CD of the week: Shaun de Waal
Bob Dylan sure started something when he allowed previously unreleased material and outtakes to be released as The Bootleg Series in 1991. The huge success of that collection encouraged the likes of The Beatles, who, once they’d finally wound up their legal wranglings, released all their leftover bits and bobs on the Anthology series.
The lesson here is that you’ve got to have good things hidden in your vaults, like Dylan did – songs worth more than just their curiosity value, not simply alternate or unfinished versions of material already well-known.
Van Morrison, thankfully, does. The double- CD set The Philosopher’s Stone (PolyGram) contains songs written and recorded between 1971 and 1988. Most are from the Seventies, Morrison’s golden period, when he made gem after gem in the wake of his twin masterpieces, Astral Weeks and Moondance.
This set reminds one of the blues base underlying much of Morrison’s work, imaginatively elaborated though that base is. His instrumentation, always rich and his arrangements lush, adds layers of jazz and soul. He sings with religious fervour, occasionally lapsing into his own patented form of glossolalia. At the same time, he’s not so fussy that he won’t use a song for a bit of a gripe about the music industry, whether he’s denouncing the “standard contract” in Drumshanbo Shuffle or lashing out at the whole sordid mess in Showbusiness.
The later numbers are patchier, like the 1980 Real Real Gone, which is quite limp next to the brilliant revised version of 10 years later. But overall this is a collection to stand alongside the best of the master.