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‘Madame George’ is a whirlpool of emotion and remembrance, of melancholy, joy and empathy. It’s like a beautiful dream that takes you back to a place of innocence and freedom and purity and possibility. Listening to ‘Madame George’ you can hear, you can even smell, those vast blue-sky days of your childhood. ‘Madame George’ is potent music. It’s the eye of Astral Weeks, an album that has been equalled but never bettered. … ‘Madame George’ is thick with atmosphere. The claustrophobia of Madame George’s house, the free air of the kids skipping stones and then it leads up to the coda where Morrison goes into a trance scatting “the love that loves to love” and he’s completely lost into that place beyond words, floating on Davis’ liquid bass lines. Neither Van Morrison nor anyone else has found their way back there.
–> Toby Creswell (1001 Songs. Hardie Grant Publishing)

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As Van moved through the songs of Astral Weeks, challenging a rock and roll beat in “Brown-Eyed Girl,” hitting a rave-up with “Sweet Thing,” Van grooving with the bass player, the crowd warmed to him and began to wait, with excitement and patience, for “Madame George,” the most powerful piece of music ever to come from Van Morrison. It’s a story—Van’s words and his voice provide the scary beauty and the instruments the drama. It’s out of Ireland, this song, and in a way it’s something like the childhood tales of Dylan Thomas in Portrait of the Artist As A Young Dog, stories of a child entering into a strange world of adults that can be trusted but cannot be understood. Van moved through the song slowly, getting into it, his singing strong­er with each line, until, gone from Ma­dame George now, he sang his finest verses, a child remembering what childhood meant:

And you know you gotta go
Round that train from Dublin
up the sandy road
Throwing pennies on the bridges down below
Say goodbye to Madame George

It ended softly, Van just whispering with all he had, holding unto the words until the time was right: “The train, the train, get on the train, say goodbye, goodbye…”
–> Greil Marcus (San Francisco Express Times, February 25, 1969)

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