New Release - An Updated Favourite : Van Morrison It's Too Late to Stop Now Volumes II-IV

I went high school in the Hutt Valley which required a mile long walk, followed by a bus ride that took anywhere up to an hour.  Coming home, rather than always catch the bus outside of school I used to walk about a mile to what was imaginatively called The Transport Centre and catch the 3:50 bus (or the ten to four as we called it).  

There were three advantages to this, one I had a better chance of getting a seat, two I could catch up with friends from other schools and three there was an EMI shop at the Transport Centre where for a number of years I bought quite a few records.

My mates and I considered ourselves pretty knowledgeable on music at the time.  We thought. However we were quite intrigued one day when the window displays and whole store was made out in some sort of homage to someone we had not heard of called Van Morrison and his then new album Hard Nose the Highway.   It certainly had a weird fucking cover........

But this post is not about that album.

While we were intrigued I for one was not intrigued enough to investigate until a year later I came home late one Friday night and caught what at the time I thought was an amazing live show by the same Van Morrison.  It was a BBC live show recorded at The Rainbow in London and I was spellbound by how tight the band was and how Van seemed to have almost complete control over them.

It was a few years later that I really started to listen to The Man.  Over the years I have built up a pretty extensive collection of his albums on both CD and vinyl.  Astral Weeks and St Dominic's Preview are probably my two favourites.

It's Too Late to Stop Now - the live album from the Hard Nose the Hardway tour has long been one of my favourite live albums and I could never understand why Van had not released that great video I saw all those years ago.  In fact early Van videos have been pretty limited overall.

Then a month ago he released what has been called Volumes II, III and IV of It's too Late to Stop Now - with DVD and now I have finally got that great live show video. Plus so much Van Live that I can see that my impression of how good that band was and the show was was not incorrect.  Incredibly tight band as illustrated by the almost identical renditions of the few duplicated songs on this exhaustive if not exhausting set.    

So there are now great live versions of Snow in San Anselmo, Being Green (yes the Kermit song) and Purple Heather from Hard Nose the Highway and Moonshine Whiskey, Sweet Thing and Since I Fell For You.  Such a rich selection from The Man in his prime.