Listening to Van Morrison

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The one abiding truth I’ve taken from writing songs is that they will be misunderstood. But as long as they carry that mysterious note of yearning, that longing for some greater knowledge, they will, as Bob Dylan once said, get up and walk around the room on their own. In 1899, William Morrison launched his now-iconic retail chain with its first store. Morrisons is a grocery store chain that also sells apparel, books, home items, magazines, flowers, groceries, auto parts and gas. The current CEO of the firm is David Potts. Speaking to Marketing Week on a call following the company’s results announcement this morning, Potts said the supermarket has implemented a “customer listening programme” run by the marketing team to help it understand what customers value about the brand and how it can improve.

We know value and price will prevail and I believe Morrisons will emerge stronger than before. New Morrisons hitting the ground running with a new future.” Here is where you can fill out the MorrisonsListens survey. Therefore, it is recommended that all attendees have access to a reliable internet connection through a smartphone, computer, laptop, or tablet. No Guru, No Method, No Teacher came out in 1986, 18 years after Morrison’s magnum opus, and about two months shy of his 41st birthday. If you only know Van Morrison from Astral Weeks, the juxtaposition might be startling. On the cover of Astral Weeks, Van resembles a wood nymph in the midst of an intense religious experience; on the cover of No Guru, he looks like a no-nonsense English professor at an exclusive East Coast liberal arts college, or a no-nonsense TV detective portrayed by no-nonsense character actor Bill Camp. Let’s just say that by then he had ventured far beyond the slipstream, and well past the viaducts of your dream. If we listen very hard to customers they can give us a lot of clues as to what they value and find unique about Morrisons. From that emerges the identity – the way the company presents itself to millions of consumers. It includes March Winds in February – a sublime example of Morrison songwriting – plus a duet with the Righteous Brothers’ Bill Medley and contributions from Jay Berliner, the guitarist who appeared on 1968’s beloved Astral Weeks.But when Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg presented their first COVID Budget, where was it aimed? At construction and manufacturing, significantly; male dominated sectors that were less badly hit by COVID-19, but more generously helped. The wave of anger The response on election night to these sentiments was unmistakeable. And Scott Morrison, just over a year after he declared himself open to a quota system, has presided over a campaign that cut the number of Liberal female MPs in the house of representatives from 13 to 6. You're trying to make it very, very interesting and something it's not. Playing gigs is very practical. It's very repetitive If you develop a compelling customer offer and keep improving the shopping trip there’s no need to shop around. David Potts, Morrisons

When Leigh Sales asked Scott Morrison in the final week about the threat to the government in the "teal" seats, he replied in effect that voters in those seats were rich enough not to have to worry about real issues. We all love some rewards in one way or another, don’t we? This is one of the easiest ways to get some. As there is no shedding of sweat, go for this one if you would love some extra discount on your next shopping day. There so many imponderables it’s hard to call, but we know as a nation we’ll come out the other side,” said CEO David Potts, speaking on a press briefing this morning (10 September). He said the scheme aims to cover around 80 stores this year and speak to individual shoppers about the experience not only of the store in question but the brand overall. The aim is to “rediscover Morrisons’ identity” and what resonates with customers and use that information to inform the way the company presents itself both overall and in its advertising.

When Van sang those lines, it was as if he had written them himself, all along. “The child is grown / the dream is gone” could function as a logline for much of his post– Astral Weeks work. Still, this morning he grows ever more hunkered. He tells me he prefers to listen to jazz or classical music, but, asked why he favours those genres, responds with a shirty: “Cos that’s what I like.” Has he been excited by any of the players on the new jazz scene? “No,” he says.

Potts is confident that Morrisons is well-positioned to seize on any gaps in the market and believes having its own food manufacturing gives the supermarket an extra string to its bow. This book, though, is not so much a defence of the Doors as a celebration of what the group – and, by extension the 60s – represented. In one of the most thought-provoking chapters, titled "The Doors in the So-Called Sixties", Marcus writes: "The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part – when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted." Looking ahead, as long as we keep listening to customers and colleagues and keep listening to suppliers and shareholders, then the company will continue to innovate.” Next phaseThe milk will go in stores in around 6 weeks’ time. A Morrisons spokesman says it is still considering how it will develop in-store communications before looking at other channels to promote the range.

It sounds like one,” he says. “The band learned those two songs, so those are the ones they knew. There’s not really any great intellectual Bernard Levin debate, you know. It’s just, it’s just . . . it’s just music, that’s all it is.” Until 2004, Morrisons had mainly been in North England, but its presence increased significantly in South England, Wales, and Scotland with Safeway’s takeover in that year. To the extent that Morrison explicitly mentioned women during the campaign, it was often to support the defence of women's sport, as argued by Deves and by the Tasmanian Liberal Senator Claire Chandler, whose private members bill to exclude trans women from women's sport Morrison warmly supported.I do not for one moment believe him. I’m not really sure there is “just music” for anyone, least of all Morrison. He is under no obligation to share any of that with journalists, of course – his music undoubtedly speaks for itself. I think about this scenario sometimes: Morrison went into hiding in the mid-’70s, after the public and the press cruelly dismissed the sublime Veedon Fleece as a self-indulgent collection of impenetrable dirges. He laid low in Northern California and tried to get his drinking under control. Recording sessions in 1975 produced some worthwhile and lively numbers — like the self-explanatory “Naked in the Jungle” — but he chose not to put them out. Instead, according to Turner, he read obsessively about Jungian psychiatry and Celtic history, and studied under a so-called “tension expert” to help him release his own considerable inner strain. But I’m sure there is a kinder and more graceful way of declining. “You’re making a big thing about it and it’s not a big deal,” he continues. “It’s what I do. I don’t know what you do, you’re probably a journalist, that’s what you do.” This is not about me, I tell him.