George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on August 31, 1945; his mother was a singer, while his father ardently collected classic American jazz and blues recordings. At 15, he quit school to join the local R&B band the Monarchs, touring military bases throughout Europe before returning home to form his own group, Them. Boasting a fiery, gritty sound heavily influenced by Morrison heroes like Howlin' Wolf, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Walter, Them quickly earned a devout local following and in late 1964 recorded their debut single, "Don't Start Crying Now." The follow-up, an electrifying reading of Big Joe Williams' "Baby Please Don't Go," cracked the U.K. Top Ten in early 1965. Though not a major hit upon its original release, Them's Morrison-penned "Gloria" endures among the true classics of the rock pantheon, covered by everyone from the Doors to Patti Smith. Lineup changes plagued the band throughout its lifespan, however, and at the insistence of producer Bert Berns, over time session musicians increasingly assumed the lion's share of recording duties. A frustrated Morrison finally left Them following a 1966 tour of the U.S., quitting the music business and returning to Belfast.
After Berns relocated to New York City to form Bang Records, he convinced Morrison to travel stateside and record as a solo artist; the sessions produced arguably his most familiar hit, the jubilant "Brown-Eyed Girl" (originally titled "Brown-Skinned Girl"), a Top Ten smash in the summer of 1967. By contrast, however, the resulting album, Blowin' Your Mind, was a bleak, bluesy effort highlighted by the harrowing "T.B. Sheets." The sessions were originally intended to produce only material for singles, so when Berns released the LP against Morrison's wishes, he again retreated home to Ireland while the album tanked on the charts. Berns suffered a fatal heart attack in late 1967, which freed Morrison of his contractual obligations and energized him to start working on new material.
His first album for new label Warner Bros., 1968's Astral Weeks, remains not only Morrison's masterpiece, but one of the greatest records ever made. A haunting, deeply personal collection of impressionistic folk-styled epics recorded by an all-star jazz backing unit including bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay, its poetic complexity earned critical raves but made only a minimal commercial impact. The follow-up, 1970's Moondance, was every bit as brilliant; buoyant and optimistic where Astral Weeks had been dark and anguished, it cracked the Top 40, generating the perennials "Caravan" and "Into the Mystic.”
The first half of the '70s was the most fertile creative period of Morrison's career. From Moondance onward, his records reflected an increasingly celebratory and profoundly mystical outlook spurred on in large part by his marriage to wife Janet Planet and the couple's relocation to California. After His Band and the Street Choir yielded his biggest chart hit, "Domino," Morrison released 1971's Tupelo Honey, a lovely, pastoral meditation on wedded bliss highlighted by the single "Wild Night." In the wake of the following year's stirring Saint Dominic's Preview, he formed the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, featured both on the studio effort Hard Nose the Highway and on the excellent live set It's Too Late to Stop Now. However, in 1973 he not only dissolved the group but also divorced Planet and moved back to Belfast. The stunning 1974 LP Veedon Fleece chronicled Morrison's emotional turmoil; he then remained silent for three years, reportedly working on a number of aborted projects but releasing nothing until 1977's aptly titled A Period of Transition.
Plagued for some time by chronic stage fright, Morrison mounted his first tour in close to five years in support of 1978's Wavelength; his performances became more and more erratic, however, and during a 1979 date at New York's Palladium, he even stalked off-stage in mid-set and did not return. Into the Music, released later that year, evoked a more conventionally spiritual perspective than before, a pattern continued on successive outings for years to come. Albums like 1983's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, 1985's A Sense of Wonder, and 1986's No Guru, No Method, No Teacher are all largely cut from the same cloth, employing serenely beautiful musical backdrops to explore themes of faith and healing. For 1988's Irish Heartbeat, however, Morrison teamed with another of his homeland's musical institutions, the famed Chieftains, for a collection of traditional folk songs.
Meanwhile, Avalon Sunset heralded a commercial rebirth of sorts in 1989. While "Whenever God Shines His Light," a duet with Cliff Richard, became Morrison's first U.K. Top 20 hit in over two decades, the gorgeous "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" emerged as something of a contemporary standard, with a Rod Stewart cover cracking the U.S. Top Five in 1993. Further proof of Morrison's renewed popularity arrived with the 1990 release of Mercury's best-of package; far and away the best-selling album of his career, it introduced the singer to a new generation of fans. A new studio record, Enlightenment, appeared that same year, followed in 1991 by the ambitious double set Hymns to the Silence, widely hailed as his most impressive outing in years.
Following the uniformity of his '80s work, the remainder of the decade proved impressively eclectic: 1993's Too Long in Exile returned Morrison to his musical roots with covers of blues and R&B classics, while on 1995's Days Like This he teamed with daughter Shana for a duet on "You Don't Know Me." For the Verve label, he cut 1996's How Long Has This Been Going On, a traditional jazz record co-credited to long time pianist Georgie Fame, and for the follow-up, Tell Me Something: The Songs of Mose Allison, he worked with guest of honor Allison himself. Morrison continued balancing the past and the future in the years to follow, alternating between new studio albums (1997's The Healing Game, 1999's Back on Top) and collections of rare and live material (1998's The Philosopher's Stone and 2000's The Skiffle Sessions and You Win Again).
It wasn't until 2002 that an album of new material surfaced, but in May his long-anticipated Down the Road was released. Three years later, Morrison issued Magic Time. Pay the Devil, a country-tinged set, appeared in 2006 on Lost Highway Records. That same year, Morrison released his first commercial DVD, Live at Montreux 1980 and 1974, drawn from two separate appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In 2008, Morrison released Keep It Simple, his first album of all-original material since 1999's Back on Top. In November of that same year, Morrison performed the entire Astral Weeks album live at two shows at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, which resulted in 2009's Astral Weeks: Live at the Hollywood Bowl album and Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl: The Concert Film. His 34th studio album, Born to Sing: No Plan B, recorded in Belfast, appeared in the fall of 2012. In 2015, Morrison made his debut for RCA Records with Duets: Re-Working the Catalogue, which found him sharing the mike on 16 songs with artists such as Michael Bublé, Steve Winwood, Mick Hucknall, and Joss Stone. After signing a deal with Sony Legacy to reissue much of his back catalog, the label issued It's Too Late to Stop Now...Vols. II, III, IV and DVD in June 2016. It consisted of unreleased music from the tour that produced the classic 1973 live album. Later that month, Morrison announced the release of an album of new studio set material. Released in September, Keep Me Singing offered 12 originals as well a cover version of Don Robey's "Share Your Love with Me." A year later, in September 2017, Morrison returned with his 37th album, Roll with the Punches, which saw him mixing new originals with renditions of blues and soul classics that inspired him by Sam Cooke, Bo Diddley, Little Walter and more. Guitarist Jeff Beck was a prominent guest. It peaked at number five on the Top 200 and number four in the U.K. He followed it less than three months later with Versatile, which was recorded in a handful of hotels in County Down. It featured Morrison delivering his own homage to jazz and iconic pop standards including George and Ira Gershwin's "A Foggy Day" and "They Can't Take That Away from Me," Cole Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You" (one of two advance singles along with "Makin' Whoopee"), "Let's Get Lost," "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," and "Unchained Melody," popularized by the Righteous Brothers. The covers are interspersed with six originals. - Jason Ankeny
Avalon Sunset is the nineteenth studio album by Northern Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison. It was released in 1989 by Mercury Records to both commercial and critical success.
This album was recorded in England at Woodhall Studio, Eden Studio, Olympic Studio, Westside Studio, and Townhouse Studio. It marked the first appearance with Morrison of Georgie Fame, who played the Hammond organ and also provided backup vocals and helped direct the band. Morrison and Fame would work together for most of the nineties.
The all new songs were rehearsed in two days and then recorded in another two days. Arty McGlynn (the guitarist) remarked about the band's feelings when the sessions ended "we still don't know if it's an album, or maybe a demo for an album." Morrison's reliance on spontaneity was evident on "Daring Night" where he can be heard calling out chord changes "one-four, one-four" (Gmaj to Cmaj) to Roy Jones near the song's ending. The album was previewed at a private concert at Ronnie Scott's club on 24 May 1989.
On Avalon Sunset, Rob Sheffield wrote, Morrison sang about God and love in a scat-influenced style, set against a musical backdrop of mellow folk rock. According to Donald Clarke, the album combined "religiosity and Celtic feeling, a sort of superior New Age music".
The album opens with "Whenever God Shines His Light", issued as a successful single that charted at #20 in the U.K. and was a duet with Cliff Richard. The album contains the religious ballad "Have I Told You Lately", which became a hit single for Morrison, reaching #12 on the Adult Contemporary Charts and was a bigger hit for Rod Stewart in 1993. This song was included on Morrison's 2007 album, Van Morrison at the Movies - Soundtrack Hits. Brian Hinton compares the idyllic female in "Orangefield" to Beatrice in the Divine Comedy.
Avalon Sunset was one of Morrison's most commercially successful albums, and his fastest-selling record in the United Kingdom, being certified gold soon after its release. The album was also met with critical acclaim. In a review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said Morrison has found new inspiration in more temporal themes, especially on the album's first side, although he cited the redemption-themed "Whenever God Shines His Light" as his most exuberant song since 1982's "Cleaning Windows". Spin magazine's Karen Schoemer called it an elegantly orchestrated record void of pain: "He celebrates nature, love and poetry too; this is contemplation without conflict, remembrances without bitterness. And no matter how esoteric things get, a charged sensuality permeates." In the Chicago Tribune, Greg Kot said "I'd Love to Write Another Song" is a return to his 1960s and 1970s peak on what is an otherwise good showcase for his insightful vocal delivery of simple yet evocative lyrics and a style of music that "strikes an artful middle ground between the visceral joys of Top 40 and the soothing aural wallpaper of New Age."
At the end of 1989, Christgau named Avalon Sunset the 22nd best album of the year in his list for the annual Pazz & Jop critics poll. The Times ranked it 63rd their 1993 list of "All Time Top 100 Albums". In The Encyclopedia of Popular Music (2006), Colin Larkin wrote that the record featured "quite immaculate love songs" from Morrison, along with a prominent sense of spirituality and nostalgia throughout, while Morrison biographer Erik Hage called it "a powerful statement [showing] the often turbulent muse had stabilized and was now a sublime force flowing through Van Morrison". AllMusic's Jason Ankeny was less enthusiastic and found it somewhat inconsistent but "nevertheless the work of a master craftsman, its lush orchestration and atmospheric production casting an irresistibly elegant spell".
Van Morrison scored one of his biggest commercial successes with Avalon Sunset, a record highlighted by the gorgeous "Have I Told You Lately," one of his most heartfelt love songs and a major radio hit which helped introduce his music to a new generation of listeners. Not a consistently strong LP, Avalon Sunset is nevertheless the work of a master craftsman, its lush orchestration and atmospheric production casting an irresistibly elegant spell; a deeply spiritual record, it also includes the standout opener, "Whenever God Shines His Light," a collaboration with Cliff Richard. - Jason Ankeny
Van Morrison spent much of the '80s being greeted with varying levels of commercial indifference on the U.S. album charts, and as the decade wore on, he seemed to drift into the sort of elder statesman status reserved for formerly top-selling artists whose work has irreversibly diverged from the mainstream. As it turned out, however, he still had a couple of big hits left in him.
Morrison's sales first started to perk up with Irish Heartbeat, a 1988 collaboration with the Chieftains that found the two acts working together on a set of material that, while largely traditional, felt fresher and more vital than a fair bit of the New Age-influenced music that made up some of Morrison's early-to-mid-'80s records. And although Morrison has repeatedly pointed out the folly of trying to discern any sort of path or pattern in his music, Heartbeat did seem to herald the arrival of a newly invigorated Van -- one who returned the following year with his 19th studio LP, Avalon Sunset.
While still incorporating elements of his meditative '80s output and the jazz-influenced sound that crept into records like 1987's Poetic Champions Compose, Sunset saw Morrison distilling his influences more clearly and consistently than he'd seemed able or willing during recent releases -- not only during radio-friendly numbers like the hits "Whenever God Shines His Light" and "Have I Told You Lately," but overall. Even at its least melodic (the spoken-word piece "Coney Island") and most nostalgic ("Orangefield"), the album boasted a sense of vitality that had occasionally gone missing over the years.
Of course, as an album artist, Morrison has generally tended to be more of a snapshot-taker than a sculptor, and Avalon Sunset is no exception. the record came together quickly, with two days of rehearsals and another two set aside for recording, and critics who'd weathered Morrison's artistic ups and downs were quick to point out that the album might have benefited from a more deliberately paced approach. But by this point, everyone knew that enduring Morrison's lows was worth it to experience his highs -- and anyway, fussing over every last detail would have been antithetical to his workmanlike approach to music in general.
More than anything, Avalon Sunset seemed to present a picture of a man at peace, which was a position he'd audibly struggled to attain throughout his career while attempting to reconcile his growing fame -- and the business obligations that came as part of the package -- with his efforts to strip away all that outside interference and simply play.
"This is all an illusion," Morrison insisted when asked about his career during a 1987 interview with Q. "It's something that you're making up: you're making up that I'm a performer who's going to go out on stage and put this thing across, so it's a bit like acting. You're taking a hell of a lot for granted. And then the audience is taking a lot for granted as well, because they agree with that way of looking at me. But for me, all I wanted to do was start playing. It was like A-Level material, learning from all these records. It was all very ear-orientated stuff, it wasn't orientated along the lines of 'I'm a personality and I'm going to put myself across and wear these clothes.'"
That disconnect, explained Morrison, stemmed from his often-repeated insistence that he got into professional music the same way anyone else starts a career -- as a job. "When I started playing, I went down the union and said 'I'm a professional musician, give me a card,'" he continued. "So they gave me a card, and I began to play in various bands and get work. And that was it. But it was for the music itself, never the show, although that did enter into it. And that's really what my entrance point was, and that hasn't changed. But I think it's difficult to find a way of doing music that doesn't have all these peripheral attachments to it."
As he told writer Mick Brown in 1986, "I don't really have ambitions" -- which makes it tempting to wonder whether Morrison derived much satisfaction from the enthusiastic commercial reaction to Avalon Sunset, which included some of the fastest album sales of his career and a Top 20 U.K. hit single in "Whenever God Shines His Light," an unlikely seeming duet with British pop legend Cliff Richard. On the other side of the pond, Morrison notched another adult contemporary hit with "Have I Told You Lately," which would soon storm the pop charts courtesy of a cover recorded by Rod Stewart.
To whatever extent he may or may not have been aware of the response to Avalon Sunset, its direction proved to be a comfortable one for Morrison, who returned with an album that more or less served as a sequel with 1990's Enlightenment. Curmudgeonly reputation aside, he sounded abnormally happy. "Psychologists will tell you that artists have to be in a state of despair before they can produce great work. But I don't think that: it just feels better, because you think that, although you're depressed, you're going to come out of it with something," he told Q. "But in my case I know it doesn't produce better work. I produce better work if I'm content. I can't create that feeling if I'm in a state of conflict."
Avalon Sunset and Enlightenment started off a particularly prolific decade for Morrison, who followed them up in 1991 with his first-ever double studio LP, Hymns to the Silence. Between 1989 and 2012, he released a dozen albums of original material, most of which peaked inside the Billboard Top 10 -- but true to form, he's never seemed to put his renewed pop stardom into consideration when entering the studio; you never know which genres he's going to focus on when Morrison decides to cut a new record, but you can always count on the results being inscrutably Morrison.
"You have to remember that writing those sorta songs is not reality, it's more like trance, dream, y'know, like dreamwork," he mused during a 1989 interview with NME. "The mythical thing can enter the creating but there's the mythical place and the real place. And there's both ... I get it between waking and sleeping. Or, when I'm doing something else. I don't sit down and think I'm gonna write about subject X or subject Y. I could be doing something and an impression comes in from outside and the song emerges out of that. It's never thought about or contrived."
"Sometimes it's an experience, and sometimes it's just a gig," he added in a conversation with David Wild. "Sometimes you get half way there, sometimes you get all the way there. It's never the same. It's very unpredictable. You work from the chaos. You work the material. There's no set pattern. What I do is just as much a mystery to me as it is to you."
It's a mystery he seemed to grasp fairly tightly with Avalon Sunset, and one he's managed to keep in his sights more often than not over the course of one of rock's most impressive careers -- not that it's ever impressed him much. "I'm just me," he shrugged to Q. "A singer and a songwriter, and that's it.” - Jeff Giles
When I started getting into Van Morrison I was amazed by his voice strength and pitch; by the time I had only listened to Moondance, which for me was the perfect record, consisting of ten exquisite tracks. I wanted to know more about him and one day searching in my father's music library I eventually came across this album and started listening to it.
It was not as impressive as the 1970 hit, but I still had a feeling that Van Morrison was really precise and accurate in composing music and lyrics, that he was a "poetic champion", to quote his 1987 record.
This time not all the songs caught me as Moondance ones did, but I found many good stuff in it.
I would recommend for instance "Have I Told You Lately"", one of the most romantic songs I've ever heard, or "Orangefield", with its dreamy atmosphere of days gone by.
If you are a really strong Christian believer, but even if you - like me - can sometimes just appreciate the music without believing in what it says, you'll like for sure "When Will I Ever Learn To Live In God", "Whenever God Shines His Light" and "These Are The Days", whose mystic lyrics and catchy sounds will certainly please you.
In the end, I'd say that this album can't be ignored, probably it's not the best to get familiar with the Northern Irish singer, but it's a must if you want to go beyond his greatest successes and appreciate him a little bit more. - eddie95 This listing is for a rare, out of print PROMO CD title - a USED / OPENED, in Near Mint minus overall condition PROMO CD PRESSED and ISSUED by POLYDOR Records, of a highly collectible title, featuring -
Van Morrison
PROMO CD Title -
Excerpts From Avalon Sunset
Track Listing -
1. Have I Told You Lately