Van Morrison - BBC Sessions, Volume 7: In Concert, Waterfront Hall, Belfast, Ireland, 2-3-1997

Here's another Van Morrison BBC album. This time, it's a concert from 1997.

I'm not a big fan of Morrison's music in the 1980's, where he leaned more into New Age sounds with more overt Christian messaging. But in my opinion he rebounded in the 1990s, with more of a focus on rootsy R&B and jazz. His renaissance continued with the album "The Healing Game," released in April 1997. A Rolling Stone Magazine article in 2019 listed the album as one of his ten best, the only album on that list from after 1980.

Although this concert took place a couple of months prior to the release of that album, he already was playing songs from it: "Fire in the Belly," "Rough God Goes Riding," "If You Love Me," "Sometimes We Cry," "Burning Ground," and "The Healing Game."

This album has two sources. The first ten songs are from a BBC radio broadcast, which was also filmed and shown on TV. Apparently, it's not just from February 3, 1997. There are some songs from February 2nd, but I don't know which is which. Luckily for us, in the filming of this concert, there were some outtakes that leaked to the public. I found those on YouTube, and added them in as the last four songs. The song order for the whole thing is scrambled compared to the actual order performed in concert, so I just stuck those four at the end. 

Overall, the sound quality is excellent. However, one of the extra songs, "Tupelo Honey - Why Must I Always Explain," was suddenly cut off before the song ended. Luckily, the song dropped off to a near end about ten seconds prior to that. Probably it would have built back up before finishing. But I just cut it off at that point, and then added in some cheering from the end of other songs to give it more of a natural sounding ending.

This album is an hour and 18 minutes long.

01 Days like This (Van Morrison)
02 Fire in the Belly (Van Morrison)
03 Rough God Goes Riding (Van Morrison)
04 Into the Mystic (Van Morrison)
05 Sometimes We Cry (Van Morrison)
06 Enlightenment (Van Morrison)
07 It Once Was My Life (Van Morrison)
08 If You Love Me (Van Morrison)
09 The Healing Game (Van Morrison)
10 See Me Through - Soldier of Fortune - Burning Ground (Van Morrison)
11 The Waiting Game (Van Morrison)
12 Ain't That Lovin' You, Baby (Van Morrison)
13 Vanlose Stairway (Van Morrison)
14 Tupelo Honey - Why Must I Always Explain (Van Morrison)

https://bestfile.io/6sMsQvFxFJoHNZw/file

The cover photo is from the Glastonbury Festival on June 29, 1997.