The ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ author is set to play some intimate shows in venues all over the UK, kicking off on March 18 at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham. Tickets are set to go on sale at 9am GMT on Friday 7 via TicketMaster.

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The 79-year-old Blues Rock legend will be going on tour in support of one of his 2024 album ‘New Arrangements And Duets’ which is an album made out of songs from Morrison’s archive. Morrison’s album contains duets of all sorts with names such as Joss Stone, Curtis Stigers and Kurt Elling. One name Van was the most thrilled about was Willie Nelson, 91-year-old Folk legend, with whom he shares the two songs ‘What’s Wrong With This Picture?’ and ‘Steal My Heart Away’.

In a talk with The Sun, the artist shared: “It had been on my mind to do a duet with Willie Nelson for a long, long time but I didn’t get the opportunity. It was absolutely fantastic. Very relaxing and very professional. Willie came in and delivered. I played those songs for him and he was into them. There’s not a lot of pondering with this stuff. The less back and forth the better. Willie covers all the bases and, to me, he’s very similar to Ray Charles. I like his work and I heard he liked mine.”

‘New Arrangements And Duets’ broadcasts a small percentage of the huge amount of unreleased music Morrison still has under his belt. Working alongside Paul Moran and Chris White on the songs that needed big band arrangements, leading an array of vocalists and paying tributes to places like Belfast, the Harland and Wolff shipyard as well as people like his father and the love the latter had for jazz music. The solo artist played a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall in late 2024 which received a four-star review from The Independent.

Set to play in his hometown of Belfast at the Whitla Hall venue at the end of the month, the singer added an extra date due to the high demand.  

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Van Morrison’s March UK tour dates are:

18/03/25 – Royal Concert Hall – Nottingham

19/03 – Symphony Hall – Birmingham

23/03 – New Theatre Oxford – Oxford

24/03 – The Subscription Rooms – Stroud

The tour will end at the Adelphi Theatre in London on September 30.

GMVs staged over 162,000 events in 2024, contributing £526 million to the economy, yet they effectively subsidised live music by £162 million while operating on razor-thin margins. A concerning 43.8% of venues reported losses in the past year, with emergency response cases rising by 19%, meaning nearly a quarter of venues face the threat of permanent closure. The report underscores the urgent need for enhanced financial support and stronger protections to safeguard the sector’s future.

The following graphic from the report illustrates the different percentages for reasons for closure of these small independent venues:

In the UK live music sector, the primary touring circuit consists of locations that host more than two-thirds of national grassroots tours, typically encompassing major cities such as London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Meanwhile, the secondary circuit includes venues in smaller cities and towns that host at least one-third of national tours, playing a crucial role in supporting emerging artists and local audiences.

The report highlights a dramatic shift in the scale of UK tours over the last three decades. In 1994, the average tour comprised 22 stops; by 2024, this number had dwindled to just 11. Cities such as Leicester, Edinburgh, and Wolverhampton have disappeared from the circuit, leaving large swathes of the country—particularly in Wales and Scotland—without convenient access to live music or the nurturing environments that GMVs provide for aspiring artists.

Mark Davyd, CEO of the Music Venue Trust, commented on the findings: “The 2024 Annual Report recognizes that after 10 years of work by MVT, a very broad consensus has been built among politicians, industry, artists, and the public that grassroots music venues must be protected, supported, encouraged, and nurtured. […] Venues, despite all the very welcome good intentions and acknowledgements they are receiving for their vital work, are still closing, still under extreme and totally unnecessary financial pressures, still failing to be recognised, as everyone agrees they should and must be, when government designs policy, taxation, and legislation. It isn’t good enough to keep saying how much we all value them, we’ve got to practically do something about it. We need action, not words.”

The report makes it clear that without decisive action, the UK’s grassroots music scene could face an irreversible decline, stripping communities of vital cultural hubs and emerging artists of essential opportunities.

The first concert, titled Madness at the Manor, is scheduled for 13 July at Tofte Manor in Bedfordshire. Billed as an intimate performance at a historic venue, the band told of their excitement about playing the venue through their promoter’s Instagram, saying: “We didn’t think there were any houses, county estates or fields we hadn’t played at”.

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The band will go on to perform at Dreamland in Margate on 2 August as part of the Margate Summer Series and at Castle Park, Colchester, on 23 August as part of the Colchester Castle Summer Series. Tickets for Margate and Colchester will go on general sale at 9am on 29 November here. Pre-sale tickets for the Tofte Manor show will be available at 12pm on 29 November here, with any remaining tickets offered in a general sale on 2 December at 12pm.

Outdoor summer shows have become a specialty of the band in recent years, with highlights from the past year including stops at Cardiff Castle, Galway Airport, and Scarborough Open Air Theatre. This year also marked a significant milestone for the band, as their 13th studio album, Theatre Of The Absurd Presents C’est La Vie, became their first to reach number one on the UK Official Albums Chart. An enhanced edition of the album was released in June.

Retropop magazine praised the album, saying “its lead single and title song harks back to the ska sound that popularised the band some 40-odd years ago while perfectly capturing the essence of Madness in its examination of the perils of everyday life”, and noting that the release was the band’s “most pop-oriented in years”.

Emerging from the two-tone craze of the late 70s and early 80s, the Camden Town ensemble rose to fame with their urban British spin given to Caribbean rock-steady and early ska. Early hits like ‘One Step Beyond’ and ‘Nightboat to Cairo’ show the band in their element covering or borrowing heavily from these genres’ classics, and propelled the band to be London’s answer to the burgeoning Coventry ska and two-tone scene, alongside the likes of Bad Manners. The band later pivoted to a more pop-based sound into the 1980s but never drifted far from their themes of working class London life, delivered with trademark humour and a taste for pastiche.