Van Morrison: Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl

You'll have your own opinion of this, I'm sure. And of the Astral Weeks Live shows at the Albert Hall. You perhaps were lucky enough to be able to afford one of the £200 seats where you could actually see and hear what was going on. I saw quite a few of the £150 seats were empty on the Sunday; but me, I was up 50 metres above the action in the £50 seats (where it was crammed). For our money we had the privilege of saying "I was there", but it was impossible to tell whether it was any good or not. Paul, who initially scorned me for even going, got a good seat at short notice, and he was impressed.

Hell, for all I know, you may have flown over to LA to see the first shows where this album was recorded. The first I knew that Van had decided to revive Astral Weeks was when Bob Lefsetz raved about those shows (while also noting that the venue was half empty, thanks to the ticket prices). But you can never tell with him: everything's black and white, breathtaking in its awesomeness or in its stupidity. And it's clear from his review that he hasn't seen any other Van shows for a very long time: yes, we know he can take our breath away whenever the spirit moves him; it's just that the spirit has been finding him hard to budge for the last decade and a half, maybe longer.

The cynic in me can't help feeling this CD is a pretty cynical release. It starts with the cover, as cheap, shoddy and unimaginative as Van's new teeth (captured in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it smile) are expensive, prisitine… and unimaginative. I remember reading an interview with Van where he moaned that his deal with Warners at the time meant he'd never seen any money from the original Astral Weeks. Evidently it still grates that Warner Chappell will get publishing money from the new album. So Van spliced the old songs with new ones, published by the enigmatically -titled Van Morrison Music Publishing Company, so that Warner Chappell's share of the royalties would be diluted and his own increased. Thus Listen to the Lion is now recast as Listen to the Lion/The Lion Speaks, the trick being that The Lion Speaks is an instrumental that, to these ears, is not so radically different from the instrumental section of older versions of Listen to the Lion.

I Believe I've Transcended is the title of the new song soldered onto the back of Astral Weeks's title track. And while it's clear that Van hasn't transcended the harsh ways of the music business, the beginning of Listen to the Lion still gives me goosebumps. For me, though, it's Ballerina, particularly the second half, where Van genuinely transcends. He still has it in him to take a song, and you with it, outside time.

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