Music Arcades: Van Morrison: Tupelo Honey

So Van becomes the first to notch up four entries on Music Arcades in a single month. And that, along with the colourfully-clad-East-Belfast-hippy-on-Marin-County-ranch photos, may be the most remarkable thing about Tupelo Honey.

What did he sing about before he found his metier in songs of spiritual quest and his victimisation at the hands of music industry bullies, critics and… anyone who threatened to pay him any attention (plus anyone who didn't)? Not an awful lot, on this evidence. He yelled "Lord have mercy" a lot (John Peel famously said he was the only white man who had a licence to do that on his show). He anticipated some of the worst elements of rap by conjuring a spectacularly crass term for sex in I Wanna Roo You. He sang to his wife Janet Planet about how their life together was going to be wonderful (it turned out to be… short; I think they'd split before the next album came out, which Van explained by saying that the songs had actually been written some years previously). And he went on about moonshine whiskey long past its 'best before' date.

It says something that, since the 1994 tour and A Night in San Francisco I think of Brian Kennedy's version of the title track as the definitive one.

Clinton Heylin's book digs out Charlie Gillett's 1971 review of Tupelo Honey, the album:

[Morrison] has developed one of the most idiosyncratic vocal styles of our time, and justifies comparison with Buddy Holly, Smokey Robinson, Otis Redding, and Dylan. But what he hasn't got, and maybe never will have, is a hint of vulnerability, which gives listeners a way into the songs, and a role to play in them.