Polydor / Pgd
1986
No Guru, No Method, No Teacher
About This Album
No Guru, No Method, No Teacher was Van Morrison's second studio album for Mercury, following A Sense of Wonder and Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast. It was recorded at the height of his spiritual period and is among the most laid-back records of his career. Morrison's notion of seeking, and being all but drowned by his obsession with "reclaiming the previous," is everywhere here, beginning with the set's opener, "Got to Go Back." With a striking wide-open acoustic piano, accompanied by a solo on oboe (by Kate St. John no less) twinned by Richie Buckley's soprano saxophone and an acoustic guitar, Morrison offers in waltz tempo these reflections: "When I was a young boy back in Orangefield/I used to look out my classroom window and dream/And then go home and listen to Ray sing/'I Believe to My Soul' after school/Oh that love that was within me/You know it carried me through/Well it lifted me up and it filled me/Got to go back/Got to go back/To the feeling." And if anything, this album is, like so many other statements made by Morrison in the years before this, a consumptive obsession with innocence, with the puzzling notion of God, of liberation from earthly constraints, while being immersed in them by the sheer physicality in his music -- despite every attempt at ethereality.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,6,7 and 8)

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

 
report abuse