'Takin’ good care of your boy/Seein’ that he’s got clean clothes/Puttin’ on his little red shoes/I see you know he’s got clean clothes,' he moans only able to stand dumbly before them struck mute by overwhelming desire as they point at him like they would any other oddball vagabond. The title track openly deals with this pain, as Morrison croons to a woman involved with a far more dapper man than he. It's about never getting up to bat in the first place like the great sonnets, Astral Weeks deals with the one-sided love a freak of the underclass feels for someone so far outside his caste that to even speak to that person would cause social embarrassment for the object of desire. It's not even an album about striking out. Astral Weeks contains heaps of heartbreak, but it is not a break-up album.

Each song is its own story, a tale of wretched, despairing individuals looking for their place in the world and, more importantly, someone with whom to share that space. The eight tracks that make up Astral Weeks are love songs, but that's far too general an assessment. What The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was to jazz, so too was this to pop: a poetic, rich expression of desperate romanticism and hope from a notoriously mercurial, yet wildly ingenious, performer.

But few rock albums - if you could call the jazz-folk-classical music contained within 'rock' by any stretch - are as paradoxically inviting as this ultra-complex recording. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, his first 'proper' solo album after departing popular garage rockers Them*, has become one of those artistic touchstones that practically wards off anyone actually enjoying it, as to touch a LP (or DVD, or copied painting) would rub the oily grease of the filthy and mortal onto timelessness and thus muck it up. Review Summary: Morrison places us all in his own slipstream, carried along by the force of his genius.

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