Van Morrison announces new album and tour dates at Belfast's Whitla Hall

Van the Man has confirmed the release of new album ‘Moving on Skiffle’ to be released on March 10, 2023 and which is now available to preorder.

It will feature the lead single ‘Streamline Tain’ and to mark the launch of the new album Morrison will perform shows at Belfast’s Whitla Hall on April 6 and 7.

Tickets for the gigs go on sale on Friday November 4 at 10am from www.ticketmaster.ie.

It should come as no surprise that Van Morrison has made an album inspired by skiffle.

Several decades on, Morrison now revisits the genre.

The album finds him taking a homemade style that exploded across Britain in the mid-1950s and infusing it with a level of soulfulness it didn’t always possess the first time around.

The 23-track album goes to the heart of the music Van has inhabited ever since he was six years old. It also contains songs that underline, in their messages on the importance of freedom and living on your own terms, his life philosophy.

Van said: “I was still in school when I performed with a skiffle band. I was already familiar with Lead Belly’s recordings so when I heard Lonnie Donegan’s version of ‘Rock Island Line’ I intuitively understood what he was creating, I knew that it was what I wanted to do. It was like an explosion.”

The ever-rebellious Morrison has changed the title of ‘Mama Don’t Allow’, recorded by both the Memphis Jug Band and the Chicago blues man Tampa Red in the late 1920s, to ‘Gov Don’t Allow’, a nod to his fight against the rise of government interference in our daily lives. And the gospel standard ‘This Little Light of Mine’, a key anthem of the Civil Rights movement in ‘60s America, is transformed into the rollicking, upbeat ‘This Loving Light of Mine’.

Van Morrison launches the album by releasing its lead single ‘Streamline Train’. Written in the 1930s by the Mississippi bluesman Red Nelson, the song was popularised when The Vipers Skiffle Group took it into the UK singles chart in 1957.

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