ON OCTOBER 23, 1973, FOLLOWING THE DISSOLUTION of his 11-piece touring band, an exhausted 29-year-old Van Morrison took a holiday in the Republic Of Ireland.

The break was much needed.

Formed out of the various musicians who’d appeared on Morrison’s July 1973 LP, Hard Nose The Highway, the Caledonia Soul Orchestra had just completed a gruelling three-month tour of the US and Europe, culminating in two nights at London’s Rainbow Theatre.

Centred around live strings and horns – arranged by pianist and musical director Jef Labes – the CSO were a compelling mix of the tightly arranged and the freely improvised. Reinterpreting songs from Morrison’s R&B and showband days with The Monarchs and Them, alongside numbers from Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Moon-dance, Saint Dominic’s Preview and Hard Nose LPs, a CSO performance, as documented on the 1974 double live album It’s Too Late To Stop Now was both a summary of past successes and a path for future directions, the band allowing space for Morrison to extemporise, improvise and free associate, the singer giving room for the band to follow, reflect and repeat.

“It was a big band,” explains Labes today, at home in California. “I was music director with the string quartet and horn players, but when you wrote for Van it had to be flexible enough so you could bring the arrangements in or out, depending on what was happening. Where the strings came in was set by signals in the music but they had to have the right dynamic, and fit in with what Van was doing. I was the link between him and the rest of the band.”

“We were having a ball because we knew we were playing at a very high level,” says David Hayes, who’d only just joined Morrison’s permanent group, having first sat in as a session bassist on Hard Nose’s Warm Love. “I was the new guy. I was brought in to replace

[Moondance bassist] John Klingberg because he’d got addicted to heroin. Most of those guys had been working together for years and it showed.”

Fair play to you: Van Morrison on-stage at Santa Monica Civic Centre, June 29, 1973.

Ed Caraeff/Iconic Images

River man: Morrison at the London Rainbow, July 24, 1973

Van circa Moondance

Bob Harris grills Morrison with (left) John Platania and David Hayes, 1973

He bridge at Arklow.

MORRISON’S VISION FOR THE CSO was not explained, but as Hayes remembers, “you saw it through how he delegated. Jef Labes organised the strings but Van arranged the band. He gave us signals behind his back. If, say, he wanted the drummer to get on the ride cymbal he had a specific hand signal for that, like in baseball. He was arranging it dynamically, on the run. I mean, we didn’t even use a setlist. He was always just in the moment, reading the room, tuning in to his own feelings.”

However, following a booze-assisted European leg of the tour, and with an increasingly morose Morrison still embroiled in divorce proceedings with his wife of five years, Janet ‘Planet’ Rigsbee, rest-and-relaxation was in order.

Accompanied by his manager Stephen Pillster, his new beau Carol Guida, and the Irish rock journalist Donal Corvin, the Dublin-based Morrison embarked upon a tour of Cork, Tipperary, Kerry, and Wicklow, specifically avoiding his Troubles-racked home town of Belfast in Northern Ireland. He wrote poems, read books, swore off alcohol and had his photo taken outside Sutton Castle in Dublin, posing with two Irish wolfhounds. He also continued his studies in Gestalt theory – a form of psychotherapy that encouraged its acolytes to focus on the present moment – devised eight new songs and conducted two interviews, a long discursive one with Corvin, later published in the July 7, 1977 issue of Hot Press, and a somewhat chaotic RTE TV interview with host Tony Johnson.