So are you going to see the Astral Weeks shows? I was very wary at first. I got an email from Van's website a week and a half ago to let me know about the Albert Hall shows, and encourage me to get the "pre-sale" tickets. What the fuck is a pre-sale? I assumed it was a trick to get the most committed fans to commit the maximum amount of money. I hate the scummy tactics promoters use for big shows, and thank the Lord that I can see my favourite acts of the moment for about a tenner and without having to scramble to mucky sites like Seetickets or Ticketmaster. Anyway, the prices were £200-60, which was an offer I found easy to refuse. Happily many other people did too, so I was still able to get a £50 "restricted view" circle ticket direct from the venue yesterday evening.
Mostly I've stopped going to see Van live in recent years. After that 1988 epiphany, I just about never missed a tour. Then, coinciding with my move to London six years ago, Van seemed to restrict himself to the stately home and dinner club circuit, which is off limits. I saw him last year when he deigned to play Hammersmith Odeon — a perfunctory performance — and also on what I guess was the Magic Time tour in 2005 at Shepherds Bush Empire, though the gig was a month before the album came out.
It was a good show. Short, no encore, but good. When it started, the drummer was wearing a lounge jacket, and I thought to myself "I hope you're going to be working too hard to keep that on", but he was great despite never breaking sweat (the same guy had been demoted to percussion three years later). Anyway, good enough for me to be taken in by the usual "return to form" reviews, and buy my first new Van studio album for… let's think now… a decade.
And just as with Days Like This there are maybe two or three pretty good songs on it. I played this in the living room at lunchtime yesterday, feeling slightly woozy after 500 ml of OTT round the corner, and quizzed Lucy about where she'd heard it before. At first she drew a blank, as she always does at the pique of another pointless bloody trainspotter question. But as that subsided, she asked, hesitantly, "Did you play it to me in the car?" Yes, it came with us in the hire car on our holiday in Sicily, along with Push Barman…, FabricLive, Paid in Full, inter alia. So often with me the memory comes with a specific scene attached: in this case, the drive back from Noto to Siracusa (a Sunday, the day before Lucy gave me The Royal Theatre) and as we passed slowly along the main street running through Cassibile, we exchanged views about our favourite songs on the album. Mine were Just Like Greta, The Lion this Time (Van recycles himself again), and maybe Stranded. Not sure about hers.
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