Van Morrison Concerts Setlist

Sir George Ivan Morrison, better known by his stage name Van Morrison, is a Northern Irish singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist. He was born on August 31, 1945 in Belfast, United Kingdom. Morrison grew up in a Protestant working class family in Belfast, but his mother worked as a singer and tap dancer in her youth. Also, his father, a shipyard electrician by trade, had the largest collection of vinyl records in the whole of Northern Ireland, so the love of music was present in his immediate family.

His father’s collection ignited the music passion in young Ivan (going by Van already at the time) as well. At age 11, he learnt to play the guitar. The next year, aged 12, he founded a folk band with his friends called “The Sputniks”. Even before he reached his teen years, he gave his first Van Morrison concert shows as the lead singer of his band at local movie theaters. Inspired by jazz musician Jimmy Giuffre, Morrison also picked up the saxophone at age 14. Throughout his teens, he played for miscellaneous local bands in Belfast, while also working as a window cleaner’s apprentice. His first band to go pro was “The Monarchs”, later renamed “International Monarchs”, an Irish showband (meaning it also included dancers) that he got to tour Europe with at age 17.

That band dismantled in 1963. So, Morrison briefly joined the “Golden Eagles” (an R&B group that later became well-known as “The Wheels”), before leaving them too to become one of the founding members of the rock band “Them”. Morrison originally responded to an advert in a local paper about a nightclub looking for singers. That’s how he met the other musicians, whom he teamed up with for this new project. Them went on to become quite a success, having released 8 albums between 1965 and 1979. Their second record, “Them Again” from 1966 peaked at #21 in the UK and #138 in the US on the charts. However, Morrison left this group as well after just two years, in 1966.

Next up, Morrison traveled to New York to kick off his solo career in North America. He got signed by Bang Records, and released his debut solo album, “Blowin' Your Mind!” in September 1967. The standout track off of that record, “Brown Eyed Girl”, became a top 10 hit in the US. In 1974, he released what is considered by some to be of the greatest live albums of all time, a recording of three Van Morrison concert shows, one at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, California, one at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, and one at the Rainbow in London, UK. That live album is titled “It's Too Late to Stop Now”.

Over his long career spanning many decades, the Northern Irish music legend has put out no less than 43 (!) studio albums in total - and that is only counting his solo work… The best selling one among them is the R&B/soul record “Moondance” from January 1970, which sold around 3.9 million copies worldwide. Meanwhile, the latest new Van Morrison album came out in May 2022, with the title “What's It Gonna Take?”. Morrison’s biggest hits to date are the aforementioned “Brown Eyed Girl” (1967), “Into the Mystic” (1970), “Tupelo Honey” (1971), and “Days Like This” (1995). He was knighted for his contributions to music and Northern Irish culture in 2016.