Van Morrison

Orangefield, Them, and the exit from Belfast

George Ivan Morrison was born in Belfast on 31 August 1945, into a house with a serious record collection — his father's blues, gospel, jazz and folk sides, Ray Charles and Lead Belly among them. He went out on the road as a teenager with Irish showbands, playing saxophone, guitar and harmonica, and made his first recording in November 1963 with Georgie and the Monarchs.

The band that got him noticed was Them, the Belfast R&B group he fronted from 1964 to 1966. They charted with "Baby, Please Don't Go" and "Here Comes the Night", but the song that outlived the group was a B-side: "Gloria", three chords and a spelled-out name, picked up afterwards by the Doors and Jimi Hendrix and absorbed into the standard bar-band repertoire.

Producer Bert Berns brought him to New York and to Bang Records, where he cut "Brown Eyed Girl" in 1967. It became the song most people know him by, and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2007. It also left him in a contractual mess that shaped the next, stranger record.

The records that hold

Astral Weeks arrived in 1968 and sold badly. Recorded with jazz players working largely on instinct, it is now the album his reputation rests on more than any other. Moondance followed in 1970, tighter and warmer, and became his first million-seller. Between them they fixed the two poles he has worked between ever since: the long, open-ended vocal improvisation on one side, the horn-driven R&B song on the other.

It's Too Late to Stop Now, the double live album from 1974, is the document of what he does on a stage rather than in a studio — the Caledonia Soul Orchestra, the songs stretched and re-shaped, the vocal repetitions pushed until they turn into something else.

Since turning 70 in 2015 he has released at least an album a year, a rate almost nobody at his level sustains: Latest Record Project, Volume 1 in 2021, What's It Gonna Take? in 2022, Moving On Skiffle in 2023, New Arrangements and Duets in 2024.

Remembering Now, and a return to original writing

Remembering Now, his 47th studio album, came out on 13 June 2025 through Exile Productions and Virgin — fourteen tracks across 68 minutes, and his first substantial run of new songs after several years of covers, skiffle and reworkings. It opened with "Down to Joy", written for Kenneth Branagh's Belfast in 2021 and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Reviews were the strongest he had had in a long time. Metacritic aggregated it at 79/100; Mojo called it his best album in decades and Uncut gave it eight out of ten, while the i was more measured at three stars. It reached number 11 on the UK albums chart and topped the UK Americana and Jazz & Blues charts, with a number six placing in Germany.

"Down to Joy" has stayed in the live set through 2026, turning up sixth in the running order on the opening night of the London residency.

Sausalito, Buddy Guy and the bridge

Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge, his 48th studio album, was released on 23 January 2026 on Orangefield Records, self-produced and recorded at Studio D in Sausalito. It runs 20 tracks and 79 minutes and 38 seconds, mostly blues standards — Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson's "Kidney Stew Blues", material associated with B.B. King and Lead Belly — with originals including "Monte Carlo Blues" and the title track sitting alongside them. It is only his second full blues-covers record after Roll with the Punches in 2017.

The guests were largely a matter of geography: Elvin Bishop, Taj Mahal and Buddy Guy were in or near the Bay Area while he was cutting it, and Morrison has said in interview that it simply made sense to use them. Taj Mahal duets on Chuck Willis's "Betty and Dupree" and plays harmonica on "Can't Help Myself"; Buddy Guy closes the album on Willie Dixon's "I'm Ready" and "Rock Me Baby". The band behind them is a working Bay Area blues unit — David Hayes on bass, Anthony Paule on guitar, Mitch Woods on keyboards, John Allair on Hammond, Larry Vann and Bobby Ruggiero on drums.

Critical response was warm rather than ecstatic: 69/100 on Metacritic from five publications, seven out of ten from Americana UK, which praised the pacing, variety and musicianship while noting how little the tempo shifts across 80 minutes. Commercially it did what blues records do — number one on the UK Jazz & Blues chart, number nine on Billboard's Top Blues Albums, number 19 on UK album sales. A vinyl pressing followed in June 2026.

2026: an award, Montreux, and a new room in west London

On 16 April 2026 Morrison was given the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Jazz FM Awards at KOKO in Camden, presented by Jools Holland at a ceremony hosted by Ben Bailey Smith and run with PPL and PRS for Music. Jazz FM's content director Nick Pitts described his music as occupying a space "where jazz, soul, blues and poetry meet". He played the Montreux Jazz Festival the same summer, and Royal Park Live at Paleis Soestdijk in the Netherlands on 5 July.

The American leg ran earlier in the year: a matinee at The Chapel in San Francisco on 16 February to introduce the blues record, a five-night run at the Palace of Fine Arts from 17 February, the Wang Theatre in Boston on 3 March.

The autumn's centrepiece is the British Airways ARC, the 3,800-capacity theatre inside the redeveloped Olympia in west London, which opened in June 2026 as the city's first major new live venue in over a decade. Morrison is its inaugural residency artist, playing five nights — 23, 24, 27, 28 and 29 September — with a separate headline show at the New Wimbledon Theatre on 26 September in between.

Ten further UK dates went on general sale on 7 August 2026 after a presale the day before: Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on 8 and 9 October, Swansea Arena on the 11th, Bristol Beacon on the 12th, Plymouth on the 27th, the Princess Theatre in Torquay on the 28th, Brighton Dome on the 30th and 31st, then Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 2 November and the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on 3 November.

On stage now

The Electric Picnic set at Stradbally on 30 August 2026 — the last day of his being 80 — is the clearest recent picture of what he does. An hour on the main stage in the afternoon, eight musicians in black behind him, Morrison in a blue suit, blue fedora and mirrored aviators, opening with a jazzy "Into the Mystic" and closing with "Gloria". It rained hard through most of it. He did not mention the rain or the crowd, and did not speak at all beyond a few short instructions to the band. Nadine O'Regan gave it four stars in the Irish Times, concluding that he is not exactly a comfort but that when he is this good he is wonderful.

The indoor shows run longer and dig deeper into the new record. Opening night at the ARC on 23 September 2026 ran 17 songs, starting with four blues covers in a row — "Kidney Stew Blues", Junior Wells's "Snatch It Back and Hold It", Marie Adams's "I'm Gonna Play the Honky Tonks", "Madame Butterfly Blues" — before "Down to Joy" and "Moondance" turned it back towards the catalogue. Later came "Enlightenment", "Tore Down a la Rimbaud", "Goin' Down Geneva", "Dweller on the Threshold", a "Real Real Gone" / "You Send Me" medley and an "Into the Mystic" that arrived with a "Gloria" tease before the real thing closed the night.