Three Van albums in the space of six days, again all down to the roll of the dice. This one followed Hymns to the Silence, but I've known it for a decade longer than that album.
I booked to go to the Fleadh in Finsbury Park in June 1993. I had two sets of friends going: Richard and Meike (not yet an item) and their London mates; and M, Mags and their Irish pals. M and I (not yet an item) drove from Sheffield to London and back in a day. I guess those journeys were part of becoming an item, though M kept her distance from me throughout the time at the festival itself. When I quizzed her about this in later years, she said she'd imagined that my London friends and I would be taking drugs. Not so! And thinking back on this answer, wouldn't it have been a little bizarre to travel 150 miles home in a car driven by someone who you suspected might have been taking drugs?
Van and Bob were the headline acts that attracted us there, though I now remember more about the sets by Goats Don't Shave and The Hothouse Flowers than I do about either of the principals. By the time Bob took the stage, we were all tired and a little overdosed with music. Blasé about Bob, indeed. So it's an image that I remember, not a sound: Van joining Bob for a song or two during the latter's set (One Irish Rover according to this source). The roadies had obviously added an extra guitar lead at short notice, and Van stood stage left, a taut lead extending horizontally back to stage centre where Bob stood. Van tugging at the lead, trying to un-snag and loosen it, like an extended umbilical cord reaching back to the motherlode and never quite free of it.
Too Long in Exile came out a few weeks before the Fleadh. I thought I needed to do some 'prep' for the Van show by getting the latest album. (Yes, this too seems a little bizarre, as he probably played nothing from the new album.) The trouble was my CD player was being repaired and unlikely to be returned to be before the event. So my copy of Too Long in Exile is the double vinyl one.
In fact this album is a more 'true' precursor of what was to follow a year later in 1994 (as described here): the collaborations with other singers, the medleys and cover versions; a proper little revue show. Clinton Heylin, in the book I mentioned two days ago is disparaging about Van's remake of Gloria with John Lee Hooker duetting with him. It's not groundbreaking, but I quite like it all the same. Which is more than I can say for the perfunctory paedophilia of Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl.
I thought it might be interesting to have a face-off between Heylin's account of this album and Johnny Rogan's. No dice, though, as Rogan only devotes a single paragraph to the album. Lots of music biographies are like that: enormous detail in the early years, but tapering off rapidly in more recent times, closer to the present moment. You'd think that details could be more easily found in the recent past, especially since the Web Years began, but writers and publishers assume that interesting moments in their subjects' lives, and perhaps noteworthy recordings as well, diminish almost to zero. How many musicians could warrant a book focusing solely on their later work
, as Miles Davis has?
Both Heylin and Rogan note the influence of King Pleasure on Van's approach to singing, around the Astral Weeks era, and Van covers KP's Moody's Mood for Love on this album. I downloaded the original from eMusic a year or so ago: can't say I could see what Van saw in him.
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