VAN MORRISON
Live At Orangefield
(Orangefield)
Van Morrison's latest release, “Live At Orangefield”, is a welcome contrast from some of his recent patchy, almost perfunctory studio sets – it’s a tremendous live album, culled from three epochal concerts in 2014 in his native Belfast. It’s a double LP and single CD and some of this has been televised.
Orangefield is the Belfast area where the young George Ivan Morrison was schooled; the shows were recorded there shortly before the area was redeveloped. The album cover is an image of a well-scratched wooden school desk…and if you grew up in the 50s & 60s, such a sight will be familiar to you as a pupil… and as your canvas!
It must have been a very evocative homecoming for his Irish fans to behold. Van is in fine voice with a wonderful, responsive and supple 8-piece band, presenting 16 excellent renditions of songs right through from ‘Astral Weeks’ to ‘The Healing Game’.
I really like this album – they are great performances. If you are in any way a Van fan with a love of his irresistible Celtic soul feel, alongside his nostalgic recall of hometown places, pastimes and the fond childhood recollections he evokes, you might make this album a Van favourite. It is superbly recorded, a perfect vinyl pressing, great on CD.
The songs can cast you back into your own childhood and home town, making you smile inwardly at remembering your own growth and rites-of-passage days.
It opens with a gorgeous, measured segue of ‘Celtic Excavation’ / ’Into the Mystic’, perking up into ‘Cleaning Windows’ and through a moody ‘Moondance’ to tributes to Sam Cooke (‘You Send Me’) and Sinatra (a loose-limbed version of ‘That’s Life’).
There are satisfying, spiritual excursions where Van (as only Van can) will cast moods of depth and space, such as in ‘Got to Go Back’ and ‘Enlightenment’ – none more so than the spine-tingling, semi-spoken centrepiece of ‘On Hyndford Street’, Van invoking his youthful innocence and freedom…. ‘in the days before rock & roll’, as echoes of a hazy Medium Wave pop station, Radio Luxembourg, stir his memory.
If you only skim one track from this set and you’re just a Spotify track-snatcher, not a Van the Man devotee, make it ‘On Hyndford Street’ that you hear and absorb… I dare say that many would then ‘get’ Van’s muse. It’s a marvellous moment.
The audience is rapt and respectful – none of the boorish, spoiling hollering and whooping that has trashed many a live rock album when sound engineers tiresomely miked-up the crowd more than the band!
Apart from myriad unofficial live releases down the years and the occasional very fine official live Van album, he hasn’t indulged those decades of concert dates a great deal in his catalogue.
I regard the stupendous Caledonia Soul Orchestra’s “It’s Too Late To Stop Now!” (1973) as my favourite live album of all time…and some 50 years later, this document captures some wonderful moments of Van on-stage; ‘Orangefield’ can proudly sit on your shelves alongside that classic album!
