Review: Van Morrison At Glastonbury Abbey Extravaganza 2021.

The big day had finally arrived. My first Van Morrison gig for nearly two years. Van was returning to Glastonbury Abbey for his fourth appearance at the Extravaganza, organised by the one and only greatest living Englishman Michael Eavis. The weather forecast was good as well. It promised to be a great night. Glastonbury is only 30 miles from where I live in Westbury, but if you haven’t got a car, like I haven’t, it is quite complicated to get there. I had to catch the train to Castle Cary and then a taxi to Glastonbury. The taxi lady dropped me off on the High Street which was bustling with tourists and festival goers. I made my way to the Aroha B&B which is in Bove Town, just at the top of the High Street. It is run by a lady called Michelle who is originally from New Zealand. Aroha is a Maori word meaning Love & compassion. I’m really pleased I chose it because it has nice vibes. I couldn’t have wished for a nicer place, highly recommended if you are ever in Glastonbury. 

Wizard.

Once I had sorted myself out, I headed for town. Outside the church of St John I met a wizard in blue robes and a pointy hat, and took a photo of him. That’s the magic of Glastonbury. There is nowhere else quite like it in the world. When I reached the historic George & Pilgrim Inn which was built in 1489, I spotted fellow Van fan John sitting at a table outside and watching the world go by. It was great to see him again. A few minutes later Emer from Dublin and her friends strolled by. Emer and John were the only Van fan friends I met that evening. The first time I saw Van at the abbey in 2004 there was a meet-up of about 20 people here, but sadly since Simon Gee of Wavelength magazine stopped organising the pre-show gatherings you don’t see that many people these days. Anyway, it was nice to sit at the table for a couple of hours and chill out, watching all the strange and wonderful people of Glastonbury walking by. 

Enlightenment.

By 4.30 the queue to get into the Abbey stretched about halfway up the High Street, but we didn’t bother joining it. Finally, about 6.00 when the queue had disappeared, we made our way across the road into the Abbey grounds. What a beautiful setting it is for a concert, steeped in legend and mysticism. I should also mention that it was a warm sunny evening, It didn’t get cold at all, even after dark. We were lucky with the weather. Almost the first person we saw was Glastonbury Festival organiser Michael Eavis. We had a little chat with him. Michael is a huge Van fan. I think this is the eleventh time he has booked Van for the festival or the abbey. 

Me & Michael Eavis.

I have met Michael about six times before, but he doesn’t seem to know me from Adam. He must meet thousands of people every year. He is always friendly and polite though. John asked if he could take a photo and Michael was happy to oblige. Tanita Tikeram was just finishing her set when we arrived. We heard one song Twist In My Sobriety which sounded pretty good actually. Then we found a good spot with a great view of the stage. The next act on were The Staves. I don’t know a lot about this band apart from hearing a few songs on YouTube. They are an English indie folk trio of sisters Emily, Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor from Watford. As well as the girls, there were other musicians in the band. 

The Staves,

They have a newish album called Good Woman and are on tour at the moment, ending in Bristol in October. John and me both agreed that they were very good indeed. They reminded me a bit of another group I like called First Aid Kit. I might buy their album soon. As soon as the Staves finished their set, me and John made our move. I packed up my fold up chair and headed for the front. We were surprised how easy it was to get right on the barrier in front of the stage. After a short wait Van and the band came on stage. 

The band has changed slightly since I last saw them in Bournemouth 2019. It is still Paul Moran, Teena Lyle, Paul Moore & Dave Keary, but they have been joined by Chantelle Duncan on backing vocals and Stuart MacIlroy on keyboards. I hope I have got their names right. There is a new drummer as well. I thought it was Colin Griffin, but apparently his name is Nick Simms. Anyway, they are all good additions to the band. I wrote the setlist down in my trusty notebook, so I hope I have got it right and not forgotten anything. It was Latest Record Project, Deadbeat Saturday Night, Double Agent, Up County Down, Days Like This, Precious Time, Baby Please Don’t Go/ Got My Mojo Working, I Can Tell, Moondance, Cleaning Windows/ Be Bop A Lula/ Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On, Ain’t Gonna Moan No More, Broken Record, Have I Told You Lately, Sometimes We Cry, Symphony Sid, St Dominic’s Preview, Madame George, Jackie Wilson Says, Help Me, Brown Eyed Girl, Gloria. The first four songs were all from Van’s most recent album, and not among my favourite songs, but like a lot of his songs they take on new life when performed live. I wasn’t expecting any improvised extended workshops from Van in this concert because it was a festival type audience. The crowd seemed

to love Days Like This and Precious Time. I did as well, and I must say Dave Keary was brilliant on the pedal steel guitar on Precious Time. Baby Please Don’t Go etc was another crowd pleaser, but I’m getting a bit bored with it. I Can Tell was ok, but not great, and I think Van has sung Moondance  just about every time I have seen him. The audience seem to love it though, so who am I to complain. I always enjoy hearing Cleaning Windows, especially when Jack Kerouac gets mentioned. Ain’t gonna Moan No More was excellent, but I can’t say the same for Broken Record. I know it is supposed to be humorous, but I am getting tired of hearing it now. Again, however some people love it. It is only personal taste. 

Chantelle.

Then it was the Las Vegas type version of Have I Told You Lately. Chantelle showed she was more than an adequate replacement for Dana Masters. Chantelle also dueted with Van on Sometimes We Cry and Symphony Sid. I have heard that song enough times as well. I wrote in my notebook ‘We want mystical Van, this is Glastonbury!’. I was getting a bit bored. Then Van pulled the show out of the fire with a superb performance of St Dominic’s Preview. “This is more like it”, I thought to myself. 

Van The Man.

This was followed by a sublime performance of Madame George which was a special request of Michael Eavis, good old Michael!. That song alone made the whole evening worthwhile. That was followed by Jackie Wilson, Help Me, Brown Eyed Girl & Gloria. Me and John made our way towards the exit as the band played on, in order to avoid the crowds. There was a massive fireworks display at the end which we watched from outside the pub. Finally John headed off home and I went back to Aroha and fell asleep into restful slumbers almost before my head touched the pillow.... 

Next morning at breakfast I had a nice chat with the landlady Michelle and the name of Eckhart Tolle came up in the conversation. 

Church Of St John, Sunday Morning.

Michelle told me that he used to live in the very street where we were. Eckhart used to walk up to the top of Glastonbury Tor every day. This was in the days before he wrote The Power Of Now  and became famous. Anyway, finally I said cheerio. I hope I return before too long. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday morning. There was a street artist drawing chalk designs on the pavement accompanied by quotes of famous people. One of them was by Eckhart Tolle. Talk about synchronicity!. I was going to visit the Chalice Well, but I couldn’t be bothered in the end. I just ordered a glass of chardonnay at the pub and sat outside, people watching and enjoyed the sunshine. Eventually the taxi lady arrived to take me back to Castle Cary. What a great weekend it had been.

Into The Mystic. Avalon Of The Heart.

Van Morrison: St Dominic's Preview at Glastonbury Abbey 2021.

Odessey & Oracle by The Zombies.

There is an autumnal nip in the air now. You can sense that summer is coming to an end and soon it will be the days of the leaves. I have been listening to an album which perfectly fits that melancholic mood of the end of summer. It is called Odessey & Oracle by The Zombies. The first thing to say about it, before you ask, is that the spelling of the album title is correct. A guy called Terry Quirk designed the album cover and by the time anybody noticed the misspelling of Odyssey it was too late, so they just pretended that was how they wanted it spelled. The copy I acquired about a week ago is a 1998 reissue to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the album’s release in 1968. It includes both mono and stereo mixes. I bought this particular copy because it is signed by three members of the band, Chris White, Hugh Grundy and Colin Blunstone. I imagine that they must have signed it at a reunion concert. 

The album was recorded in 1967, mainly in several sessions at Abbey Road studios just after The Beatles had finished work on Sergeant Pepper. They used the same equipment as the fab four recorded on and had the same engineer Geoff Emerick. I also read somewhere that they even borrowed John Lennon’s mellotron. Some tracks were also recorded at Olympic Studios which is where The Stones used to record. The album was originally released on the CBS label. The head of CBS in America Clive Davis didn’t want to release it in the USA but was persuaded to by Al Kooper who heard it and loved the album. By the time of it’s release The Zombies had broken up, so the songs were not performed live, and the album didn’t get the promotion it deserved. Friends have been telling me for years what a great album this is, so I am pleased I finally got around to getting my own copy.

The opening track Care Of Cell 44 immediately reminded me of the Beach Boys, which is a good start. It is an unusual song about a female who is in prison, but we don’t find out what she did. A Rose For Emily was apparently inspired by a short story of that name by William Faulkner. I couldn’t help but be reminded of See Emily Play by Pink Floyd. It is a sad song about ageing. Maybe After He’s Gone had a similar sound and mood to Here Today on the Pet Sounds album, and with the great harmonies on this album I can understand how some people have described it as an English Pet Sounds. Beechwood Park is possibly my favourite track. It perfectly fits that autumnal feel of seasonal melancholy that I was talking about. I think Beechwood Park is in the band’s hometown of St Albans. The track exemplifies what a great keyboard player Rod Argent is. His playing and Colin Blunstone’s vocals are what made The Zombies great in my opinion, although Chris White’s song writing contributions shouldn’t be overlooked either. 

Brief Candles probably took its name from a short story collection by Aldous Huxley. The Zombies appear to be very well read with all the literary references. There is even a Shakespeare quote in the sleeve notes. Hung Up On A Dream is a huge production showing all Rod Argent’s talent and the presence of the mellotron, Changes is another song wistfully observing the passing of time and changes of the seasons. I Want Her, She Wants Me and This will Be Our Year are two nice love songs before we come to Butchers Tale (Western Front 1914) which is quite a harrowing anti-war song and is one song on the album that I feel doesn’t fit comfortably with the mood of the other songs. Friends Of Mine by contrast is a much catchier upbeat happy song by Chris White. Time Of The Season is the one track on the album that I was familiar with before buying it. It provided The Zombies with a belated surprise top ten hit in the USA in 1969, not in the UK though. 

The success of this song came too late. Rod Argent and Chris White had formed the band Argent and Colin Blunstone had embarked on a solo career. As the years have passed Odessey & Oracle has established a cult following and the critics have hailed it as a masterpiece of British psychedelic baroque music. Q magazine voted it as the 26^th greatest British album of all time. I am glad I discovered it 53 years after it was first released. I think I will put it on my CD shelves next to SF Sorrow  by The Pretty Things and We Are Ever So Clean by Blossom Toes. 

Cyclist With Five Cows.

Sorry I haven’t written anything for a few days, I have been a bit busy with one thing and another. Also, I am quite lazy. I did actually do some real work on Tuesday. A couple I know asked me if I would polish their furniture for them, bookcases, chests of drawers, that sort of thing. I used to do antique furniture restoration for a living many years ago. I quite enjoyed it and they are very nice people. A lot of the time I was at their house involved sitting in the garden, drinking tea, and chatting. I enjoyed it so much that yesterday I even did some work on my own house. I repaired my front door, which was beginning to disintegrate at the bottom, and gave it a coat of varnish. I also stained the bench in my yard. It looks a lot better. There has been some sad news on the music scene recently. Firstly, Nanci Griffith passed away aged only 68. I called one of my recent blogs From A Distance after one of her most famous songs, little realising that she was ill. Nanci was a great singer. I remember seeing her at Glastonbury in 1997. I always used to play her song On Grafton Street at Christmas time. Another great singer was Don Everly who died aged 84. I listened to my only Everly Brothers album on Sunday, Everly Brothers In Concert which was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall in 1983. Another legend who has passed away is Charlie Watts. He was a great drummer, perfect for The Stones and a wonderful person with a dry sense of humour. It is hard to imagine The Stones without Charlie. 

I finished reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara about a week ago and I wrote some notes meaning to write a review, but it was so long ago now, I can’t make much sense of my notes. I wrote down words like aphorisms, nourastinia, insouciance, naphtha, au courant, and metier, but I can’t remember why. I was probably trying to show off by using posh words or jotted them down meaning to find out what they meant. I did enjoy the poems though. The book was published in 1964, but the poems still sound fresh today. You can almost date the day he wrote them because they read like diary entries and he mentions events that were happening, such as Khrushchev visiting New York, Lana Turner has collapsed, or Billie Holiday dying. It was very educational reading the poems. In one poem called In Alma he mentions Judas Priest. I always thought that name was invented by Bob Dylan on his John Wesley Harding album. This made me think that Bob stole the name from Frank after reading Lunch Poems. However, when I looked it up, I discovered that Judas Priest is a well-known American expression, and it appears in a book by Sinclair Lewis called Babbitt published in 1922. 

August is a Wiki month because I also had to look up Norman Bluhm, Mal Waldron, Adolph Deutsch, Helmut Dantyne, Bill Berkson, Mary Destri, Vincent Warren, Fanny Elsser and other names that litter the poems because O’Hara was such a name dropper. Northern Pursuit is a 1943 film starring Errol Flynn. Cyclist With Five Cows turned out to be a painting by Jean Dubuffett. I must say some of the humour in the poems did remind of Bob Dylan and his book Tarantula. Lunch Poems was published by City Lights which is why I bought it when I saw it on eBay for only £2.00. I thought it might be a bit like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Corso, or Ginsberg. Although Frank O’Hara was loosely associated with these people, he isn’t really a Beat writer, he had his own witty unique voice, and it is a shame he died in a freak accident in 1966 aged only 40. I think that has cleared my backlog of things I wanted to tell you about. I got a new CD a couple of days ago which is a lost psychedelic classic from 1967. I’ll tell you all about it this weekend hopefully. 

Cyclist With Five Cows.

The Guardians.

Sunday morning, the sun is trying to shine, Anne Briggs is singing in my kitchen, and I have just made a cup of tea. All seems well, as long as I don’t think about the news from Afghanistan which is awful. I haven’t been up for long because I was watching a film last night until 2.00 in the morning. I stumbled across it on BBC4 when I was flicking around the channels for something to watch. It was a French film called The Guardians made in 2017 starring Nathalie Baye and Iris Bry. It is set during World War 1 on a farm in the Limousin region of France. The men have gone off to fight, get killed, injured, or go mad in the war and the women are left to do the arduous work on the farm. The farm owner Hortense hires an orphan girl Francine to help her on the farm. The story develops very slowly. All goes well at first, but tensions develop. What I particularly liked about the film was the beautiful cinematography and the attention to detail. It was almost like a painting by a French landscape artist. They used authentic farm tools of the period, and one could feel how tedious and back breaking the work must have been. Slowly, you can see how the lack of workers for farming during the period helped the development of farm machinery and the pleasure the women felt as combine harvesters and tractors were introduced. The acting of the two main characters was excellent. I read that Iris Bry had never acted before and was only discovered by chance by the casting director. That fact makes her performance all the more remarkable. I think some people might find the film too slow, but I enjoyed it. 

Iris Bry.

Apart from that, I didn’t do much else yesterday. I had to go to the Post Office because I sold two books, the Monty Don and the Ian Rankin, so it was good to get them off my land. I finished reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. I might tell you about that tomorrow when I have made some notes. I spent some time just staring out of the kitchen window. A family of starlings have moved in. I like watching them and the sparrows flying around. They go around in gangs. It is like the collective unconscious. I have seen some amazing films of starlings in a murmuration, but I haven’t got enough for one of those!. Anyway, I can’t think of anything else to tell you now. Enjoy Sunday.

Starlings Murmuration.

Bird-Watching From My Kitchen.

Visiting Laurie Lee In Slad.

Rosebank Cottage.

Following our expedition to see George Orwell’s grave recently, one evening in the pub I suggested to my neighbour that it might be interesting to visit the village of Slad in The Cotswolds which was the home of the author Laurie Lee. There is actually a link between the two writers because they both fought in the Spanish Civil War and wrote famous books about their experiences. It is only about 44 miles from Westbury to Slad, so we set off yesterday morning at about 11.00. The journey was quite uneventful to begin with. We went via Trowbridge and Bradford-On-Avon. Before Bath we headed north, across the M4 and up the A46 through some scenic countryside and interesting villages and towns. 

Laurie Lee's Grave.

One small village had the unusual name of Petty France. I googled it this morning and found that it got the name because of the number of Huguenot refugees who once lived here. There is also a village called Dunkirk for the same reason. The town of Nailsworth looked very attractive, if somewhat hilly. All went well until we reached the town of Stroud where we got completely lost trying to find the road to Slad. We ended up doing a detour of several miles until we stopped and asked a passer-by who put us on the right road. Finally, we arrived in the picturesque village of Slad nestling in the Slad Valley.  Parking spaces were at a premium, so we had to drive through the village and park in a kind of lay-by and walk back. Almost the first place I noticed was Rosebank Cottage which is immortalised in Laurie Lee’s classic memoir Cider With Rosie. He arrived here with his six brothers and sisters in 1917 aged three. In the book he says, “I was set down from a carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of terror and bewilderment my life in the village began”. 

He related how the cellar would flood during heavy rainfall and they would have to clear the storm drain. Seeing the house in reality, you can understand that because it is situated down a steep incline from the road. I took a couple of photos of the cottage, and we moved on. On the right side of the road is the small Holy Trinity Church where we easily found Laurie Lee’s resting place just by the pathway. The headstone simply reads, ‘He Lies In The Valley He Loved’. On the reverse side of the headstone is a verse from his poem April Rise, ‘If ever I saw blessing in the air, I see it now this still early day, Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips, Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye’. 

In The Woolpack.

It was all very interesting, but unlike other famous graves I have visited, I was beginning to realise that this whole village is a memorial to Laurie Lee. Right next to the church is the School House which Laurie attended until the age of twelve. He also wrote vivid descriptions of that experience. Straight across the road from the school is the Woolpack Pub. It was busy with tourists and walkers who were on the Laurie Lee Wildlife Walk. It is a five-mile circular walk around the Slad Valley and is marked at certain points by Poetry Posts which have appropriate verses on them. There is one right outside the pub. The sun had emerged by now and it was quite warm, so we sat at a table outside and admired the wonderful view. I would have loved a pint of cider in honour of Cider With Rosie, but knowing we had an hours drive ahead I thought it would be more sensible to just have a glass of wine. 

Books by Laurie Lee.

Laurie Lee and his wife moved back to Slad in the 1960s after over 30 years away. He could often be found holding court in the bar here. He once recounted how there were occasions when people would ask him in the pub if he knew where Laurie Lee was buried!, not realising he was still alive and they were talking to the great man himself. I had a little tour of the pub’s interior, and it is quite fascinating. There is a bookcase containing lots of rare editions of his books. There are photos and paintings of himself. I particularly liked a large, framed poster of the cover of my favourite book by him called  As I Walked Out One Mid-Summer's Morning. It is the second book of his memoir trilogy. It tells the story of when he left Slad, and his experiences in Southampton and London and then walking all the way through France & Spain, surviving by busking with his violin. One of the places he stayed in is Tarifa which I remember from our journey to Morocco back in 74. In Almuñécar, Andalusia there is actually a memorial to Laurie Lee. He was finally evacuated by a British destroyer as the Spanish Civil War got underway. 

When I was young, that book inspired me to want to go travelling almost as much as On The Road by Jack Kerouac. The third part of the trilogy called A Moment Of War is about Lee’s return to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco. I haven’t read that one though. Anyway, after a most enjoyable visit to Slad we headed homeward. Thankfully, finding our way out of Stroud was a lot easier on the return journey. When we got home, I went to the pub at 5.00 and ended up drinking five pints of cider in honour of the great Laurie Lee.