Van morrison

There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name of an artist and a comprehensive history of their live performances will appear, spanning decades long gone to the hour just past. Setlist.fm is both a useful resource and a massive spoiler-fest; the music equivalent of skipping to the last page of a book. Those planning to see a band can discover in advance most of the songs they are likely to hear. Those whose interest starts waning mid-gig can check to see how many songs are left. Those who stayed at home can soothe themselves with the thought that the artist failed to play all, or indeed any, of their favourite tracks.

Pop quiz time: which act was named Melody Maker Group of the Year in 1975? The answer is not, as you might expect, some testosterone-fuelled blues-rock outfit or a hip gang of proto-punk gunslingers, but a gaggle of semi-professional Irish musicians who performed trad tunes sitting down, dressed for church in cardigans, sensible shoes, shirts and ties. The Chieftains were so far from rock and roll they met it coming back the other way. On the cover of Irish Heartbeat, a later collaboration with Van Morrison, they could be mistaken for a loose affiliation of farmers, minor office clerks and earnest ornithologists waiting for a bus outside the town hall. It was a brilliant disguise. The Chieftains wore their radicalism lightly, but radical they were.

Next week The The release The Comeback Special, a 24-track live album documenting the band’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in June 2018. Meanwhile, Steely Dan’s last man standing, Donald Fagen, has just released two live albums recorded in 2019. Their musical qualities notwithstanding, these releases feel like relics from a lost world. Much like the fondue set, the live album is much reduced from its 1970s and 1980s heyday, when a pretty blonde sideman-turned-solo artist called Peter Frampton could somehow shift eight million copies of the anodyne Frampton Comes Alive! The stand-alone contemporary live album is now an endangered species; MTV’s Unplugged series in the 1990s offered a final down-home twist on the format.

The dopes with tropes are at it again. This time, their target is Van Morrison. But Sir Ivan is, as Billy Joel would say, an innocent man. Morrison has been called a crank and anti-Semite because of the lyrics to his new single, ‘They Own the Media’. The Guardian, which really does have a problem with Jews, has called him a tinfoil milliner. The Forward, which used to be a serious Jewish paper, claims that Van’s title ‘espouses a classic anti-Semitic trope’. No, it doesn’t. What the lyrics say is that our media are owned by a small number of people. That their outlets habitually lie to our faces. That they want us to believe that ‘ignorance is bliss’, so let’s leave the decisions to the experts. And that we’ll ‘never get wise’ until we look behind the curtain.