There’s a quiet irony to Van Morrison ’s entrance at the Royal Albert Hall , as the band play him on for a prosaic cover of “You Are My Sunshine”. Face obscured behind dark sunglasses and a brimmed hat, mouth fixed into a near-unwavering scowl, he looks allergic to the very idea of sunshine. But such is the mercurial appeal of Morrison, perhaps the greatest and most confounding curmudgeon in the history of popular music .
After briefly re-branding as an anti-lockdown campaigner during the height of Covid, the 78-year-old is back touring his latest album, Accentuate the Positive , a record comprising covers of classic country and rock’n’roll songs. After “Sunshine”, he throws himself into a cover of the Everly brothers’ “When Will I Be Loved” with considerably more gusto, which gamely compensates for a rather plodding arrangement – albeit with a couple of guitar licks that fleetingly evoke Linda Ronstadt’s peerless 1974 version. The band (seven men, and two women backing singers) are uniformly excellent, and come alive on the more up-tempo numbers, such as the jaunty “I Wish I Was An Apple on a Tree”.
In his pomp, Morrison was able to grab a cover by the neck and really make it his own – think back to the mid-Seventies when, newly divorced, he slowed Sam Cooke’s ineffable love song “Bring it On Home To Me” to a bitter, snarling croon. Tonight, though, many of the covers plucked from Accentuate the Positive are little more than drab re-imag.