another friend, Billy McAllen, remembered him as being 'a bit strange, a bit weird'.

Fast forward to 25 September 1968. Morrison, 23, and already in retreat from pop stardom, stands in the centre of Century Sound Studios in midtown Manhattan. In the past few years he had tasted fame as lead singer of Them (dubbed 'Belfast's answer to the Rolling Stones' in the music press), singing on two hit singles, 'Here Comes the Night' and the proto-punk 'Gloria'. His first solo album - released in 1967, and entitled, in the spirit of the time, Blowin' Your Mind - had yielded another hit, the buoyant 'Brown-Eyed Girl'. Now, though, newly signed to Warner Brothers, he was intent on reinvention .

Strumming gently on an acoustic guitar, he begins to sing the first of several strange, stark songs he has been recently performing in small venues on the east coast to general disinterest. Around him, listening intently, are gathered three jazz musicians of the highest calibre: bassist Richard Davis, who had played with the likes of Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan, guitarist Jay Berliner, best known for his work with Charles Mingus, and drummer Connie Kay, a member of the esteemed Modern Jazz Quartet. They had been assembled, alongside arranger Larry Fallon, by producer Lewis Merenstein, who on first hearing the songs had immediately sensed that they would not work in a rock setting.

If the young Van Morrison felt awed in such exalted company, he did not show it. In fact, he betrayed little emotion at all, and throughout the session, spoke only to the technicians. 'There wasn't much communication,' recalls Richard Davis, who now teaches music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 'As far as I can recall, I don't think I exchanged one word with the guy. We just listened to his songs one time, and then we started playing.'

Brooks Arthur was the sound engineer on that same session, though, inexplicably, his name would be left off the subsequent album credits. When he talks about it today, 40 years later, regret soon turns to excitement in his voice. 'From the moment Van hit the first note I knew we were involved in something special,' he recalls. 'You have to understand, everything was live. There were no music charts. He ran it down once for the players and went into the vocal booth. Then we got the sound levels right and I hit the red light and he started singing.'

That first working day comprised two three-and-a-half-hour studio sessions, during which three extended songs were recorded. 'There wasn't too much stopping and starting,' says Arthur. 'Van took off and the musicians went with him. They were serious players, they didn't have to think about it, they just did it instinctively, and it caught fire. We were working at the speed of sound. I tell you, we were breathing rarefied air in there.'

On 15 October the musicians and sound men reconvened. In another two short sessions, according to Merenstein, they produced 'six or seven songs, two of which just didn't fit the mood of the album'. Larry Fallon then spent another day overdubbing strings and horns on certain tracks. Throughout Morrison remained uncommunicative, self-absorbed. 'People told me later that he was shy,' says Davis, 'but to me he seemed aloof, maybe a bit moody. He was caught up in his own thing. He communicated through his singing.'

It still seems scarcely credible that, under such strained conditions, an album was created that has since come to be regarded as perhaps the greatest work of art to emerge out of the pop tradition. Released in November 1968, Astral Weeks is a work of such singular beauty, such sustained emotional intensity, that nothing recorded before or since sounds even remotely similar - or, indeed, comparable. Elvis Costello would later describe it as 'still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium', adding that 'there hasn't been a record with that amount of daring made since'. When I spoke to Nick Cave about it a few years ago, he spoke enviously of 'its power to mesmerise and disturb', and wondered 'at the sheer nerve of this young guy to attempt something so obsessive and uncompromising, and then actually pull it off'.

Initially, though, Astral Weeks was greeted by both the critics and the public with utter bemusement. The NME compared Morrison's extraordinary voice to the mannered Latin stylings of José Feliciano. Initial sales were disappointing and it received little support from Warner Brothers. 'They just didn't know what to do with it so they did nothing,' says Merenstein, scathingly. 'They were expecting "Brown Eyed Girl", and the first thing I played them was a seven-minute song about rebirth with no electric guitars and an acoustic bass. They just shook their heads.'

Since then though Astral Weeks has gone from a cult album to an acknowledged classic and has been celebrated, alongside the likes of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde and the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's, in countless best albums of all-time lists. It was voted No 2 in a Mojo magazine critics' poll of 1995 and at No 19 in Rolling Stone's selection of the 500 Greatest Albums Ever Made in 2003. More surprisingly, it was also voted ninth greatest album of all time in the more populist Music of the Millennium poll conducted by Channel 4, the Guardian, HMV and Classic FM in 1997.

Now comes the news that the ever-contrary Morrison, having continually shrugged off Astral Weeks' legendary status in interviews over the years, will be performing the album in its entirety at two shows at the Hollywood Bowl on November 7-8. The concerts are an intriguing prospect but it turns out that I am not alone in wondering at the wisdom of such a risky undertaking. 'How does that old Buddhist saying go?' says Merenstein. 'Something like, "You can't bathe in the same river twice." I hear he is going to record the concerts for a live album, too. Man, I have mixed feelings about that. Part of me thinks, just leave it alone. It's a moment in time that has become timeless. It's just too unique, too magical to try and recreate.'

Astral Weeks is that rare thing in pop music, an album that lives up to its own legend. Its singularity lies, as Costello points out, in its vaulting ambition. It is neither folk nor jazz nor blues, though there are traces of all three in the music and in Morrison's raw and emotionally charged singing. There are no solos save for the ethereal flute and soprano saxophone improvisations that are woven through the last, and shortest, song, 'Slim Slow Slider', the album's elegaic coda. Throughout, there are interludes of breathtaking beauty when the music surges and subsides, rises and falls, around Morrison's voice.

And it is that voice, by turns flinty and tender, beseeching and plaintive, that is the most extraordinary instrument of all. It is the sound of someone singing to himself, utterly immersed in the words that are pouring out of his mouth. This is that adolescent aloofness transmuted into a kind of enraptured self-assurance. 'His voice has so much integrity and conviction,' says the singer Beth Orton. 'It's as if he has sung the whole album into being just by his conviction, his absolute self-belief.'

At times Morrison seems overwhelmed by the intensity of the feelings he is attempting to express. 'His voice is a thing of quite extreme beauty,' says the psychologist and author Adam Phillips, a longtime fan of the album. 'What is extraordinary is the emotional atmosphere he creates in the songs and the sense that he is not even remotely concerned about communicating with an audience or a listener. He's just singing out his songs, and we are, in a sense, listening in.'

It has long been my contention that Astral Weeks is an album rooted in adolescence; its confusions and frustrations, its often volcanic emotional turbulence. On 'Cyprus Avenue' he is 'caught' and 'captured' by adolescent sexual desire, and 'conquered in a car seat'. On 'Beside You', the most dense and tortured song on the album, he sounds traumatised - though by what one never knows.

'On Astral Weeks I think he is haunted by something,' says Phillips, 'and I am not even sure he knows what it is. He sounds confounded, literally confounded. I don't think he has a clue what this music is about, other than it comes from somewhere deep inside him. As a psychologist, one often encounters people who harbour these sort of confused feelings but what you don't very often encounter is someone who has found a form for them. That is what is startling here, and almost unique in the medium of popular music.'

For all that, there is a mood of exultancy and, in places, abandonment, on Astral Weeks: words break down or are repeated until they lose their literal meaning and become mantras of desire and loss. 'I always think Astral Weeks sounds somehow victorious,' says Beth Orton. 'It's as if he has won a great victory but lost so much too. He sounds altered.'

There are few moments in popular music as affecting as the repeated refrain on 'Madame George' of the line, 'dry your eye, your eye, your eye...' as the strings swell around his voice then fall away, leaving just his acoustic strumming and Davis's wonderfully insistent bass pulse. It is the sound of someone trying to retrieve the irretrievable: lost youth, lost innocence, lost love; and at the same time realising the impossibility of ever experiencing those heightened moments again.

Astral Weeks is also a long goodbye, both to his younger self and to the city of his youth, a prelapsarian Belfast untouched by bomb or bullet. It was recorded just as the Troubles began, and remains, alongside Derek Mahon's poetry and Gerald Dawe's memoir, My Mother-City, one of the most tender...#65279; evocations of a straight-laced and hard-edged city, whose more progressive youth were embracing the creeping bohemianism of the times. On his brief return to Belfast after Them split, Morrison hung out for a time with an arty student crowd, but he was an outsider there too.

The two songs on Astral Weeks that are most infused with a sense of place - 'Cyprus Avenue' and 'Madame George' - are also undercut with the deepest sense of melancholy and longing. 'What he is tapping into on those songs is a collective experience,' says Dawe, a Belfast-born poet who knew the young Van Morrison. 'It's about describing the familiar in extraordinary detail, even as you are leaving that familiarity behind once and for all. Van grew up in an intense, tight-knit community, and knew early on that he did not fit into that community, that he was, as artists often are, an outsider. That feeling was really brought home to him when he returned to Belfast after his brief pop stardom. He didn't fit, and knew he would have to leave again, this time for good. All those complex emotions echo through Astral Weeks. That's why it resonates so deeply with people from home, many of whom have left there with the same anxieties of belonging.'

Astral Weeks may be the moment when Van Morrison accepts that he can never truly go home again. 'Ain't nothing but a stranger in this world,' he sings towards the end of the title track, echoing the gospel hymns of his youth. 'I got a home on high...'

When I interviewed Morrison back in 1987 he did not want to talk about Astral Weeks at all. We met in the Chelsea Arts Club. He arrived very late and for the first hour was tight-lipped and combative. It was only when we moved off the subject of his music that he began to open up. 'Basically, Irish writers, and I include myself here, are writing about the same things,' he mused at one point. 'Often it's about when things felt better. Either that, or sadness... It's the story about going back and rediscovering that going back answers the question, or going back and discovering it doesn't answer the question. Going away and coming back, those are the themes of all Irish writing.'

In a way, Van Morrison has grappled with those same themes ever since. For a long time his albums were about the great quest for home, the search for a place to belong, be that a tradition or a belief system or an actual landscape. In his songs he has drawn on Romanticism and esoteric theosophy, and evoked the names of John Donne and WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Seamus Heaney. On Astral Weeks, though, there is no questing. He is simply there, transported by his words and his voicing of them. No one in popular music, including Van Morrison himself, has since come close to that exalted place .
1968 and all that



In the news
5 November Richard Nixon narrowly beats Hubert Humphrey in the US presidential elections.
26 November New race relations law in the UK makes it illegal to refuse housing, jobs or public services on ethnic grounds.
30 November The Trade Descriptions Act outlaws the selling of an item with a misleading label or description.

At the cinema
Barbarella Jane Fonda plays the 41st-century astronaut in this hedonistic sci-fi romp.
Oliver! Musical version of Charles Dickens's classic tale.
Girl on a Motorcycle Road movie with Marianne Faithful.

In the shops
Sliced white loaf - 1s 7d (8½p)
Pint of milk - 11d (4½p)
Bag of sugar - 1/4 (6½p)
20 cigarettes - 4/10 (24p)

On the radio
'Those Were the Days' - Mary Hopkin
'Hey Jude' - The Beatles
'With a Little Help from My Friends' - Joe Cocker

At the theatre
Hair Controversial rock'n'roll musical.
Forty Years On Alan Bennett's first West End play.
The Real Inspector Hound Tom Stoppard's farcical whodunnit.

On the bookshelves
The Armies of the Night Normal Mailer's Pulitzer-winning nonfiction novel.
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe's pioneering account of Merry Pranksterism.
Eva Trout Elizabeth Bowen's last major work. Ally Carnwath

How Van the man found his voice

Born George Ivan Morrison on 31 August 1945 at 125 Hyndford Street, Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Courtesy of his father George's extensive jazz and blues record collection, he grows up listening to the likes of Ray Charles, Leadbelly and Mahalia Jackson.

1958 Joins the Sputniks as a saxophone player. Later groups he plays in include Deanie Sands & the Javelins, the Olympics and the Monarchs.

1964 Forms Them, and the group begin a residency in the Maritime Hotel in Belfast. Two hit singles follow: 'Baby Please Don't Go'/ 'Gloria' (November 1964) and 'Here Comes the Night' (March 1965).

1968 Astral Weeks, his masterpiece, is released.

1970 Changes direction again and releases Moondance, a soul-jazz classic.

1973 Tours with his finest band, the Caledonian Soul Orchestra, and in 1974 issues one of the great live albums, It's Too Late to Stop Now.

It is followed in October by Veedon Fleece, a record that some critics compare to Astral Weeks.

1980 Releases Common One the first of a series of albums, among them Inarticulate Speech of the Heart (1983) and No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986) that explore themes of transcendence and spirituality.

2008 Decides finally to revisit Astral Weeks. He will play the album in its entirety at the Hollywood Bowl this Friday and Saturday.

[BlueChair]

From Billboard:

Van Morrison Sets Up Shop At EMI

December 18, 2008 10:54 AM ET

Jonathan Cohen, N.Y.
Van Morrison is bringing his Listen to the Lion label to EMI via a new deal to be crowned by the early 2009 release of his recent live performance of the classic album "Astral Weeks."

That set was recreated in painstaking detail for two Los Angeles performances at the Hollywood Bowl in November. "I brought these records to EMI because they seem to have people with vision, who have 'ears' and who understand the significance of the complex arrangements and the classic essence of recordings like 'Astral Weeks,'" says Morrison. "They're committed to maintaining the integrity of the records I make. That is what it's all about to me."

Morrison has bounced around labels since the mid-1990s, when he ended a long association with Mercury to sign with Verve. Since then he has also recorded for Virgin, Lost Highway and Geffen.

Additionally, a whole bunch of clips are on YouTube of songs from the concert:

"Astral Weeks" - http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=orTr1z3NY ... re=related

"Madame George" - http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=qqRF0efmV ... re=related

"Cyprus Avenue" - http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=qloIlAtd1 ... re=related

[Otis Westinghouse]

Was wondering how those shows went and hadn't looked on YT. Sounds good.

Here's another clip worth seeing. The wonderful 'St Dominic's Preview' from the 90s:

[Who Shot Sam?]

My sister got me the three new 180 gram Van Morrison Rhino vinyl reissues for X-mas - Moondance, Astral Weeks and His Band...

Should be arriving sometime soon.

[johnfoyle]

I got the recent remaster of Astral Weeks that came out in Japan. It's a vast improvement on any previous editions I've heard, all kinds of acoustic elements popping out of the speakers. It's still, however, a recording that I'm so familiar with , like the Beatles albums, that it's hard to keep my mind from wondering and just not hearing it. Maybe if I heard it on headphones, something I rarely use, I might appreciate it more and end up walking in front of a bus.

Get it here -

http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/detailview.html?KEY=WPCR-75419

[Otis Westinghouse]

I'd say yes to the headphones. To me it's exciting to hear a remaster of something you know really well so you can spot those differences.

[martinfoyle]

Interesting thread on the Astral Weeks Bowl shows here

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showt ... tral+weeks

[Who Shot Sam?]

I got the recent remaster of Astral Weeks that came out in Japan. It's a vast improvement on any previous editions I've heard, all kinds of acoustic elements popping out of the speakers.

I'd second this - I assume it's the same remaster that Rhino used for the vinyl. What a revelation. I always loved the album, but only knew it from old cassettes and the muddy-sounding CD.

[johnfoyle]

http://www.rocksbackpages.com/library.html

Free this week (Feb.9 '09):

INTO THE MYSTIC – Revisiting Van Morrison's magnificent Astral Weeks: a seminal interview by Happy Traum (1970) plus the legendary Lester Bangs essay (1979) and Barney Hoskyns on the story behind the album (2001).

[Otis Westinghouse]

My first thought was 'Who's that?' Then I realised it couldn't just be a member of his backing band. Smiling? Then I realised he's got new teeth and is obviously keen to show them off.

He's doing it now for 2 nights at the Royal Albert Hall. Would love to be there, but at £200 a ticket for floor or box tickets, sadly not.