Van Morrison/ Sam Butera, St David's Hall, Cardiff <br></br>The Kennedy Soundtrack, Camden Palace, London

Van's the Man. Well, OK, if you say he is...

I don't know what I'm talking about. I realise this on the train to Cardiff. I try to list the Van Morrison songs I know, and I can only come up with three. There's the one that Dexy's did on Top of the Pops in front of a picture of portly dartist Jocky Wilson. There's the religious duet (and unless Sir Cliff shines his light, we're not gonna get that). And there's the one you always hear at karaoke nights with the line about making love "behind the stadium with you", which I've always liked because the seedy specificness reminds me of Jarvis Cocker. And that's it.

Given those three, the mystique surrounding Van Morrison is a source of bewilderment to me. Much of that mystique seems to centre on Astral Weeks, an album he made in 1968 after leaving Them. It's one of those records you always see on critics' All Time Greatest lists, but I've never knowingly heard it, just as I've never knowingly heard Tim Buckley's Starsailor or Big Star's Thirteen or so much as a note of Gram Parsons, mainly because – perhaps hypocritically – I don't like being told what to like, and I believe that life's too short, and music is too big, for anything other than finding your own idiosyncratic path.

Most of the people in St David's Hall, however, look like they've been Van fans for 30 years, and I'm intimidated by their knowledge. Then again, I start to wonder what kind of person, amid the myriad dizzying possibilities of 1973 – Isaac Hayes inventing orchestral funk, Sparks and Roxy re-inventing Weimar cabaret, Stevie Wonder hitting his peak, Bolan and Bowie turning pop into a playground of dreams, Lee Perry turning Studio One into a Jamaican Motown, Kraftwerk flicking the "On" switch and the Wigan Casino opening its doors – would have thought "thanks all the same, but I'll stick with a grumpy old Ulster Protestant blues singer"?

Before I witness Van's elusive magic, an old man who looks like he might die any moment, wanders onstage blowing a saxophone, lays down some trad jazz, and procures applause for his band members when the first song is barely 60 seconds old (it's theoretically "When You're Smiling", but in practice a load of parping and snare-tapping).

It turns out that he's 75-year-old Sam Butera, and he's the real Dixieland deal: a New Orleans native who moved to Vegas and became sidekick to swing legend Louis Prima for 21 years. Butera's anecdotes about this time are frustratingly inaudible, as he chooses to tell them through a mic which is set for the tenor sax, not the human larynx.

Sam is joined in due course by a man in a pork pie hat and round shades who looks like he's wandered in from a Blues Brothers tribute by mistake. The applause alerts me to the fact that he is Van Morrison. Together, they rattle through a couple of standards – "Kansas City Here I Come" and "Jump, Jive An' Wail" – and, quite apart from his obvious lack of visual charm (his jowls wobble when he's really getting into it, maaan), it soon becomes apparent that Van Morrison's voice is a deeply unlovely thing, calling to mind the bellowings of a constipated wildebeest.

Van can play sax too, as he proves in his own set. When he isn't scaring the living daylights out of his band. At the slightest bum note or missed beat, he shoots his fellow musos "What the fuck do you think you're DOING?" glances. They look terrified of him. With James Brown's JBs, this benefits their tightness. With Van's band, it prevents them from ever finding a groove.

Even in my heightened state of ignorance, I'm aware that Morrison's set is comprised mainly of obscure blues numbers. Not one for speaking to, or even acknowledging his audience, Van's attitude is "this is where I'm at now, like it or lump it." The first "Brown-Eyed Girl" heckle comes three songs in.

After maybe an hour, there comes, at last, a moment of user-friendliness: Sam Butera returns for a scat jazz version of "Have I Told You Lately" (so I do know more than three of Morrison's songs). I think I admire the patience of the 30-year Van-atics, but I'm glad I'm not one.

These nu-metal bands sneak up on you, don't they? One minute, Lost Prophets were a modest Brightest New Hope from South Wales, the next they were sending the kids knicker-wetting crazy and filling Brixton Academy.

There's no reason whatsoever why The Kennedy Soundtrack can't follow the same trajectory. TKS are already the biggest thing to come out of Pontypool since the rugby club's legendary Front Row, and by the time their second album drops in May, they'll doubtless be Academy-sized too. I say this neither in sorrow nor in joy, but simply in prophecy.

As rap-metal goes, they're possibly as good as it gets right now. The Kennedy Soundtrack make as intense a noise as is possible within the strictly-codified limits of the genre – particularly on new track "Bring It On" – without ever threatening to stretch it. The interplay between rapper Nic and guitarist/singer Troy suggests that they spent many teenage hours perfecting a hybrid of Faith No More's "Midlife Crisis" and Rage Against The Machine's "Killing In The Name". Nothing wrong with these as influences per se, although FNM and RATM, both fine bands themselves, have caused incalculable damage in terms of their posthumous effect on pop.

What's more worrying is that Nic, a stocky Welshman (nothing wrong with that; some of my best selves are stocky Welshmen), chooses not only to rap, but also to talk between songs, in a fake American accent. The possibility of a homegrown rock band speaking about the British experience in a recognisably British "voice" has never looked so remote.

Equally unlikely is a return to subtlety and guile.

This does not make me happy. Van Morrison isn't my past, The Kennedy Soundtrack aren't my present, and sure as hell neither of them are my future. Will the real 2003 hurry up and happen?

s.price@independent.co.uk

The Kennedy Soundtrack: Nottingham Rock City (0115 941 2544), 21 Jan; Exeter Cavern (01392 495370), 22 Jan; Bournemouth Mr Smiths (01202 291617), 23 Jan; Blackwood Miners Institute (01495 227206), 24 Jan; Stourbridge Rock Cafe (01384 390918), 26 Jan; Newbury Corn Exchange (01635 522733), 1 Feb