I was fascinated by the background of the musicians – jazz artists like the drummer Connie Kay, who came from the improvisational Modern Jazz Quartet – and I liked this idea of music coming from people you wouldn’t normally associate with that genre. When something is good, it works at any time. It felt like Van Morrison could’ve recorded it yesterday, even though this year marks its 50th anniversary. I’m a late-night person, so I would come home after a gig at around 3am when the adrenaline was still firing, I’d stick it on and I really started getting into it.
I went away and immersed myself in the record for about a month. That was until two years ago when a friend, Colm Carty, approached me with the idea to do a whole concert of Astral Weeks. I’d heard odd tracks, like Madame George or Cyprus Avenue, but I’d never sat down and heard it in its entirety. We’d want to know what the album was saying and we’d take it all in, from the liner notes to the artwork.Īstral Weeks was one of those albums that had been floating around my mind in bits and pieces for years. It was a ritual: we would sit on the sofa and play the whole thing. I had a nice hi-fi system so all the local kids would come round to hear the latest albums.
It has a quality unique to Van and only Van of 1968.I remember as a kid regularly going into the West End and spending all of my money on records – so much so that I wouldn’t have my bus fare home. This album is to me one of the single greatest works in modern music. but what we do know is that he is still in love with her dispite it all and her pain is still his pain. Is she dying on the inside, by becoming more and more unloving and interested in greed (remember the avarice from the first song?!?! a ha, is that the connection? ((Avarice- love of money,greed))? or is she dying physically, from the heroin or something else? we never know. but the last lines are the most disturbing of the album.
or maybe wants the richer man to pay for her drug habit.? who can say. Maybe shes been revealed to be shallow and only interested in money and was lying the whole time. Not only that she has left Van for a richer man( who also happens to own the stereotypical love-gone-bad mobile, the Cadillac). It seems that she has in fact a drug addiction( i believe heroin specifically because of the white horse, metaphor, and the fact that ireland had a very bad heroin problem). People take from it whatever their disposition to take from it is." (Van Morrison, to Randy Lewis). The songs are works of fiction that will inherently have a different meaning for different people. "The songs are poetic stories, so the meaning is the same as always–timeless and unchanging. Approach it a bit the way you would a dream - things are not what they seem, but they are exactly what they feel (to each person individually). Feel the words, feel the music, and derive your meaning from that. I think a better approach to understanding the works is to ditch the narrative, like you would when reading a non-linear books (Ulysses for example). Fact is though, youre never going to achieve a satisfactory result because Morrison wrote some of these peices as a 'stream of consiousness' not 'even thinking about what he wrote' (Ritchie Yorke, Van Morrison Biographer) whilst others were 'composites.of conversations.movies, newspapers, books' and are 'totally fictional' (Van Morrison, NPR Interview). My InterpretationYou can spend alot of time trying to tie specific meanings to the songs on Astral Weeks, pinning places and metaphors together, trying to create a narrative storyline and ahcieve a definite understanding.