Van Morrison has been given a knighthood.
Sir George Ivan Morrison was at Buckingham Palace this week to be dubbed a knight by Prince Charles. Sir Ivan’s daughter Shana Morrison accompanied him to the Palace where he later commented that the knighthood was “not bad for a blue-eyed soul singer from east Belfast.”
Van Morrison had his first hit with ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ and ‘Gloria’ in 1964 fronting Them. The follow-up ‘Here Comes The Night’ in 1965 is now a classic.
In 1967 Morrison went solo and reached no 10 in the USA with ‘Brown Eyed Girl’.
Morrison’s second solo album ‘Astral Weeks’ (1968) went Gold in the USA but it was the third one ‘Moondance’ that made him a global star. ‘Moondance’ sold over 3,000,000 copies in the USA alone and to date is his biggest seller.
Van Morrison has released 35 solo albums to date. ‘Duets: Reworking The Catalogue’ was released in 2015.
Morrison detests flying and has not toured Australia since the mid 80s. Bluesfest boss Peter Noble notes Morrison is his “white whale”, the one act he has never been able to obtain for Bluesfest.
Big shows are not what drives the Irish star. “I enjoy that the most – playing a small club – that’s really what I do,” he said fater receiving his knighthood. “The bigger places you have to do for financial survival reasons, let me put it that way, but the bigger places enable me to play small clubs occasionally.”
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