“Queen Of The Slipstream” by Van Morrison

Van Morrison recorded "Queen of the Slipstream" at the Wool Hall Studios in Beckington during the 1987 summer sessions that yielded the rest of Poetic Champions Compose. It's a romantic ballad of the unhurried kind, in E major at a slow four-four, and the Northern Irish singer wrote, arranged, produced and sang it, with Mick Glossop engineering and mixing.

The strings are the story. Fiachra Trench scored them for a full string orchestra of around 26 players, then shrank them to a chamber group under Morrison's harmonica solo and on through the second bridge, with the whole section back in force everywhere else. Issued as a UK single in 1988, it failed to chart, which says more about the charts than the song.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.