Көрікті Көру (Kóriktí Kóru)

Beautiful Vision is the thirteenth studio album by Northern Irish singer songwriter Van Morrison, released in February 1982. It continued Morrison's departure from R&B at the time, instead favoring Celtic folk and American jazz in its music. As with many of Morrison's recordings, spirituality is a major theme and some of the songs are based on the teachings of Alice Bailey. Other songs show Morrison's Celtic heritage and reminiscence of his Belfast background. Beautiful Vision received critical acclaim but garnered only modest chart success, peaking at number 31 on the UK album charts and number 44 on the US Billboard 200.

The first recording session started in May 1981 at the Record Plant studios, Sausalito, California, near the Golden Gate, San Francisco. Although only "Scandinavia" was released on Beautiful Vision from this session, "Cleaning Windows" and "Celtic Ray" were re recorded for Beautiful Vision later on. All the other songs or instrumentals from the session were included on one of Morrison's later albums: the instrumentals "All Saints Day" and "Daring Night" appeared with lyrics on the albums Hymns to the Silence and Avalon Sunset, and "Down the Road I Go" was renamed "Down the Road" and used as the title track on Down the Road. On 27 July Morrison entered the recording studio to record "Cleaning Windows" and "Aryan Mist". Morrison concluded recording in the summer, when he recorded the rest of the songs for the album. Four songs were not used from this session, including the future singles "Real Real Gone" and "Tore Down a la Rimbaud". It is also said to have been strongly influenced by his new girlfriend, Ulla Munch, from Vanløse in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is concerned with the singer's connection to the ancient Celtic culture. The song has the concept of messages coming through the ether from Mother Ireland. "Northern Muse (Solid Ground)" adds a young woman in County Down to a similar theme. Morrison commented in an interview with Hot Press in 1982 that "Some of the material [on Beautiful Vision], when it started, was more traditional. Some of the songs – like 'Solid Ground' and 'Celtic Ray' – they basically started out as folk oriented stuff, and ended up being integrated as folk/R&B." "Dweller on the Threshold" and "Aryan Mist" are credited to the religious writings of Alice Bailey. Her book discusses the New Age ideas of "glamours" or "mental illusions", which formed a fog that covers the "spiritual warrior" and the "Aryan race" from the world. When the "dweller on the threshold" was covered with the light of the soul or "Angel of Presence" illumination came. Some of these ideas were quoted in the two Morrison compositions, both co written with Hugh Murphy. In 1982 Morrison revealed in an interview: "I've read Glamour four or five times, and I get different things out of it each time. [Alice Bailey]'s saying a lot of things. It's depth reading. You might read it on Wednesday and on Thursday you pick it up again and get an entirely different thing. I don't feel qualified to speak about what it's about – you really have to read it yourself because there's so much in there." "Beautiful Vision" can be interpreted as either a vision of heaven or of his girlfriend, who also influences "She Gives Me Religion" and "Vanlose Stairway" (which refers to the stairway in the apartment where she lived). Biographer Clinton Heylin believes the songs "'Vanlose Stairway' and 'She Gives Me Religion' [were] perhaps Morrison's most captivating love songs since the days of Veedon Fleece." The melody is very upbeat and embellished with organ and guitar, reminiscent to the music of The Band. The song is written in a similar fashion to Morrison's 1970 song, "And It Stoned Me". There is no other evidence for this interpretation, however, and the song makes no reference to either Morrison's daughter or ex wife. Further weakening Coulter's interpretation is the fact that the lyrics were co written by Hugh Murphy. Murphy's two other songwriting contributions to the album are "Dweller on the Threshold" and "Aryan Myst", both explicitly influenced by Alice Bailey's work "Glamour: A World Problem", which contains direct references to angels. Beautiful Vision ends with the instrumental "Scandinavia", with Morrison on piano and prominently features Mark Isham's synthesizer.

Morrison was eager to include the new material recorded for Beautiful Vision in concert. Before the album was released he performed three quarters of it at shows in California in October 1981. However his live performances at this point were increasingly confined to the San Francisco Bay Area. His manager, Bill Graham, was concerned that Morrison was not promoting the album with a nationwide tour of the US. Morrison fired Graham on stage in San Francisco. Herbie Armstrong remembered "He was taking Van in the wrong direction. He was trying to commercialize him." Warner Brothers persuaded Morrison to allow Tom Dowd to produce the album but after Morrison became suspicious of Warner's motives, Dowd's services were not used and Morrison took over production of the album. After the release of the album, Morrison performed a series of concerts at the Dominion Theatre, London, opened by Herbie Armstrong with an acoustic set.</blockquote> Morrison's love of live performing was reignited by this set of concerts and he commented at the time that it was "more like appearing in a play, going to the theatre and doing your job every day – which I prefer to touring because that's very fragmented and disorientating." According to Johnny Rogan, these performances "are still regarded by many as his most memorable since the glory days of the Caledonia Soul Orchestra. In March 1983, Morrison performed a series of four concerts at the Grand Opera House; six of the Beautiful Vision songs were featured on the live album Live at the Grand Opera House Belfast that was composed of the two best concerts performed at this venue. On 27 January 1984, Morrison performed at another Rockpalast TV special from the Midem at Cannes, where he promoted Inarticulate Speech of the Heart and included seven songs from Beautiful Vision. "Vanlose Stairway" is one of the songs that Morrison has performed most frequently since the release of the album; the song has featured in over seven hundred of Morrison's shows, behind only "Moondance", "Gloria" and "It's All in the Game" (as of 2010). A remastered version was released in 1998. On 29 August 2008 an extended remastered version with alternative takes of "Cleaning Windows" and "Real Real Gone" was planned to be released in the Remasters series, but got postponed until 9 January 2009 and was eventually cancelled.

Year Single Peak positions US UK 1982"Cleaning Windows" — —"Scandinavia" — — "—" denotes releases that did not chart.