“Rock ‘n’ roll is simplicity and sincerity,” says Van Morrison
Last year Van Morrison he scored a double. In March he dedicated “Moving on skiffle” (read the review here) to the music that fascinated him as a child, while on November 3rd the encore was entitled “Accentuate the Positive” and it was about the music he started listening to a few years later: rock’n’roll. In the lines below we report the review of the Irish musician’s latest album.
Last March Van Morrison released “Moving on skiffle”, an album in which he paid homage to his love of skiffle. Musical genre he had breathed, enjoyed and played as a kid (“I was still at school when I performed with a skiffle band: a couple of guitars, a washboard, a bass drum”). This genre, born among black laborers in the cotton fields of the United States, subsequently landed in Great Britain and in the mid-1950s met the tastes of young English people looking for less rigid sounds than those proposed by their fathers. If skiffle was a great love of the young Van (born in 1945), the other great loves of the musician born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, were the blues and rock ‘n’ roll. “Accentuate the Positive” is his affectionate caress to the memory of his greener years, giving himself and giving us nineteen covers of early rock’n’roll, a music that goes beyond the boundaries of time whose secret Van Morrison summarizes thus: “Rock ‘n’ roll is simplicity, sincerity and expressive strength. This is why it is popular and has lasted over time.
Van Morrison in his new album offers a handful of timeless classics such as “Lucille” by Little Richard, “Shakin’ all over” by Johnny Kidd or “Flip, Flop and Fly” by Big Joe Turner, but they could really be mentioned all without fear of error.
And if on the one hand his versions take away a few notches from the charge, the enthusiasm and youthful determination of the originals; on the other, her talent and her voice, as if they were Tinkerbell’s magic dust, sprinkle every song with beauty, giving it renewed lifeblood. The setlist for “Accentuate the Positive” was carefully chosen and Van’s versions of it are impeccable in terms of class and style. These songs come back to life from a distant time and amaze with their pleasantness, recalling a distant but fundamental time in the development of the history of modern music. To give great prestige to the songs on the album, in addition to a band implacable in its precision and expertise, also the voice of Chris Farlowe (formerly singer of Atomic Rooster and currently of Colosseum) and the guitar of the now deceased Jeff Beck in ” Lonesome train”, as well as the six strings of blues master Taj Mahal in “Lucille” and “Shake, Rattle and Roll”..
Van Morrison dedicated 2023 to himself when choices were almost exclusively guided by guts and passion, recording some of the many songs that made his heart beat faster as a boy, which thrilled him to the point of lead him to dedicate his entire life to music: a few months ago it happened with skiffle and now with rock’n’roll. With these somewhat sentimental choices, the Belfast grump proves to be a little less grumpy and personally I really appreciated his journey back in time. The joy and lightheartedness of this album is well summarized by the cover image which shows its best in the splendor of vinyl. And now? Van Morrison has accustomed us not to let too much time pass between one album and another, so we are waiting to see – we believe the wait will not be long, only a few months will pass – what will be the next move in a career that from time moves in legend.
