Music Arcades: Van Morrison: The Philosopher's Stone

I had this album out just a couple of months ago, when I was reading Johnny Rogan's Van Morrison: No Surrender, so it's one of the first that the Boy has heard twice. He is, after all, kind of named after Van — though of course he's not. Did he show a flicker of recognition when he heard it? I couldn't swear to that, but I do promise you that he closed his eyes during Van's Try for Sleep. We really can have no grumble about the Boy's behaviour or temperament thus far, but getting enough sleep during the day is something that we're all having to work at: as long as there is light, there is too much to look at with curiosity and wonder.

But back to Van. What a great album this is! Thirty previously unreleased tracks, recorded between 1971 and 1988, promises the sticker on the front. First, I couldn't point to a single duff song among them. Second, for songs recorded at different times, in different places, with different musicians, each of the two discs hangs together really well as an album (admittedly the first one covers only three or four years, mostly with a similar line-up). A few of the songs from the late '70s feature Herbie Armstrong on guitar. Herbie knew Van from Belfast back in the days of showbands, before Them, in the early '60s. But I and my Psychology Branch colleagues knew him in the early '90s as the landlord who launched and ran the Slug and Fiddle on Ecclesall Road. He moved on after a few years, initially within Sheffield, and the pub is now owned by a students union and called the Varsity or something.

I remember Tom Paulin on Late Review mentioning For Mr [Dylan] Thomas as one of his highlights of 1998 (the year The Philosopher's Stone was released). I was impressed by the lyrics, by Van's ability to step outside his usual tropes — aside from the line "Stage-up like Flastaff or the wild welsh Rimbaud", which is very typical of him — until I read the CD booklet more closely and noticed the song was written by Robin Williamson, once of The Incredible String Band. Then I was impressed that he had written it so well.

The back of the CD says "The Unreleased Tapes, Volume One". As Rogan points out in No Surrender, Van owns just about all the rights to his old recordings, through his company Exile Productions, so there's nothing stopping him releasing Volume Two. But while Bob is up to Volume Eight, and even Neil is on his third (helpfully titled Volume 00 in the Performance Series), Van is keeping any further outtakes and archives to himself. In fact, he's re-performing Astral Weeks, one of the few recordings he doesn't own, so that he can issue that on his own label. No doubt it all makes sense to him. He won't be explaining it, that's for sure.