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Belfast's finest acknowledges neither the rain nor the crowd on the final day of being 80, and barely talks at all. But joy arrives when he plays some of his biggest hits.
Van Morrison turned 80 on the final day of Electric Picnic 2026, but Belfast's finest was not ready to celebrate his birthday just yet when he took to the Main Stage for a midafternoon performance.
The iconic singer and songwriter, famous for his onstage unpredictability, lived up to his reputation for being gruff, taciturn and abrupt even on a good day. Yet the faithful still arrived in their numbers: young and old, huddled in raincoats, gathered in reverent swells, one man finishing off a Cornetto, many wondering which version of Morrison they would get and whether he might slip his biggest hits into his hour-long set.
Questions about whether Moondance, Jackie Wilson Said or Into the Mystic would feature were answered from the very beginning. Introduced by his wingman, with eight backing musicians on stage, Morrison wasted no time in delivering a jazzy, low-key version of Into the Mystic before segueing effortlessly into Kidney Stew Blues, drawn from his recent LP Somebody Tried to Sell Me a Bridge, his 48th studio album and his seventh release of the 2020s.
Some of the crowd clapped along as the groove kicked in, lively, upbeat and warm. Morrison himself wore mirrored aviators with a blue fedora and a matching blue suit, while his band were dressed in smart, subtle black. Alternating between saxophone and tambourine, he moved effortlessly from one song to the next, flipping back and forth through the decades, sometimes into head-scratching obscurity and sometimes into anthems for the ages.
Then, to the delight of the audience, he kicked into Days Like This. If it was not bang on the original arrangement, it was very close, and it felt like a reward for surviving the weekend's rain, which had returned to pummel the crowd having cleared off just minutes before Morrison took the stage.
A quarter of an hour into the set, the rain was slanting down so hard that ink ran on a correspondent's notebook and pulling out an iPhone to take notes looked like a path for certain destruction. Morrison did not acknowledge the rain or the crowd, barely talking at all except for a couple of terse notes to his band.
It was a set designed not for the big screens or the TikTok purveyors, with audience lulls and plenty of chatter at times, but it was musically almost faultless, material arranged to get lost in, prioritising feel over look, navigating a space beyond words. Jackie Wilson Said (I'm in Heaven When You Smile) elicited a thrilled yelp from the audience, while Real Real Gone, from Morrison's 1990 album Enlightenment, went down even better.
Deluge aside, there was great comfort in a set like this, particularly at the end of the weekend; it would be a stretch to say Morrison is like an old snuggly blanket, but when he is this good he is wonderful. After he left on a rousing Gloria, some members of the crowd began singing Happy Birthday to him, knowing full well he could not hear it and perhaps would not care even if he could. But it was a thank you all the same
Van Morrison Electric Picnic Into The Mystic Days Like This Concert Review
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