His 1967 debut solo album, Blowin’ Your Mind, while leaning heavily towards the rock and R&B sensibilities that had defined his short career up until that point, did suggest a passion for sprawling, complex arrangements and unconventional structures. But it’s part of the enduring magic of the album that it should have been the creation of such a famously private and introverted individual – and, it must be acknowledged, a team of brilliant studio musicians.Īlthough he had been variously pigeonholed as a rocker – having departed the short-lived Them in 1966 – and latterly as a folk artist and a bluesman, Van Morrison had always displayed a latent interest in jazz. Given its reputation as a hazy, dreamlike and deeply romantic masterpiece, Astral Weeks doesn’t seem to chime with Van Morrison’s infamous reputation as a grizzled, cantankerous and deeply reticent artist who gives little away and suffers fools even less. But it’s the hallmark of a truly great artist that he or she uses the platform they’ve gained to challenge their audience to follow them, rather than placate them with dilutions of the same product. In the context of a 1967 in which Morrison had enjoyed a massive hit as a breakout solo artist, the effortlessly breezy karaoke staple ‘Brown Eyed Girl’, the sprawling Astral Weeks, released just over a year later at the end of 1968, was about as radically different for a major label star as it was possible to imagine. In terms of unexpected career shifts and surprise new directions in the history of pop, Astral Weeks, the spellbinding second album by Van Morrison, serves as a textbook example. Influenced by: Frank Sinatra, Lead Belly, Bob Dylan Influenced: Simon & Garfunkel, Leonard Cohen, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Neil Young, Elton John, Elvis Costello, The Police, The Pogues, Jeff Buckley, David Gray, Regina Spektor, Ben Howard

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