Van Morrison: The 1987 Interviews with David Tame

I just came back to this part of the forums on book reviews .... astonishing that I mentioned "Human Traces" so far back as 2009, in the thread on fiction about therapy. How time flies ... it obviously wasn't my cup of tea since that book still remains unfinished.

Not a "review" here, but just to let anyone who knows me or is interested know that I have a new e-book out. This seems the best place to mention it. (And as I write, it is an e-book, not in hardcopy.) The story is that I and Van Morrison met up a number of times in the 1980s, beginning when he read a book of mine, tracked me down and gave me a call. I visited him at home sometimes, and he came to the spiritual center I then helped run, but we even bumped into each other as though quite by chance a couple of times. Though not really so much by chance - I used to run a stand at the London Festival for Mind-Body-Spirit, and Van would visit that Festival, as even his PAs of the time would also.

Anyway, the idea was hatched to do a series of interviews in such a relaxed atmosphere, his sitting room, and since we knew each other's interests and backgrounds quite well by then, that these could be truly in-depth and with no time limit. They became quite fascinating, and I now realise that it was a bit of a vehicle for Van to start elaborating on what at least then was his truly main interest in life. For as he put it, music was important to him, but only secondary. He'd opted out of being caught up in the "biz", and he could write and perform simply when he felt called to. But he had another interest which had actually been the most important thing to him "since about 1974". Unexpectedly therefore, the interviews frequently branched off into this whole other subject....

Anyway, people who know me here on HP may be interested that I thought it was a real shame for these interviews to go any longer unpublished - as nobody else at all has ever seen or read them, over all these years! So I've brought them out at last, aptly titled, "Van Morrison: The 1987 Interviews with David Tame"