Van the man delivers a glorious mixed jukebox
Van Morrison Electric Ballroom, London NW1 ★★★★★
Inimitable and seemingly indefatigable, like Bob Dylan, Van Morrison has apparently arrived at the “endless tour” stage of his career, where the road is his home. In a time before coronavirus, Morrison, who is now 75, was probably performing more regularly than at any other time in his life, and he evidently has no intention of letting the small matter of a global pandemic get in his way.
Having resumed live shows last week with an open air concert in Newcastle, this was the first of four socially-distanced London performances, two at the Electric Ballroom, in the more intimate sort of setting that he obviously most enjoys, and two more – forthcoming – at the London Palladium.
What actually constitutes “social distancing”? Here it was a matter of masks on as you entered; masks mercifully off as you took your seat. But the novelty, not to say sheer joy, of being able to watch live music again after so long was palpable – even before Morrison took the stage.
Watching him these days is akin to having access to a glorious jukebox of blues, jazz, R&B and celtic soul.
By my reckoning, he must have more than 500 original compositions to draw on, in addition to the countless standards he’s enjoyed, absorbed or recorded over the years. And this performance was a thrilling excursion through his own back catalogue, jazz and R&B standards and obscurities, and tributes to his favourite singers, all superbly crafted by Morrison and a six-piece band.
As if setting the scene for a journey back through the past, the evening began in a gently swinging mood, with the title song from his most recent album, Three Chords and the Truth, before immediately jumping back 56 years to the Them hit, Baby Please Don’t Go, segueing into another staple from that period, Muddy Waters’s Got My Mojo Workin’. A rapt rendition of Lonely Avenue was
Jumpin’
With Symphony Sid. For BB King’s Rock Me Baby, he was joined by the redoubtable British singer Chris Farlowe, trading phrases that had Morrison breaking into laughter.
All this conjured up the image of Morrison rifling through his record collection and plucking out favourites at random. And what a singular, compelling figure Morrison is; short and squat, dressed in his signature dark suit, trilby and shades, a man in his own world, apparently oblivious to the fact that there’s an audience in the room at all, his right arm pumping as he urges the band on.
Toying with his own back catalogue, Have I Told You Lately was reconfigured as swing; Got to Go Back, a memoir of his Belfast childhood, was sung in crooning, lounge-bar style. But the evening’s crowning moment was the stately, rhapsodic And the Healing
Has Begun, a song that fuses the elements of spiritual transcendence and carnal love – that “backstreet jelly roll” – in a way that only he can do.
Morrison’s singing has weathered with age, gruffer now, of course – a man who does not so much perform a song as take possession of it, bending and pushing its shape in a series of growls, cries, slurs and moans, the phrasing and timing immaculate. In the autumn of his years, Morrison is utterly comfortable in his artistry and, it appears, his own skin. I have seen him perform more times than I can count, but I can’t recall ever seeing him more mellow, at ease and, dare one say it, content, on stage than this.
“It’s not high finance, it’s called heart and soul,” he sang, revisiting Raincheck, from the album Days Like This. “Call me raincheck, I won’t fade away, I won’t fade away/ I don’t fade away, I don’t fade away, unless I want to…”
Van Morrison is at the London Palladium Sept 23-24; vanmorrison.com
I can’t recall seeing him more mellow, at ease and content on stage than this