It Was Fifty Years Ago Today...

There aren't many landmarks from the Age of Rock/Folk/Pop Etc that are worth marking, but today's is surely one: the golden anniversary of the release of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, a true one-off album, the like of which was never heard before and has never been heard since. Nothing in Morrison's earlier career – except perhaps the flash of genius that is Gloria – suggested he was capable of such things, and the Astral Weeks sound, a sinuously expressive blend of folk, blues, jazz and even classical, seemed to have come out of nowhere. (Like so many good things, it was actually the product of a contract dispute that had led Morrison to start experimenting with new, pared-down, jazz-inflected sounds.) The words too – nothing quite like this rambling, sometimes incoherent stream of consciousness had been heard on an album, or rather nothing so rambling and yet so firmly rooted in the experiences and images of a time and place, Morrison's early years in Belfast. On Astral Weeks, words and music form one continuous whole, so perfectly does the sound fit the (elusive) sense.
  When it came out, with minimal publicity, the album was barely noticed, and what attention it got was often hostile. In the NME, Nick Logan – in words that must have haunted him for years – denounced it as a pale imitation of Jose Feliciano's Feliciano! album, but he was not alone in his disappointment. As for me, I didn't even notice it until a couple of years later, maybe more. Even Morrison himself claims not to have regarded Astral Weeks as anything very special, and says he hasn't listened to it for many years. Well, each to his own – but for me, after years of listening to it (once I'd discovered it), Astral Weeks remains a glorious piece of work, one of the handful of truly great albums. And the best way to celebrate its anniversary is simply to play it again – preferably on vinyl, but a CD will do, and of course it's all over YouTube. Enjoy...