The release 40 years ago of Moondance, swiftly followed by His Band and the Street Choir by Van Morrison, who is 65 tomorrow, took place during an important period of the singer/songwriter’s career.

Astral Weeks aside, Moondance is recognised as one of Morrison’s most creatively successful and acclaimed albums although it took until 1999 for it to be inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, when the award was presented to him by Ray Charles after he and Morrison performed ‘Crazy Love’ together.

In contrast 2010 so far for Morrison has been quiet in terms of releases and gigs and while there is deep radio silence on any future album, just five years ago and another important birthday celebrated, Morrison’s sixtieth year was marked early by Magic Time (with stand-out tunes ‘Gypsy In My Soul’, ‘The Lion This Time’ and ‘Celtic New Year’), a definite return to form. Since then it has been a mixed picture, detoured for a while by a foray into country music documented on the 2006 album Pay The Devil which nonetheless brought Morrison a new audience.

With only one appearance in the UK this year at the Hop Farm festival in Kent and limited touring in the States, it won’t be until later in the autumn that Morrison returns here again for a few further dates. Yet in the last 40 years, like his friend Bob Dylan who also appeared at the Hop Farm, Morrison has been on the road constantly since Moondance, releasing regular studio albums and only occasionally looking back to earlier highlights of his career, chief of which were documented on Astral Weeks: Live At The Hollywood Bowl which received critical acclaim both for the initial live concerts and the resulting album. It marked the first concerted attempt to recreate at a concert Morrison’s defining album Astral Weeks recorded almost 42 years ago in New York.

Morrison’s last studio album was the popular Keep It Simple from two years ago, his thirty-third studio release which at number 10 reached his highest ever Billboard chart position in its first week. But despite such successes Morrison is not about just selling records, nor is he about genre even if it’s fairly clear that jazz, blues, early rock 'n' roll and folk are never far from his heart, irrespective of the labelling on any particular album. In some ways the least successful of his jazz-influenced albums are the ones that make the claim too overtly (compare say How Long Has This Been Going On to Into The Music).

Despite his remarkable tendency to remain difficult and distant, his music continues to inspire. “He gets inside people,” wrote Greil Marcus in The Guardian recently; “and he festers there, sparking longings too intense and elusive to satisfy, desires too abstract and ethereal to fulfil, a sense of escape, transcendence, revelation, and ecstasy so deep it can seem to trivialise ordinary life, and thus trivialise whoever has to live that life, which is to say anyone.”

– Stephen Graham