Van Morrison is sounding better than ever

There is a website called setlist.fm which allows its users to vicariously attend pretty much any concert. Search the name of an artist and a comprehensive history of their live performances will appear, spanning decades long gone to the hour just past.

Setlist.fm is both a useful resource and a massive spoiler-fest; the music equivalent of skipping to the last page of a book. Those planning to see a band can discover in advance most of the songs they are likely to hear. Those whose interest starts waning mid-gig can check to see how many songs are left. Those who stayed at home can soothe themselves with the thought that the artist failed to play all, or indeed any, of their favourite tracks.

Had I not physically attended Van Morrison’s concert at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall on 30 March, had I instead glanced only at the raw data via setlist.fm, I would have been pleased to note a pivot away from the glut of skiffle and early rock’n’roll covers Morrison has tended to favour in recent times. Even so, I would not have been hugely excited by the choice of material. Aside from a closing ‘Gloria’ – which, according to the website, Morrison has performed 1,004 times in his solo career, the first occasion being at the Café De Hip in Deventer, Holland, on 9 March 1967 – he played not a single song of his own from the 1960s and 1970s. Instead, the focus fell on his 1980s and early 1990s catalogue: ‘Northern Muse (Solid Ground)’, ‘Did Ye Get Healed?’, ‘Someone Like You’, ‘Have I Told You Lately?’, ‘Real, Real Gone’, ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Days Like This’. Solidly soulful and lushly meditative stuff, rather than truly transcendental. I might have congratulated myself on saving a few quid – Morrison’s gigs have become very expensive – and scrolled on.

Thankfully, concerts don’t exist on a webpage. They live and breathe in the moment. The setlist.fm entry for Van Morrison on 30 March 2025 will never convey the way he seemed, in his 80th year, an artist reattuned to his own brilliance; the way he sang more intuitively than I have heard him sing in a long while, snapping into the rhythms, channelling the intent of the songs; and, memorably, wringing every last drop of feeling from one word – ‘crazy’ – during a stirring rendition of Ray Charles’s ‘What Would I Do’, which Morrison recorded on his 1984 album A Sense of Wonder.

It can never show how he huffed hungrily into the saxophone and harmonica, as though filled up with music and desperate to get it out; nor the ways in which he worried away at his superb nine-piece band, jabbing a finger at each member to demand countless solos. He paid particularly close attention to the bassist, who was asked to jump into action on so many occasions I began to wonder whether the poor chap had pilfered the last croissant at the breakfast buffetthat morning.

The pedestrian blues stomps from Morrison’s more recent oeuvre – ‘Ain’t Gonna Moan No More’, ‘Little Village’ – lie lifeless on the page, but here they roared into life, reimagined as extended exercises in nuance and dynamics. Likewise, there was an urgent snap and crackle to his interpretation of Junior Wells’s ‘Snatch It Back & Hold It’. Even the moments where Morrison eased into cruise control came from left field, such as a jaunty tea-dance version of ‘Have I Told You Lately?’, which sold a sweet song short.

Setlist.fm does correctly record that, regrettably, nothing was aired from Morrison’s forthcoming album, Remembering Now, which may well be the best record he has made since the era he was revisiting. Otherwise, you really had to be there.

Making a return to the fray after a two-year absence, at the second of three intimate Art School shows Glaswegian singer-songwriter Joesef, aka Joseph Traynor, sang likeable songs of quotidian desire and non-lethal heartbreak.

He proved an engaging performer, leaning into the raucous hometown goodwill with humour and humility. As the spring nights begin to stretch out, Joesef’s cottony electro-pop and lightweight funk, fluttering falsetto and ear for a good tune – new single ‘Stephanie’s Place’ vied with old favourite ‘It’s Been a Little Heavy Lately’ for best in show – will no doubt find its small hours niche in cool clubs and flat-share kitchens.

In common with many of his contemporaries – Arlo Parks springs to mind – the overall effect leaned towards polite and slightly pedestrian optimism. There was no shame in a cover of ‘Thinking of You’ by Sister Sledge being the best song of the evening, but I left wishing that Joesef would push his obvious attributes into a few more interesting areas.