Van Morrison Remembering Now 2025 ...and Them 1964-1967

Van Morrison's latest is getting mostly excellent press, with several reviewers saying it's his best in three decades. I'm not sure I'd go quite that far, not because it isn't darn good, but because the last thirty years, while inconsistent, have given us several really good ones. How Long Has This Been Going On 1995, What's Wrong With This Picture? 2003, Down The Road 2002, Keep It Simple 2008, and You're Driving Me Crazy 2018 were all good Van Morrison records, and a few others came close. But since 2020, he's given us five records that range from dull to god-awful. His two lock down bitch sessions, a skiffle outing, an oldies covers record, and a back-catalog retread have kept this decade mostly disappointing.

And so Remembering Now is a strong return to form. He's never going to make music like he made in the 1970s again, and that seems an unreasonable expectation from anyone turning 80. But he still sings with soul and verve, and he's written mostly better songs this time around. The band has been around a while, and they are good. He tends to make long records, and if he'd edited out maybe three of them, it might approach perfection. You can read more detailed reviews elsewhere, but suffice it to say that if you gave up on Van Morrison a while back, now might be a good time to check out his new one.

So now lets check out Van in his youth with Them. Them made two LPs with Morrison, and this 3 CD collection The Complete Them 1964-1967 from 2015 includes those LPs, plus singles and b-sides and demos and first takes and pretty much everything that was worthy of release. And somewhat remarkably, almost everything here is worthy of release, and worth your time to hear it. Them was a blues-based rock outfit that most closely resembled The Animals in sound, although Morrison's voice and Eric Burden's are different, Morrison with a higher register than Burden, but both bluesy and soulful. 

Of course the few hits they had (Baby Please Don't Go, Here Comes The Night, Mystic Eyes) are here, and so is Gloria (a hit for The Shadows of Knight in the US). But there's a lot of fine performances, both from Morrison's pen as well as blues chestnuts Stormy Monday, Route 66, Turn On Your Lovelight, and I Put A Spell On You. The third disc is not essential, with it's demos and alternate takes, but there's six live tracks from BBC radio that are pretty cool. They had a good reputation as a live act. It could have been an excellent 2 CD set, but you really can't blame them for collecting it all in one place, and Van Morrison completists are surely happy. There's a detailed review at Everybody's Dummy here.

I also recently realized that in my quest to review all of Van Morrison's work, I skipped the work he did for Bang Records after Them and before Astral Weeks. Originally released as Blowin' Your Mind 1967, and later as T.B. Sheets and under several different names and with different song selections, I'll be brief. You can get Brown-Eyed Girl lots of other places, and unless you just have to have everything, the rest of the songs are unimportant and inferior to the work he would start to do immediately thereafter.