Like many fans of 'Astral Weeks,' local musician and marketer Ryan Walsh wondered about this for years. But his Cambridge/Boston period remained an under-explained footnote in his biography, an anomaly without context. In the years following the album's November 1968 release, the vague tidbit that the songwriter had lived in Cambridge for a while became received wisdom among fans of the deeply affecting, deeply mysterious piece of work, by many accounts Morrison's masterpiece. But what the heck did they have to do with this album, a deeply meditative exercise in memory and nostalgia that was recorded in New York City and teems with references to Belfast? It always seemed safe enough to assume Morrison had written these words.

Knew you had the blues, saw you coming from across the river. I saw you coming from Cambridgeport with my poetry and jazz, When I got back it was like a dream come true I saw you coming from the Cape, way from Hyannis Port all the way, But on the back cover of Van Morrison's much-cherished album 'Astral Weeks,' there is an unexplained bit of verse that links the work to a different place altogether. Its song lyrics are dotted with references to the artist's native Ireland. Over to you.Facebook Email Van Morrison performing at Spring Sing on Boston Common in 1968. But Astral Weeks is no one-trick pony – open your heart to Sweet Thing, Cypress Avenue, Madame George, Ballerina (ahh-sigh) and Astral Weeks itself and the payback will surely be huge. Madame George engages me in exactly the same way that Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row does, and I reckon I’d need them both in my Desert Island knapsack. But, down the years, I’ve taken the view that such concerns do not matter – each time I listen there is something fresh to consider (and after forty years that is saying something).

Yeats, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce or Flann O’Brien, for example, you will know that the ‘Irish’ poetic or prose voice is rich, evocative and often downright difficult to comprehend. I bought the album as soon as I’d saved up enough pocket money! Them proved much too narrow a channel for Van and he split the band up once he tired of chasing chart success, promptly disappearing to the US to hone his ‘Irish / Caledonian’ vision and find the best way to express it.Īstral Weeks appeared in 1969 and I first heard tracks from it on Radio One’s more progressive programmes hosted by people like Pete Drummond and John Peel. He is a multi-instrumentalist (piano, sax, guitar and much more besides) but in truth his best instrument is his voice. Van was the vocalist with Them (an Irish version of the Stones, if you like) and they had a few big hit singles in the glory days.

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