Guest listener - Daniel Maier
Who’s Daniel when he’s at home?
I’m a comedy writer who spent ten years watching the telly for Harry Hill’s TV Burp. More recently I’ve written things with Charlie Brooker, like A Touch Of Cloth, the DVD boxset of which is just a tenner on Amazon.
Daniel’s Top 3 albums ever?
Usual caveats: if you asked me tomorrow, if the rest of Funhouse was as good as the first eleven minutes, etc etc.
1. Julian Cope, Fried
2. Tim Buckley, Happysad
3. The Velvet Underground, Loaded
What great album has he never heard before?
Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
Released in 1968
Before we get to Daniel, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Astral Weeks
Let’s try and get a sense of the lives he led before he got there.
George Ivan Morrison had a relatively normal childhood in East Belfast. Well, normal apart from the visions and out of body experiences.
On one occasion he said he was lying in bed with his eyes closed when suddenly he found himself floating around the ceiling. On another, he looked down the street and started to picture Spanish castles in the distance.
I like him already.
As he grew older, and stopped floating around his room, he developed a keen interest in American music - courtesy of a father who owned one of the largest record collections in Ireland.
And what changed him was hearing Leadbelly. Despite Morrison being only 10 years old at the time he developed a taste for songs about prison life, women, liquor, and cattle herding. So much so that he would later say that “hearing Leadbelly was the best thing since Swiss Cheese” - a slightly weird expression which leads me to believe that Van Morrison thought sliced bread was overrated.
Unlike his father, content just to listen, the young Morrison decides to get involved - to be a participant. First he learns guitar and then he starts dabbling with poetry about escapism, love, and precocious young girls. What can I say, he was an only child.
At the age of 14, an opportunity presents itself when he sees a BBC ad looking for talent. He turns up, adds his own words to a traditional folk song, and does his best Leadbelly impression in front of a confused and unimpressed panel.
Not a great start for our hero then. Turned down by the BBC in what appears to be an early incarnation of The Voice - minus that fella from the Kaiser Chiefs who always wears waistcoats.
Still, he wasn’t going to let that stop him.
The skiffle boom of the late ‘50s saw an emergence of teenage bands with great names and Morrison joined a load of them - The Sputniks, Midnight Special, and The Thunderbolts to list a few. His first real breakthrough, though, came when he joined The Monarchs - part of the dominant “showband” genre unique to Ireland at the time. The showbands were a curious mixture of sentimentality and pop tunes, shiny suits and dance steps - as far away from Leadbelly as you could imagine. However, Morrison was serving his apprenticeship, performing on stage at night whilst working a series of cleaning jobs during the day.
He worked for a spell as window cleaner, which he later immortalised in song.
He also worked for a spell as a meat cleaner, which he never immortalised in song because no one wants to hear a song about cleaning meat.
Despite the multiple cleaning jobs, Van Morrison and The Monarchs managed worked up a head of steam and were soon given the opportunity to tour Germany - that weird '60s tradition of sending British bands to play 10 hour sets whilst people threatened to beat you up if you weren’t good enough. Still, the visceral danger of these gigs, along with their relentless pace, provided the perfect boot camp for Morrison to hone his emerging talent.
I’ve often thought they should bring this tradition back. Too many bands since haven’t been threatened with a good kick-in 8 hours into their set and they’re definitely worse off because of it. The Levellers, for example, would have been drastically improved, or at least regularly beaten up, if they’d had a six month stint on The Reeperbahn.
But anyway ….
When the German tour was over The Monarchs stopped off in London, and it’s here that Morrison sees the way forward - away from the shiny suits and the orchestrated dance steps.
A series of R&B groups had sprung up whilst they’d been away and Morrison saw one that provided the epiphany. The band in question were the relatively unsuccessful and unheralded Downliners Sect but it wasn’t so much their quality that impressed - it was their attitude and the fact they were just doing it without any affectations or conscious attempts at “entertaining”.
Morrison looked at them and said “That’s it, that’s the sort of group I want to have”
With that, he returned to Belfast and joined a band called The Gamblers - who eventually changed their name to Them.
Cryptic adverts started to appear in the local paper -
14th April - “Who are? What are? Them?”
15th April - “When? And Where? Will you see Them?”
16th April - “Rhythm and Blues and Them - When?”
Thankfully, on the 17th of April, they stopped all this nonsense and simply announced that a Rhythm and Blues band called Them were going to be playing at The Maritime Hotel.
Thank god for that.
At the Maritime they started a residency that caused a stir. Morrison had become a man possessed - a whirling dervish on the stage alternating between singing, playing harmonica, and occasionally diving into the audience. And Belfast lapped it up. The crowds grew bigger and the band’s notoriety increased.
Within 3 months of their first rehearsal they were signed to Decca Records by Dick Rowe - the man who had turned down The Beatles but had signed The Rolling Stones. What follows is a series of garageband classics that sounded like they were made in Detroit but actually came from Belfast. Gloria is the one with the legacy, thanks in no small part to Patti Smith, but honestly, have a listen to their rendition of Baby, Please Don’t Go.
It’s an absolute racket - in October 1964 when people didn’t make rackets. With a young Jimmy Page on guitar, with a cool '60s organ, it stops and starts before picking up pace and running you over. And it’s Morrison that does it - he sounds so intense, so authoritative, as he berates you to keep away from New Orleans.
I’ve still never been there and I probably never will.
Despite the early string of hits, the problems came thick and fast for Them. In short, they’re a shambles - impossible to manage and rebellious to a fault. They fell out with promoters, managers, audiences, and themselves - precipitating a series of line-up changes that even The Fall would be ashamed of.
One gig summed it up - Morrison walked on stage, with a joint and a glass of wine, and said to the audience “To wank or not to wank, that is the question”. Who needs that in the Swinging '60s? No one. That’s who.
It all came to an inevitable end during a tour of the States when a group of shady characters offered to shoot Them’s manager in return for $2000. The band thought about it, a lot, but ultimately refused and decided to go their separate ways without the need for killing anyone.
No more Them.
Morrison subsequently disappears for a while, depressed and anxious that his career appears to be over - forever to be known as that bloke from Them who seemed a bit mad. However, Bert Berns at Bang Records (I know, rolls off the tongue) had other ideas. He tracks Morrison down and offers to sign him as a solo artist. Desperate, backed into a corner, Morrison puts pen to paper on one of the worst contracts ever - the terms of which committed Morrison to 5 years, during which time they could call on him to produce 62 songs a year!
And he all got was £2500 in advance.
Still, he gets off to a great start again, travelling to New York and recording the brilliant Brown Eyed Girl - a song that I danced to every weekend, without fail, at The Venue in New Cross between 1989 and 1995.
History repeats though and the problems reappear. The
rebellion, the arguing, the conflict of approach. Whilst Berns is more concerned
about the commerciality of the songs, Morrison is focussed purely on their
“feel”. No longer interested
in writing a 3 minute hit, his songs have become more open ended - oblivious to
structure and limitations. The argument rages, the disagreement deepens.
Eventually, and I bet you didn’t see this coming, Berns collapses and dies of a
heart attack. To make a terrible situation worse, his widow blames Morrison
for her husband’s death and, as the inheritor of his contract, effectively puts
him out to pasture.
No more Van Morrison.
With nothing else to do, with a label not interested in releasing any of his records, he goes to Boston and starts to develop the songs that would become Astral Weeks. Did he think they would ever see the light of day? Broke, and broken, had he finally thought he’d come to the end of the road?
The lives that he led to get here. The only child obsessed with his father’s record collection; the bands after the bands after the bands that he joined; the stint in Germany; the electric stint in the Maritime Hotel; the rise and fall of Them; the solo career that was over before it had started.
It had come to this - holed up in Boston, twiddling his thumbs with a new sound.
And then he was given one more chance.
Warner Brothers swooped in and negotiated a deal with Berns’ widow so Morrison could resume his career. What made them gamble on such damaged goods is unclear but they appeared at just the right time to give the story yet one more lifeline.
Not only that, they give him free rein.
Morrison hooks up with jazz producer Lewis Merenstein and some of the best players around and, in just 3 sessions, they record Astral Weeks - Morrison isolated in a booth whilst everyone else tried their best to connect with him. He hadn’t even met them before, they hadn’t even rehearsed. There were no lead sheets, nothing planned in advance, it just happened there and then - a magical coming together that doesn’t remind you of anything else.
On first listen it’s rambling, incoherent and, spectacularly devoid of choruses. Nothing pulls you in, you’re deliberately kept at a distance. Even Morrison, at times, seems stuck in the groove - repeating words and phrases before having the confidence to move on. And you have to remember that your first listen was also theirs, that this is how it must have sounded to them in the studio when it came together on the spot.
Were they aware that it would endure? That it would get you in the end?
Because it very much does. Sometime around the 38th listen, maybe around 17 years after you’ve first heard it, it very much does. You’re up to speed and you’re inside.
And it’s his past that makes the album - the battles that he’d won and lost, the memories that he’d harboured. Everything gets thrown in, and nothing’s spared as Morrison pours it all out. It’s an album that sounds like it’s been made in twilight - built upon a lifetimes’ worth of experience.
Yet, remarkably, Morrison was just 23 years old - in some respects, he’d barely had a past at all.
And maybe that explains it.
Because for all the talk of pain that exists in this record I have to confess to never finding it. Too often it catches the breeze and swirls, too often it’s the lightness of touch that rises and keeps everything gloriously afloat. Yes, there’s a cliff edge, a threat implicit in the words, but the “feel” is of a young man who turns his back and walks away - who realises what’s ahead of him.
That’s the album for me, that’s the “feel”.
For all the lives that he led to get here, it’s the sound of a young man being born again.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Astral Weeks
In a retrospective review, Pitchfork gave it 10/10
In 1998 it was voted the 9th greatest album if all time in a “Music of the Millennium” poll conducted by HMV, Channel 4, and The Guardian.
So, over to you Daniel. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Perversely, one reason is that I love 60s music. I love 60s music and had an idea that I didn’t like 70s music. Now, first of all there are numerous exceptions which make this an entirely unsustainable principle. And even without them it’s one I’d struggle to justify because it is - or was - almost unconscious, not intellectual and in no way critically sound. Nevertheless, bands whose 60s canon I’d browsed or in some cases methodically worked my way through, I’d just pack in when they reached the early 70s. The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, The Stones - I had an idea that come the 70s, they’d stop playing the jangle and fuzz and psychedelia that I liked and would sludgily morph into a ponderous prog outfit, or take up lumpen blues-rock or go all plasticky and synthy or something like that.
I might push the envelope a bit - with Can, for instance - but then I’d run out of confidence and just stop. I don’t know, I reiterate, this wasn’t thought out. I didn’t even realise I was doing it. It was just an unhelpful little cognitive process, quietly denying me access to swathes of undoubtedly great music.
You’d be forgiven for wondering what this has to do with me never having heard Astral Weeks, which came out in 1968. The answer is quite simple: I thought it was from the 70s. The cover. The Celtic font, the hair, the washed-out colours. I must at some point have momentarily considered it, assumed it was from about 1973 and never really thought about it again.
The little I knew of 60s Van Morrison I liked, which was essentially some of the stuff with Them. Baby Please Don’t Go, Gloria - great. I Can Only Give You Everything (riff nicked by Julian Cope and Beck) is absolutely fantastic, probably the greatest non-US garage number of the 60s. But then I think I probably thought about Brown Eyed Girl (meh) and Moondance (into thy warm embrace, sweet Hypnos) and assumed that 70s Van Morrison, which I thought Astral Weeks was, was not going to be for me.
I assumed it would be folky caterwauling; fun-free, traditional-instrument as-I-walked-out-one-morning cobblers. I thought I’d probably find it a bit bodrhán. (‘Boring’!! Oh, please yourself). Or worse, it might prove to be an interminable, noodling soul-jazz odyssey; the snarling, Napoleon Complex-driven singer I’d loved on ‘Gloria’ reduced to a finger-clicking, eyes-shut, scat-a-dooby Ronnie Scottanaut. At this point, eagle-eyed readers may note the utter fucking hypocrisy of my professing an aversion to indulgent soul-jazz crooning, while claiming my second favourite album of all time is Tim Buckley’s Happysad. You’re right. No logic, no method. Trying to put in writing what made me drift down one particular tributary of musical discovery at the expense of another…I don’t know. It’s like trying to transcribe a dream.
But there are more tangible things that’ve put me off Van Morrison. Mainly the kind of people who like Van Morrison. Thickset, 50-ish men with a fondness for single malt and high-end audio equipment. In fact, he’s probably in the top 3 Spotify plays for that demographic. Bob Dylan at 3, ‘Van The Man’ (that’s another reason I’ve steered well clear) at 2 and John Martyn at 1. They love John Martyn, don’t they? The thickset 50-ish men with a fondness for single malt and high-end audio equipment? This is who I see when I think of Van Morrison. This is who likes him. It’s your brother-in-law, Mike. Mike, who goes to the kind of gigs in Hyde Park that are simulcast on Radio 2. Who takes Eva, his daughter from his first marriage, to see Taylor Swift and puts on Joni Mitchell in the car on the way home in the vain hope Eva’ll take an interest.
And then finally, well, it’s just that face. That troubled scowl. You wouldn’t employ Van to stand on the street, coaxing passers-by into your restaurant for the pre-theatre special, would you? That angry face. Like a cuckolded sponge. Like the last cat in the shelter, the one they have to keep making Pet Of The Week, in desperation.
I didn’t say I had a good reason.
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
Well, I wasn’t a million miles off.
My initial feeling is that I would have loved this, fifteen or twenty years ago. I think we all have a time when the concrete of taste hasn’t set, when whatever music you hear, you’ve got a chance of loving for life. Later, your preferences are set and hearing the same records for the first time wouldn’t have the same effect. You know, I loved Kilimanjaro by The Teardrop Explodes when it came out. And I still do because I did then. But if I heard it for the first time now, I doubt I’d give it a second go. Likewise, I think it’s harder for Astral Weeks to make the impression on me it might have made around the time, say, I got into Happysad. I think of Happysad almost immediately here, partly because of the jazzy vibes and bass sound, but also because the two records start almost identically, with a little up-and-down, back-and-forth melody (though evidently Buckley copped his, for Strange Feelin’, off Miles Davis).
I would have dug this opening (title) track then, and I do now. Clean, clear, effortless. Beside You seems less structured, Van’s voice a bit more toddler-tantrum in places. But I’m starting to get the feeling that Astral Weeks is a very good Sunday morning hangover album. Sweet Thing is a little one-paced and I find myself drifting off for the first time, but the lack of choruses - and much discernible structure - give the whole thing a flow that I appreciate.
Apparently Van told the musicians to play what they felt - they were given no charts and had no rehearsals. It shows, and not always in a good way. Sometimes they sound tentative, sometimes noodly. The whole thing’s very loose. The Way Young Lovers Do is more of the sa- WOAH! The brass! It’s like someone decided they needed a single and this was the easiest one to chuck some trumpets on. It’s a bit, well, gauche. Madame George comes on, and it’s kind of lovely. I’ve accepted the structureless nature of the vocals by now. It carries me away and by the end I want it played at my funeral. Ballerina works well after it, Slim Slow Slider is a bit of a fizzle-out.
On second listening, I’m struck by the licence Morrison had when he made this record. I bet he couldn’t believe his luck, 23 with the freedom of the studio. “All right lads, just play what you fancy and I’ll make up some cobblers over the top.” On the title track, it feels like everyone’s looking at each other, wondering when to finish. I can’t quite work out how he’d earned the right.
Now it starts to feel like they’re making a lot out of not that much. Cyprus Avenue is a languid blues with some slightly obtrusive fiddle thrown on top. This time round, though, The Way Young Lovers Do makes more sense. It reminds me of David McWilliams’ The Days Of Pearly Spencer. I have a look and it turns out McWilliams and Van were born virtually next door to each other about two months apart. I don’t know how this helps.
Madame George is soporific, it feels like it’s been playing for an hour. Ballerina seems more of a piece with it. I drift, but not from boredom. I drift because the music insinuates itself, positions itself with repetitiveness in a way that won’t let me actively listen, that evades my concentration. It’s a sensation I’ve only noticed before with those long, motorik Neu! numbers. It’s transcendent, it influences my mood by making me forget I’m even listening to it.
Third time around, the title track seems light and ephemeral. I feel I might have already reached Peak Weeks. I’m doing other things now, but in a good way. It’s like the album has become a guest I’m sufficiently comfortable with that I don’t have to sit and give them my full attention.
I can see why, stylistically, Astral Weeks might not have grabbed the attention of the public when it was released, but then again, it came out a month after Electric Ladyland, a week after The White Album and Village Green Preservation Society, and a week before Head and Beggar’s Banquet. Fuck me, there can’t have been much public attention left to grab. Imagine the pocket money option paralysis you’d have experienced that month. (It was a fruitful time for humans too, by the way - I dropped a fortnight before Astral Weeks.)
Meanwhile, third time around, this album is starting to feel like a bit of con trick. Lester Bangs might have fallen for its emotional intensity and raw pain, but I’m starting to think that it’s simply a young man singing impressionistically about drag queens, school girls and whatever other characters meander into his head. It’s just that he’s a young man raised on Leadbelly, Ray Charles and Solomon Burke, who knows how to inflect these vignettes with a kind of instant, powdered soul. I’m not convinced he’s really got as much emotionally invested in these songs as his admirers assume. I think he just likes singing, and he’s good at it. I don’t know. And I don’t know if it matters.
I feel warmer now about Van Morrison, if not particularly driven to explore more of his work. And I don’t know how often I’ll revisit Astral Weeks in its entirety. I’ll take the title track, Madam George and Ballerina with me, these are quite lovely. Overall, well, it’s ok. You know, for 1973.
Would you listen to it again?
Yeah, but mainly to get to Madame George and Ballerina.
A mark out of 10?
7.
RAM Rating – 9
Guest Rating – 7
Overall – 8
So that was week 52 and that was Daniel Maier. Turns out he’d never listened to Astral Weeks before because he thought it came out in 1973. So we made him listen to it and he quite liked it – but still thinks it came out in 1973. I don’t really know what to do about that to be honest.
Next week, Desi Jedeikin listens to something from 1967 for the first time.
In the meantime, here’s Astral Weeks from, er, Astral Weeks.
Enjoy
Ruth and Martin
xx