And why does the landscape shift from Belfast to Ladbroke Grove in the final song? And who is the girl that's dying? Who knows? Who cares? The songs have their own logic, the strange, ever-shifting logic of dreams and heightened recollections. The image of her/him "playing dominoes in drag" still intrigues a whole other, hidden Belfast emerges from that line. What else can I tell you? Sometimes I wish I knew who Madame George was, if indeed it was one person in particular. It seems to have arrived out of nowhere, and no one has run with its possibilities ever since. I think that has to do with its difference – you won't hear anything else like it even if you trawl though the rest of Van Morrison's epic body of work. It has slowly gained an audience over the years. Oddly, it is a record that did not change the course of pop music the way Sgt Pepper's or Pet Sounds did, nor did it impinge on the collective imagination as soon as it appeared. As much as I love certain other classic albums – Revolver, Blonde On Blonde, The Velvet Underground and Nico, Pet Sounds, Kind of Blue, What's Going On?, Five Leaves Left - I have never listed to them as often, or as closely, as I have to Astral Weeks. The voice is all, the words, the music the melodies and rhythms all seem to flow from it. You can hear what Beth Orton is talking about when she says it sounds like a record "that has been willed into being" by Van Morrison. All the while, the music ebbs and flows around it, everything sounding heightened and spontaneous. It can shift from the harsh to the tender, the guttural to the gentle often in the space of a single line. While the lyrics are often impressionistic, the voice is extraordinarily articulate – emotionally articulate.
You can hear what he means on Astral Weeks, but you can also hear joy, angst, celebration, desire and regret. The late Spike Milligan, of all people, once described Van Morrison's voice as a mixture of "menace and abandonment". No one in popular music has sung like that before or since. Nothing in popular music compares with it in terms of its passionate intensity. Having just listened to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks over and over again last week while writing about it for the Observer Review, I am more convinced than ever of its unassailable greatness.
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