Van Morrison gigs are always a gamble. If you're lucky, the pay-off will be an impassioned set of old favourites.

If you catch him on a bad day, you may only get a petulant performance of old obscurities.

With 30 albums under his ever-widening belt, he certainly has a lot of those. The unpredictable moods of "Van the Man" have often caused dismay, yet the fact the fans flock back each time is testament to how good he can be - when he feels like it.

Having come to prominence with the band Them in the mid-Sixties, George Ivan Morrison went on to pen numerous chart hits, such as Brown-Eyed Girl, Here Comes The Night, Moondance, Domino, Caravan and the garage-band classic Gloria.

Yet it was his 1968 album Astral Weeks which earned him a place on the roll call of Sixties mythology - a masterpiece of spontaneous jazz-folk coupled with soulful, stream-of-consciousness poetry.

Since then, he has furrowed a largely self-defined genre, vacillating between the poles of jazz, rock 'n' roll, blues and Celtic folk.

Like most of his generation, however, Morrison's music did not fare well in the Eighties, when his growing preoccupation with both Christianity and the music of his Irish roots inspired the sort of records only an ardent completist would concern themself with.

Many, however, laud his last two albums, Down The Road (2002) and What's Wrong With This Picture? (2003) as a return to form.

The new songs tend to revisit the earlier model of relaxed, finely-woven songwriting, the main difference seeming to reside in the subject matter.

Whereas Morrison's previous lyrics often concerned his take on spirituality (beginning with the hippy kind and moving into the Celtic-Christian variety), we now find him railing against the evils of the media, the music biz and fame in general.

Despite being one of music's most intransigent figures, it seems he feels threatened, and maybe trapped, by his own legend.

Starts 8pm, Tickets £32.50/£28, Tel 01273 709 709