‘Give it up for the band!’ cried Van Morrison from the stage at King John’s castle in Limerick the other week before grabbing the gold saxophone he had been periodically playing, abruptly turning on his heel and disappearing into the wings as his backing group played on. Most of us in the two-thousand-strong capacity crowd might have thought we could predict – even stifling an inner groan – what was going to happen next.

I was in Ireland for a spot of ‘revenge travel’, which in my case meant nights of back-to-back shows as I tried to make up for all that musical time missed while I was locked down in the South Pacific.

In Belfast, I saw a young guy called Dermot Kennedy, who was pretty sharp, and a couple of nights earlier in Dublin I caught a sensational performance by Michael Kiwanuka, who was sharper still. But a balmy night spent listening to Van Morrison on his home turf always promised to be the cream of the crop.

Morrison’s music was all over Kenneth Branagh’s recent hit film, Belfast, and his dissenting voice was a source of comfort for many during the darkest days of Covid. At seventy-six, he may not be getting any younger, but this is still an artist who knows how to put the slip on his own shadow. The mystical rocker had just turned in ninety magical minutes largely consisting of bluesy new material from his more recent albums. But now his rather splendid eight-piece group were belting out the familiar opening chords to the celebrated hit ‘Gloria’, and that could only mean one thing.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the iron-clad certainty would have been that the man in the blue suit and reflecting sunglasses would be gone from the stage for all of sixty seconds.The fans would tepidly applaud and stomp their feet a bit. Thereupon, perhaps wearing a theatrically assumed expression of utter surprise, Morrison could be counted on to reappear on stage to finish up with a slew of well-known chestnuts plucked from the better-known recesses of his back-catalogue.

Other than the dependably left-leaning politics of most performers, has there ever been a more crushingly predictable musical ritual than the encore? And has there ever been a flourish quite so pointless as an artist briefly quitting the stage before returning to do a few hits everyone knows they will do to allow the audience to feel they are somehow getting a slightly bigger bang for their buck?

Certainly, few musical rituals have been with us longer. The practice originated in 18th century concert halls when wealthy patrons began to request to hear their favourite song one more time. ‘Encore!’ they yelled and pretty soon attendees everywhere were hollering out encore, the French word for again. At the première of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro on 1 May 1786, ‘many pieces were encored, almost doubling the length of each performance’, according to musicologist Maynard Solomon, author of Mozart: A Life. Not everyone was thrilled. The practice so irked Emperor Joseph ll of Austria that he issued a decree limiting it.

For a brief time, popular performers were happy to take a leaf from the good Austrian monarch’s book. Elvis Presley never did encores. His distaste for the practice (along with his financially minded manager ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker’s well-founded belief that doing them could only rob The King of his essential mystique) gave rise to the line, ‘Elvis has left the building’. The Beatles also weren’t big on encores, although in their case it was more to allow them to beat a hasty retreat lest their hormonally charged fans rose up as one and stormed the stage to wreak a harrowing sexual vengeance upon the moptops.

Elsewhere, however, the encore was picking up steam. Artists from the 1970s, notably Bob Marley, became famous for turning in marathon encores. Prince stuffed anything up to seventeen songs into that segment of his shows. That way too went Leonard Cohen, not so much in his early years but definitely in his late-career rebirth. Sadly, Cohen is no longer with us, having departed the scene a few years ago for the great garret in the sky where we can confidently assume he is responding to celestial cheers and foot-stomping with a tip of the Trilby hat and yet another rendition of ‘Bird On A Wire’.

By far the biggest offender has to be Bruce Springsteen. In Melbourne, in 2014, the Boss reappeared on stage after a two-hour show and performed the entire Born in the USA album. As if that wasn’t enough, he  followed it with another fifty minutes of assorted hits. At a show in Auckland, in 2003, I saw him do much the same thing. I arrived a bit late while Springsteen was performing one of his old hits, so only caught the last twenty minutes of the sweaty guitar solo that invariably went with such selections. Not that arriving a bit late really mattered. The encores that night – there were seven – seemed to go on forever. Whatever happened, you had to wonder, to the terse young man who began his career in awe-struck emulation of the laconic Morrison?

Search me, guv. But I do know what became of Morrison at his recent Irish gig as his backing group played on and members of the crowd began shouting for his immediate return.

Sadly for them, the Belfast Cowboy had already saddled up and was galloping back to his hotel suite, not to be heard from again that night. The band remained on stage for a full quarter of an hour though, completely ripping ‘Gloria’ to pieces, pushing it inside out with new twists and turns. This final workout included a gospel-style performance by one of the backing vocalists, a weird but transfixing drum piece that sounded like reggae but was in fact ‘Moondance’, and a fantabulous guitar piece led by long-time sideman Dave Keary. I had no idea what it signified, but I do know it lifted the roof off the ancient venue. And all the time, while soaking up this startlingly encore-free finish, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if it was like this all the time?’