Let’s suppose you were one of rock’s heritage artists, a star of a certain age and unimpeachable reputation. Like many of your peers, your problem these days is how to make that reputation pay. Your box sets and remastered CDs don’t sell now in the quantity they did back in the 1980s and 1990s. Nor, despite the respectful reviews, do the new albums you put out. The booming interest in the live scene hasn’t done you any harm, but, like you, your audience is hanging in there rather than booming, and the career lift that derives from landing the Sunday night headliner slot at Glastonbury — the relaunch pad recently for golden oldies such as Leonard Cohen, the Who and Neil Diamond — has still not come your way. You haven’t lost your mojo, but there’s no great sense of event surrounding what you do any more. How to get that back?

The popular tactic currently is to stage a special concert performance of one of your classic albums, preferably one with a troubled history or, failing that, a significant anniversary. This trend was initiated by Brian Wilson, who turned up at the Royal Festival Hall in February 2004 to perform songs from Smile, the “lost” Beach Boys album from 1968 whose eccentric character — a prelude to the mentally fragile Wilson’s semi-retirement for the next 35 years — meant that it had never been formally released.

The excitement generated by this performance had a tremendously energising effect. His return to the UK this summer for three dates — “digging ever deeper”, it was proudly announced, into his illustrious back catalogue — coincided with a flurry of activity by other heritage acts following the example of Wilson’s Smile project.

Next up is Van Morrison, who is set to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Astral Weeks with two concerts at the Hollywood Bowl on November 7 and 8. A “concept” album loosely themed around his recollections of his Belfast childhood, Astral Weeks marked a new direction for the artist formerly known as the creator of uptempo rockouts Brown Eyed Girl and Gloria. This was the point at which Morrison started to add elements of folk and jazz to his mix, inventing a personal hybrid later dubbed “Caledonian soul”. While some of the songs from the record, notably Madame George, Cyprus Avenue and The Way Young Lovers Do, have been staples of Morrison’s live shows over the years, he has never played all of them in sequence before, partly because of the impromptu style of the original recording.

Taking his cue from his old-school producer, Lewis Merenstein, who came from a jazz background, Morrison formed a temporary alliance with a four-piece band made up of sidemen who had worked with the likes of Eric Dolphy and Charles Mingus. From a standing start, they jammed their way through the eight tracks of Astral Weeks in two days in a New York studio, after which Morrison went his way and the band dispersed, never to reconvene.

For the Hollywood Bowl shows, Morrison has reunited with a couple of the key players from the 1968 sessions, bassist Richard Davis and guitarist Jay Berliner, both now over 70. The rehearsals for the anniversary concerts, which have been proceeding in LA for the past month, suggest that the second coming of Astral Weeks will be a rather more considered affair than the first.

It needs to be. These historic performances are to be preserved for posterity — and for future commercial exploitation. Morrison plans to record and film his Hollywood Bowl shows for subsequent release on CD and DVD, the same way Lou Reed has done with his recent concert performance of his neglected 1973 opus Berlin.

Not so much a “lost” album as one that got mislaid in the avalanche of music Reed put out in the 1970s, Berlin suffered upon release from the overhang of its predecessor, the wildly successful Transformer, a sparkly glam-rock primer produced by Reed’s best friend, David Bowie. By comparison, Berlin descended like night after day. A song cycle describing the decline and eventual death of a junkie hooker who loses custody of her children while her lizard-like boyfriend looks on, the album was deemed depressing. But, like Astral Weeks, it acquired a cult reputation.

Its concert premiere, which took place in a converted church in Brooklyn in 2006, has gone on to supply laughing Lou with more reasons to be cheerful than he has had for decades. The Berlin world tour began in summer 2007 and was still motoring a year later, while Julian Schnabel’s movie of the event received an international art-house release in 2008 prior to its current appearance on DVD.

Inevitably perhaps, the success of these big names in remarketing their classic albums as concerts has encouraged some smaller names to have a go. Echo and the Bunnymen have recently been performing Ocean Rain, their fourth LP, from 1984. Optimistically billed at the time as “the greatest album ever made”, it plainly wasn’t; but it did feature some unusual string arrangements that have lent the new shows added interest — and more box-office clout. It seems unlikely that the band would have filled the Albert Hall last month or the Liverpool Echo Arena, in Liverpool, next month, without the assistance of a small orchestra.

Still more niche in their appeal to the heritage concert crowd are the Zombies, a British band from the 1960s who have just re-formed to perform their second album, Odessey \ and Oracle. Many of us were barely aware of the existence of this psychedelic pop classic — recorded at Abbey Road just after Sgt Pepper — when it first appeared in 1968. But its prestige has grown since, to the point where the group are going to perform a short UK tour next spring before taking off for America; further proof that when it comes to this kind of concert, rarity sells.

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