Given that there are not many – if any at all – post Healing Game albums on there, maybe we should do an informal (no points awarded) worst – OK then, “worthy of reappraisal” – five Van M album poll.
Logical cut off point would seem to be 2000 after which everything seems – to these ears anyway – just lame cocktail noodling
In no particular order, I’d go for
Hard Nose
Period of Transition
Too Long in Exile
Back on Top
His Band and the Street Choir*
* Narrowly beats out Wavelengh on the basis that I dig out the latter far more often (i.e. very rarely) than Street Choir (i.e. hardly ever – maybe I should give it a spin)
In the interests of balance I should mention that His Band… is one of only three Van Morrison albums I own.
for all its faults, there are three terrific singalongavan songs on Period- Joyous Sound, Heavy Connection and Kansas City.
Personally speaking, I’ve always liked Common One. Remember him doing a stunning live version of Rave On John Donne at the Dominion Theatre in March 83
I was there too (possibly, as there were multiple nights), Rave On coming from Inarticulate Speech of the Heart of course.
Blimey, you’re right!
Was convinced it was on CO. Probably getting mixed up with Summertime in England, which, iirc, he also did at the Dom show I was at (still one of the best gigs I ever saw).
you’re also right about his being on for more than one night. He did two or three years of multi-night residencies back then.
also there, and also one of the best gigs I have ever seen. Summertime in England particularly magnificent as I recall
I saw him a few times in that period and SIE was a real highlight, with an electrifying climactic call-and-response duel, usually with Pee Wee Ellis. This was pre- Brian Kennedy. (This was pre- Brian Kennedy).
Good work, Black Type!
Re: Brian K
Van’s mini-me. Last seen on Celeb Come Dine with Me. Probably lost because his food kept repeating.
Ho ho! Ho ho!
“Did you ever hear about Wordsworth and Coleridge?
They were smokin’ up in Kendal
By the lakeside”
Marvellous.
Street Choir is great.
Wavelength, Transition, Hard Nose weakest until the mid 90s. He was more consistent in the 80s than the 70s for me.
Despite it’s appearance on many many Greatest albums ever lists, I would start with Astral Weeks.
I never ever play it, not sure why, it’s just not my got to Van.
Add to that, Hard Nose The Highway, Period Of Transition, Common One and Avalon Sunset (probably the Cliff factor doesn’t help).
Not that any of these are bad albums, they just remain on the shelf, unplayed.
One of the delights about being a music hoarder is you forget you have certain albums, and then you invariably stumble across them whilst looking for something else.
If Discogs ever vanishes off the face of the earth, then I’ll be absolutely fucked..
Agree on AW. I do like Hard Nose if only for Snow in San Anselmo.
Common One is my absolute favourite – beautiful expanses of music. It’s definitely worth exploring. And…
I think Common One is my favourite too.
Hey, I’m an overweight sociopath too – maybe I am Van Morrison!
Take me back
Take me back to Hull, where it’s still basically the fifties anyway
Smoked some illegally smuggled Drum tobacco I got off a Kurdish bloke on Spring Bank
Philip Larkin and Alan Plater corresponded, corresponded, corresponded
Listenin’ to The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death in the midnight hour
The commentary from the KCom stadium comin’ through the ether
And we let the haddock and chips go
*drops coin into cup*
Fank you, gavnah!
*flinches*
…let the goldflinch go….
Too Long In Exile, His Band, his Street Choir (with the fabulous “Domino” being the exception),Whats Wrong With This Picture, Side Two of “Moondance”, what an incredible fall off after the magnificent opening side and thats it for me as I stopped listening and buying after Magic Time…….Oh and i still think “Hard Nose” is vastly underrated….
A man of wealth & taste is old Bang em in. Hard Nose is a belter, some wise people (ie me) think it his best.
It is a fantastic piece of work, especially in its original double album configuration, which only Lodey here appears to give a shit about!
The gatefold sleeve you mean – from when albums presented themselves with style and substance, rather than in a shitty little plastic case.
Hard Nose has a lovely spread of artwork, lost on the single sleeve reissues, which is, sadly, all I own now. I’d buy a decent green label copy just to get the sleeve, but it’d cost me about £50 nowadays! Too much for an album I already own twice over.
Noooooonononononnoooooo … Van recorded it as a double album, and Warners hacked it back to a single. You want it, PM me, but you seem to be a disinterested lot at t’Word. I’d of thought …
Just perm any 5 from those released in last 10 yrs. Dull RnB retreads. The last VM which had any magic was indeed Magic Time from 2005.
The whole idea was to pick five albums from before he started doing lazy wine bar noodling…
yebbut, I still contend that Keep Me Singing and Three Chords and the Truth have some great stuff on them, despite the awful titles and cover artwork (They are Van Morrison albums after all)
I also enjoy the Keep Me Singing album. Some very good songs on here.
Soz didn’t read the instructions (as with most things I do or rather don’t do), in which case
Avalon
Common One (hugely overrated IMHO)
Period of Transition
Tupelo
Band and street Choir
You rebel, you!
Unfamiliar with “Soz didn’t read the instructions (as with most things I do or rather don’t do), in which case” – is this a contractual release album?
Yeah – it’s quite rare mainly outtakes from the ‘No Fucking Lockdown’ sessions
No Method, No Guru, No Teacher, No Lockdown, No Ass Bitch No Backstage Pass
If I am playing by the rules and staying strictly pre-2000, I would genuinely struggle to come up with 5 I don’t rate as at least very good in parts. I would certainly list these (though they all have tracks I wouldn’t want to do without) –
Sense of Wonder – just dull, I think
Too Long in Exile – Too Long in total
Back on Top and Days Like This – both described as returns to form but were nothing of the sort.
That’s it. If I had to pick one more I would go for His Band but only because it pales alongside the magnificent other records he put out in the first half of the 70s.
God, I’d forgotten all about SOW. One of the few pre-2000 Van albums I had but never upgraded to CD. Back on Top was just woeful.
I quite like “A Sense of Wonder” … apart from that bizarre back cover photo of Van the Man dressed as a matador or something.
Like it too, agree with Exile, BOT and DLT (shudders) though.
Though I do have a sneaking admiration for the title track of Days Like This. Only Van could come up with a song that sounds upbeat, nostalgic and romantic enough for the Irish Tourist Board to adopt it, when it fact it’s the usual diatribe against the business freeloaders, Judas kissers, and people who just don’t understand him. It’s a kind of genius, that.
And that bizarre front cover with him…SMILING! Compare and contrast with Poetic Champions Compose.
You should see the set of gnashes on yer man on Astral Weeks live
That’s a good album, even if I Believe I’ve Transcended reminds me too much of Vic Reeves as Loyd Grosman: “I’ve just cogitated”
But like all his albums there is always the odd diamond lying around and Back On Top does contain the magnificent autumn gold of “When The Leaves Come Falling Down”
My top 5 chose themselves, but this was a real challenge. In the end, after a great deal of heart searching, I chose these. In no particular order…
A Period of Inarticulate
How Long Has This Compose Been Going On
Hymns to the Fleece
Too Long in Avalon
What’s Wrong with Silence
Tchuh! you forgot
St Dominic’s Transition
Keep it Common Length
Blowin’ Your Moon
Prophet On Top
It’s Too Late To How Long Has This Been Going On Now, Honey
Yebbut I love those…
And one you forgot
Have I told you lately how much I hate Bert Berns
I very much divide Van into everything up to Veedon Fleece, which I adore, and everything after, which I mostly dislike. To keep it fair, I’d swap Into the Music from the latter with Hardnose the Highway from the former, both of which are anomalies compared to the releases that surround them.
There are occasional worthwhile tracks on Transition, Wavelength and Common One, but then things fall off a cliff after that. I have, sitting in front of me as I type, copies of Beautiful Vision and Inarticulate Speech that my parents gave me for a birthday sometime in the late 80s, and I’m as perplexed by them now as I was then. They sound like Muzak, and are unrecognisable from the artist of a decade before.
My only other data point is the two disk Still on Top compilation and the Philosopher’s Stone outtakes collection. I’ve listened multiple times to both with open ears, but once things hit 1981 or so I find it unbearable. This seems to align with the rise of Kenny G-style alto sax warbling and overt Celtic instrumentation, so maybe it’s as simple as that.
I think it highlights the mercurial nature of the thing I love in early Van Morrison records. I can’t identify why I love them and can’t stand, for example, someone like Jackson Browne who was mining a similar seam of simple 3-4 chord diatonic songs.
Ooh controversial! He did move to a more mellow sound in the 80s, but Beautiful Vision is chockful of wonderful songs. And I like all his 80s albums to some degree or another, an improvement on the dodgy mid 70s. Things begin to go wrong for me in the 90s, although everything up to The Healing Game is pretty worthwhile.
I had always thought that Neil Young as the artist who had the most number of albums that his fans would buy and then listen to once.
Reading this thread, now I’m not so sure. The lack of repetition in the lists is impressive.
Was thinking about starting a similar thread on NY, but you beat me to it so away you go.
Timewise, think that Neil’s “least best” albums would be a lot more widely spread
Neil was unsurpassable in the 70s, mostly awful in the 80s (unlike Van), back on form in the 90s and then this century mostly unlistenable. Take any 5 since 2000 for me apart from Psychedelic Pill and Le Noise probably.
Go for it, Jay! I don’t have an opinion on Neil so I wouldn’t be able to curate that thread.
We’ve ‘done’
favourite Neil Young tracks
Neil Young playlists
and Alexis Petridis's ranking of the albums
but apparently not the definitive Afterword take on best Neil albums.
Neil Young peaked when he scored the winning goal for Manchester City in the 69 Cup Final and scored in the 1970 Cup Winners’ Cup Final, after that it was all downhill… which, coincidentally, is EXACTLY the time when Neil Young, the Canadian singer-songwriter, peaked.
Never saw them in the same room together, did you?
The City player would walk in, the singer-songwriter would have left, the singer-songwriter walks in, the City man’s playing a pre-season friendly at Bury.
Spooky.