OM by Cecil McCartney

Cecil McCartney is not a name that means much to me musically, but I was intrigued when I came across his Columbia LP OM, from 1968, in a charity shop yesterday. Something told me that it was worth buying - particularly as it cost a mere 30p - and sure enough it turns out to be a collectable hippie style psych folk album. Most of the17  tracks are written by McCartney - apparently a distant cousin of Paul - with the addition of others by Dylan, Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot. It's not really to my taste - pretentious nonsense in my opinion - and I've put it on Ebay, but it turns out that Cecil has an interesting back story.
It seems that he was the inspiration for Van Morrison's Astral Weeks album but had a long standing feud with him following an argument in 1989 about whether Myra Hindley's conversion to religion was genuine or not (Cecil thought not). He is best known as a painter and now lives in Ireland. He says that he has sold paintings to such rock luminaries as Eric Clapton, Roger Daltrey and Bono and has made a peace offering to Van - an abstract painting called Astral Nano Seconds.