After the singularity of Astral Weeks in 1968, the 1970s were the formative years for the solo career of one of the acknowledged giants of modern music. Van Morrison was one of the music legends who defined the decade, with every album bringing out different aspects of Morrison’s vast musical spectrum. His story is a chronicle of a Belfast artist coming to terms with the voice, the call and the dream of America, as the decade saw him work through the promise of the land of blues and jazz, westerns and railroads, big cities and backwoods. It also saw his own spiritual quest and the reimagining of a North European heritage and Irish roots alongside the realisation of emigration and exile.
Morrison forged a rich artistic catalogue that continues to the present day. Beginning with the smash hit Moondance in 1970, his output in the decade continued through Tupelo Honey via Hard Nose the Highway to 1979’s Into the Music. By the end of the decade, he was again looking to Europe to recast his music for another half-century in the business, but throughout most of the 1970s, his songs centred on America as he created the foundation of an astonishing legacy.

Sequestered in rural Gloucestershire, UK, Peter Childs is starting his seventh decade. Having devoted a life to teaching English and professing about literature, he is the author or editor of dozens of previous books including The Twentieth Century in Poetry and the Encyclopaedia of Contemporary British Culture. Like many of his peers, he has always found music the purest source of shared pleasure and the true solace of the inner life of the soul. Unwilling to dance about architecture, he is delighted now to be writing about the records he loves.