REVIEW: The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (2022)

“Like everything Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement,” says the publicity bumf from publisher Simon & Schuster. Is it, though?

Bob’s new book works best if you regard it as his version of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, the entirely unlicensed compilation that he stole from a friend as a teenager, and which informed his career more than any other single document. That bootleg box-set compiled 84 folk, country and blues songs from 1926-33; this book creates a canon of its own, with essays on 66 recordings dating from 1924 to 2004, its accent falling particularly on early rock and roll. It arguably works better as a playlist than a book – alongside vaguely leftfield classics like Bobby Darin’s ‘Mack the Knife’ and Marty Robbins’ ‘El Paso', he includes obscurities such as ‘CIA Man’ by the Fugs, 'Detroit City' by Bobby Bare, and Johnny Paycheck’s desolate, gorgeous ‘Old Violin’ – but there’s enough in The Philosophy of Modern Song to make it worthwhile, at least for that stoic and balding band of Dylan obsessives.

STREAMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Most of the book's essays consist of a freeform, stream-of-consciousness riff on the meaning of the song – inhabiting its world; frequently written in the second person – followed by a more matter-of-fact contextual section. The former, aside from the occasionally arresting, terse turn of phrase, is usually pretentious and tedious (editors don’t like to tinker with "momentous artistic achievements", especially when written by Nobel Prize winners); the latter tends to be more interesting, allowing for insights into Dylan’s own processes and prejudices – some of those revelations intentional, others unwitting – as well as inspiring some agreeably peculiar tangents. A Santana track turns into a recap of the career of screenwriter and sci-fi novelist Leigh Brackett, as well as incorporating a note about the invention of Velcro. Other songs lead to digressions on lemmings, Esperanto and the history of the Nudie suit. Good non-fiction has always been about connections.

Dylan is a curmudgeonly host, tediously "both sides”-ing every political question, complaining about people saying “OK, boomer” (OK, boomer) and, perhaps more reasonably, railing against the rise of niche marketing, which by definition narrows our artistic horizons. This broadly grouchy work, though, is saved by two things in particular: the author's transparent love of music, and the way the book shades in, subverts or enhances our understanding of his own life and legacy.

Whether he’s extolling the emotional directness of bluegrass ("the other side of heavy metal"), becoming transparently excited that Stevie Wonder plays the harmonica on the Temptations’ ‘Ball of Confusion’, or exhibiting a very nerdy, very male obsession with chart placings and discographical chronology, the sincerity of his enthusiasm about the music itself is rarely less than endearing. He'll tell you about a song he loves, and then he'll tell you why a certain live version is even more special.

And for Dylanologists, there is an almost endless amount to get your teeth into – not least his absolute hatred for you in particular; understanding music doesn’t enhance it, he says for the millionth time in his life, which broadly translates as, “Stop analysing my songs and fuck off.” Another endlessly-repeated Dylan mantra, that songs are merely captured in the studio, they don’t end there, is, like Highway 61 before it, revisited.

PROTEST SONGS

For those still nonplussed by Dylan's shrugging off of “finger-pointing songs” in 1964, he’ll spell it out for you, with that pronounced predilection for provocation that here bleeds into trolling. ‘Ball of Confusion’ is “one of the few non-embarrassing songs of social awareness,” he says. “Writing a song like this can be deceptively easy. First you assemble a laundry list of things people hate. For the most part, people are not going to like war, starvation, death, prejudice and the destruction of the environment." He follows this with an unexpected, barely-veiled ad-hominem attack on Tom Lehrer.

In 1966, Dylan pretended to placate his audience in Manchester in 1966 with one of the funniest pieces of trolling in history, announcing to his audience of disgruntled folkies, “I'm going to do a protest song... this is called ‘I Hear You’ve Got Your Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’.” His essay on ‘War’ by Edwin Starr is a fascinating counterpoint to perhaps his first great protest song, ‘Masters of War’. War is “often the only solution”, he says baldly now, while still raging at the attendant profiteering, pomposity and pride. Whereas Robert Caro’s recent book, Working, included a chapter on Pete Seeger’s song, ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’, notable for its piercing clarity on the subject of Vietnam, Dylan’s waffly, pointless discursion on the track turns into a peculiar rumination of the ethics of old Disney documentaries. It had been Woody Guthrie – allied perhaps to boundless ambition – that first opened Dylan’s eyes to music as a vehicle for social change; Guthrie who was once his lode star. There are no Woody Guthrie songs in the book.

Surely the oddest and most disquieting element of The Philosophy of Modern Song, though, is Dylan’s women problem. If we’re playing count-the-faces identity politics, then 62 of the 66 songs are by men, and the cover photo seems a hollow joke, but that’s not even the point. While most of the strange things he writes about women in the book are said essentially in character, he chose the songs, which include I Got a Woman, Black Magic Woman, and the execrable Eagles track, Witchy Woman). Taken at face value – which in this instance seems reasonable – Dylan is trapped as a product of his time, his inspirations and his own oeuvre in a disastrous madonna/whore dichotomy, forever desperate to escape from an awful world of terrifying, sexualised harpies to a simpler, more old-fashioned place and time in which a submissive and pliant woman will bring him snacks. A lengthy digression on the subject of divorce lawyers also seems less an objective and reasoned treatise about a societal ill, and more a highly public admission that he has just got divorced.

FIBS

In his only volume of memoir, Chronicles, Dylan defensively – and unconvincingly – suggested that his 1975 album, Blood on the Tracks, had been based on a series of Chekhov plays, but had been misidentified by rock writers as exactly what it was, a break-up album in which he sounds alternately livid, sentimental and bereft. When he says in the first chapter here that first-person narration is often mistaken for truth, I took it as a threat that he’s warming up for another crack at that unconvincing lie.

There are smaller insights too, for those who care about such things. A chapter about Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ is is unexpectedly revealing as to the mundane details – and psychological facts – of Dylan’s own life on tour. ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ may be a strange vehicle for Dylan’s crotchety musings about mystery and nuance in art, but they’re valuable all the same. Elsewhere, he’s still low-key obsessed with Robert Ford, he loves old movies (though doesn’t write very well about them, and passes up the chance to engage in some much-needed Mickey Rooney revisionism), and touchingly refers to Pete Seeger throughout as “Pete”, their connection long-severed but not dead.

There’s some merit, too, in his observations from outside, though the level of insight – and interest – really does vary. He makes a fascinating, if confused, argument that how learning the back story of a song can either augment ('Old Violin') or obliterate ('Save the Last Dance for Me') its universallity. Once you know that Doc Pomus's lyric for the latter is about being in a wheelchair at his wedding, due to polio, that subtext overpowers anything the listener can bring to the song. The idea that our feelings of pure empathy for the song's narrator might create a different, even richer experience is, bizarrely, an angle that Dylan doesn't consider.

Bob's thoughts on country music are especially arresting (also sexist): the genre "finds itself in the church on Sunday morning becauuse it spent Saturday night in a back-alley knife fight and trying to convince the barmaid to hike her skirt up around her hips." Perceptively, he crystallises the glory of so much country music and the emptiness of its recent iterations: "Without the dynamic tension of the guilty over the bacchanal, it becomes either joyless proselytising or empty-headed carousing." That idea, though, clashes with the author's simplistic ideas of spirituality expressed elsewhere; Sam Cooke's undeniable gospel credentials are largely dismissed because ultimately he got "shot, bare-naked in a motel room". This as Bob grows misty-eyed over monotonous pig-tail wearer Willie Nelson, very much the Danny McBride of the songwriter world: adored and revered by his more talented contemporaries to the general bafflement of their fans. "Elvis had a hit with 'Always on My Mind'," points out Bob, following this observation with one of the wrongest sentences ever written: "All you remember now is the Willie version."

'MOON, JUNE, SPOON' SONGS

The author's enthusiasm is expended much more effectively righting wrongs. Dylan writes with a mixture of an old man's irascibility and a young man's idealism about the cynics who ridicule simple lyrics, particularly on paper (Brett Anderson talked about something similar when I interviewed him in 2019). Explaining that the words are written for the ear and not the eye (apologies to anyone who's bought the coffee table book of his own Nobel Prize for Literature-winning lyrics), and that prescriptive songwriting rules impair creativity, Bob takes aim at the naysayers with a critique that's at once petulant, adolescent and quite beautifully pure: "All the self-styled social critics who read lyrics in a deadpan drone to satirise their lack of profundity only show their own limitations."

So he's appealing if repetitive when stanning Tin Pan Alley, penetrating if not necessarily correct as he delves into the world of ‘El Paso’ (“a ballad of the tortured soul… that resonates on every level with people on every level… a dark tale of indescribable beauty and death”), and extremely funny when describing Carl Perkins’ obsession with his Blue Suede Shoes. But he also reads way too much into Jackson Browne’s semi-laughable ‘The Pretender’, a song where events and what passes for motivation are determined entirely by things that happen to rhyme with ‘pretender’, including “begin and end there”, “legal tender” and, most regrettably, “ice cream vendor”. His fascinating essay on ‘Volare’ – which takes in psychedelia and foreign-language records – is followed by a confused chapter on ‘London Calling’ that contradicts itself and constantly misses the point, suggesting that Dylan understands neither punk nor England.

Perhaps only this author could reimagine the most innocuous songs as being so ineffably creepy – he depicts Rosemary Clooney’s ‘Come On-A My House’ as a grim fairytale, and cheerily informs us, of Eddy Arnold’s elusive ‘You Don’t Know Me’, that “a serial killer would sing this song” – and yet his phrasemaking is at times appallingly cringy. “Some may argue that there are better reasons to go to war than an unpaid patisserie bill’, he writes, replacing Roget’s Thesaurus on the shelf, before claiming that a Rodgers & Hart tune is “as complex as anything by Stephen Hawking,” a sentence that could only be worse if he’d referred to him as “Hawkings”. Similarly, the potted biographies of artists sometimes come with an interesting slant, and at others are largely meaningless, whether that’s because the claims made about their talent are so vague (Bobby Darin) or so preposterous (Perry Como). The final chapter – on space, time and Dion and the Belmonts – is, fittingly, this book at its most extreme: the most weird, the most nerdy, the most pretentious and ambitious.

A GRUMPIER BOB

Some have described The Philosophy of Modern Song as the print equivalent of Dylan’s now-defunct Theme Time Radio Hour, but while the world of the songs remains the same, his view of the wider world has intruded, and palled. This is a grumpier Bob, less playful, more resigned. There are still tall tales, but there are fewer of them, and his listing of song titles that share a word seems less like a fun experiment in genre and more like a boring old bloke who won’t leave you alone in the pub.

But like everything Dylan does, it is, if not a momentous artistic achievement, at least deceptively unusual, repeatedly illuminating – at times by accident – and in the end just about worthwhile.

“When I say infinity, I mean NOW": Adrianne Lenker and Bob Dylan

Big Thief at Bristol Academy, 27/02/22
Big Thief at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 02/03/22-05/03/22
Adrianne Lenker at EartH, 06/03/22

“The new album by @BigThiefMusic is a revelation,” tweeted Dwight from The Office this weekend. “Can I have permission to compare Adrianne Lenker to Bob Dylan?” Permission granted: the parallels are inescapable – and thickening.

When I followed Big Thief on tour in 2020 (not that I like to go on about it), I wrote:

I leave muttering something about Lenker being the only New Dylan since Dylan. You know in ‘Love Minus Zero’ when he sings, “My love, she speaks like silence”, or ‘Visions of Johanna – “The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face” – well no-one writes like that. But Lenker does. Not like Dylan, exactly – because what’s special about that? – but prolifically singular, with his perfect abstract specificity. “Your eyes were like machinery,” she sings in ‘Mary’. “Your hands were making artefacts in the corner of my mind.”

Perhaps the most exhilarating aspect of seeing either artist live, though, is that their songs are never finished: they’re in a constant state of flux, developed organically through being played to an audience. How a song sounds on record is just how it happened to sound at the point it was recorded. Or in the words of Dylan at the Free Trade Hall, “It used to go like that, and now it goes like this…” Take the title track of Big Thief’s latest, for example. Lenker introduced it in a whispered, half-written version at an Islington church in 2019. Last month it debuted on record: a wispy rendering so delicate that you feel if you breathed on it, it might blow away. By the time the band takes to the stage at Bristol, it has become a chugging, unremitting post-punk song, with a jagged, slashing guitar riff.

Or listen to ‘Not’, included among Obama’s songs of 2019, and essentially the band’s anthem nowadays. Reviewing the following year’s tour, I called it “an explosion of cathartic anguish … a list song that exalts through endless negation”, but there was release there: a rush of respite in Lenker’s breakaway guitar solo. This tour, there is no release. The support band back then was ITHACA, a London thrash metal group, and a sign that Lenker’s interest in getting heavier was getting heavy. ‘Not’ ends now in an unforgiving squall that’s directed entirely inwards. The flurry of squealing, arrhythmic high notes whistling from Lenker’s guitar feel like clues to an emotion, not the emotion itself. In Bristol, the song becomes a 15-minute freakout. On the second London night, Lenker towers above the crowd during the solo, her face tortured beneath the lights, purging something. The next evening her dress starts coming down during the guitar break, like a stress dream for the ages. She doesn’t quite cut her losses, but let’s say that she doesn’t extend the communication with her muse.

I love this picture because you can hear it.

Another interesting comparison with Dylan is how Lenker’s persona appears to be ageing in reverse. Dylan wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ at 21, junked his political ideals in favour of creative ones with ‘My Back Pages’ at 23, and by 27 was writing throwaway country ditties. “Oh me oh my,” he sang that year. “Love that country pie.” By comparison, Lenker was a late starter: she didn’t put out ‘Indiana’, ‘I Still Hear You’ and ‘Steamboat’ until she was 22. But the three records (!) she released in 2014 feel like the crystallisation of late style: simple, pared-down, timeless. They are an old man’s songs. Perhaps her life has been back to front in a way: she married young, then caught up on her ‘freedom’ later.

Five years after that flurry of standards, Lenker would introduce a strange new tune called ‘Spud Infinity’, which mixes abstract cosmic imagery with twee nonsense poetry and sounds like what people who don’t like Big Thief think Big Thief sound like. Over time it has become a clarion call (and a merchandising opportunity: there is a long-sleeved ‘Spud Infinity’ t-shirt; I’m wearing it right now), and morphed from an ethereal poem into a wobbleboard-inflected album track and then a sing-along anthem. Appending an intro and outro centred around the words ‘lah-di-dah’, like an alt-folk Annie Hall, Lenker now takes a transparent on-stage delight in the song’s passages of trivial incoherence, as if Dylan had spliced bits of ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’ into ‘Chimes of Freedom’.

That love of language for language’s sake is another parallel, surprisingly rare among songwriters. Think of the DA Pennebaker footage of Dylan in England in 1966, where he’s outside that cornershop, repeatedly re-arranging the words in his mouth, taking simple joy in the possibilities of a sentence. I was reminded of that before Lenker’s solo show at EartH last night, when she performed her customary, gentle duty of asking people who want to talk during the support act to do so outside. “If any of you have any social obligations that need to be… expressed verbally,” she said, “please do them in the… outer realm.” Aside from the humility, it felt like pure Dylan, right down to the mid-sentence giggle. But more importantly, it was pure Lenker: the perfect choice of words, inevitably straddling the mundane and the eternal. The similarities run deeper, though: it isn't just the elegant synonymising that draws these two artists together, it's the very sound of their syllables. Both his "majestic belts of bolts" and her "meteor show at the motel" are as much in love with the tongue as with the picture.

And yet sometimes words aren't enough. In 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands', after close to 10 minutes of cryptic love verse, rock music's most important poet simply gives up on the idea that his lyrics could ever do justice to Sara Lowndes' spiritual and aesthetic beauty, and finally picks up his harp. It's among the most moving moments in the Dylan canon, and finds an echo in Lenker's guitar solos: with words, she builds a dam; with sound, she sweeps it away. Her 2020 colllection of improvised instrumentals hinted at an artist growing tired of chatter, and in the title track of her accompanying 'songs' (which, paradoxically, also provided the name of the new Big Thief record), she made the feeling overt: time to trade the metaphysical for the purely physical. "I don't wanna talk about anything," she sings. "I wanna kiss, kiss your eyes again/Wanna witness your eyes looking."

Perhaps the most prosaic point of comparison between the pair is how prolific they are. Dylan released the five albums spanning The Freewheelin’… to Highway 61 in just over two years, writing dozens of other masterpieces that have since turned up in the Bootleg series. Lenker put out two Big Thief albums in 2019, and two solo records (one comprising instrumental improvisations) in 2020, before penning a 20-song double-album released last month. My friend Jeff called it “her Blonde on Blonde”, and that’s spot on: it’s sprawling, unfocused, with whiplash turns of tone; incoherent, perhaps, but with incredible high points. During the first show that I saw on the official Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You tour, two weeks after the record’s release, she performed three newer songs before playing anything from the album, including two absolute all-timers: a rambling, Neil Young-ish number about a river (‘Forgiver’) complete with shredding solos, and a quiet one, ‘Wait a While’, written mostly on the ferry across from the Dublin gig.

Introducing it, she said it was to comfort the heartbroken, and it seems that she has had her own heart broken. If these shows have seen her between-songs chatter become more natural – spotlighting a sense of comic timing that was always present in her lyrics but previously buried beneath sheer awkwardness – they have also suggested that she is Working Through Some Shit. The climax of ‘Flower of Blood’ sees her assaulting the bridge of her guitar, bending it to within a point of snapping as the track ascends into pure metal; ‘Not’ is purpled with rage, ‘Shoulders’ flecked with spit. It can’t just be down to entering the world of ITHACA, though one wonders how the ambient support act KMRU might influence Big Thief’s next moves: the Bristol show is dominated by strange and extended atonal intros. The next night it’s mostly the new album, then the one after that is as close to a greatest hits show as this band ever gets.

The recent country music influence is largely (and somewhat thankfully) absent. Dylan’s dalliances with the genre have usually been tinged with embarrassment, especially at first: the acknowledgement, perhaps, that this is a small Minnesotan boy playing dress-up. And that’s how Big Thief have tentatively approached country too. If there’s a cringier moment in their career so far than Adrianne’s cry of “That’s my grandma!” during the new album’s square dance number, ‘Red Moon’, then it must have escaped me. I really struggle to understand the point of pastiche in music: it feels like a dollop of self-satisfaction where the heart should be. The band’s other country tune, ‘Blue Lightning’ – a cousin of Evan Dando’s impeccable ‘Being Around’ – is also hampered by its affectations, though Lenker’s preference for playing the song as a lolloping, languid chronicle of offbeat admiration (rather than the country bop favoured by co-conspirator Buck Meek) helps a little.

On the second London night, when the band trips over ‘Little Things’, a song they’ve been struggling to render live, they ‘reset’ by watching Meek play a new number of his own, Lenker sitting down on the stage, bassist Max Oleachik lying on his back. It flows into the one of the most euphoric passages that I’ve ever witnessed at a gig: five full-band numbers of shimmering intensity – a rhapsodic, mounting ‘Mary’, ‘Black Diamonds’ reinvented in the Bunker Studio style – and, tossed in alongside, the sweet humanist sentiment of ‘Forgotten Eyes’ (the key refrain: “Everybody needs a home and deserves protection”). If the band’s essential duality – its capacity for quietness or ferocity – is another mid-‘60s Dylan trait (those being the two halves of his ’66 tour), it’s the spirit of the former, of the hiatus, that dominates Lenker’s heartstopping one-night-only show at EartH on Sunday night.

The first evening at Shepherd’s Bush, she makes her only concession to rock star ladder-climbing I’ve seen so far: playing the game for the three-songs-and-out photographers, striking a few poses, gently accentuating the facial mannerisms. There’s none of that at EartH, nor the breath-caught stillness of her full band solo spots. This is like she’s just picked up a guitar in a mutual mate’s flat and begun to cycle through new songs, cast-iron masterpieces (‘Indiana’, ‘cradle’) and deep cuts (‘Kerina’, an update of Dylan's 'Corrina, Corrina'), covering for flubs with self-deprecating quips, a genius in your front room.

She seems different there. But then she always does. Dylan once said, “I wake up in the morning and I'm one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I'm somebody else.” I’m certain that Lenker could relate. Her most popular song, ‘Paul’, is an ode to one of her alter-egos (“The last time I saw Paul, I was horrible and almost let him in,” she confides), and, most trivially, she always looks different. Last time she was rocking a Henry V pudding basin and then a long bob. This time she turns up shaven-headed, with a scar cut into one side. Across several nights, she’ll dye her hair blonde, and wear variously a vintage wedding dress, a Scarface t-shirt, a sweater that’s more holes than sweater, some sort of ornately-patterned kimono, and a see-through top (a bold choice, since there’s always the danger you’ll be upstaged by your own boobs). An enduringly enjoyable aspect of the Big Thief experience, too, is that the four members each look like they’re in different bands. Brian Epstein would shit.

Musically, though, they’re perfectly simpatico, their irregularities allowing them to effortlessly tessellate. For the most part, Meek plays a supporting role, sprinkling sounds into the mix, occasionally breaking out into an anti-solo dominated by the notes implied but not played. His cult status, or perhaps just the satisfying nature of his eight-letter Southern name, is defined by the fact that for every 10 fans shouting, “I love you, Adrianne,” there is one – always male – just yelling, “BUCK MEEK!” No pleasantries, just “BUCK MEEK!” That’s how you know you’re at a good show.

After playing a tormented new number, ‘Happy with You’ – halfway between an accusatory mantra and a Cranberries song, an impression not dispelled by Lenker’s hairdo – she says revealingly that you “don’t need to explain love”, before launching into ‘Certainty’, probably the best love song she has ever written. Like Dylan’s ‘I Want You’ or his late-period ‘Nettie Moore’, it’s built around a statement of perfect, direct economy (“My certainty is wild”), and there’s something so desperately affecting about seeing her perform it with Meek, when one knows their back story. They were married young, they broke up, they still write and play together, and they perform this almost as equals, both playing acoustics, voices entwined like brambles over a grave. They love each other. It’s complicated but it’s simple. Like the song.

Another guitar hero spotlighted at these shows is 80-year-old Tucker Zimmerman, a contemporary of Ralph McTell excavated from the footnotes of folk by an adoring Lenker, and summoned from his seclusion in the Belgian woods to open half of these shows. She takes the lead vocal on a version of his classic, ‘Slowin’ Down Love’, memorably describes his fingerpicking style as having “a danceband in his right hand”, and disappears at the start of his first show to find his songbook, which he’s left in the wings. He’s helped onto and off-stage each night by members of the main act. And that’s where there’s a key differences to Dylan: these people care about each other, their collaborators, their fans. You can accuse Dylan of many things but not of being a nice person.

There are marked disparities, too, when it comes to their limitations. “Geniuses steal”, of course (the ‘Nettie Moore’ chorus I mentioned was a direct lift), but Dylan has always stolen too much and too often. If Lenker has a shortcoming as a writer, it’s that her auteurism can lead to a repetition of imagery. I regard myself as one of the world’s premier Big Thief botherers: I turned up an hour before doors every night to get on the front row of six consecutive shows, and there are still a handful of their songs that I get mixed up because they essentially trade in the same pastoral imagery or Biblical allusion.

Yet there’s more to the reconfiguring of material than musical evolution. I wrote in a Guardian piece a couple of years back that it took seeing Big Thief live to reveal the secrets of some of their songs, as if they had meanings that could only be communicated in person. Hearing ‘Simulation Swarm’ live was a great musical experience, but hearing ‘Change’ was an emotional and intellectual one. That track had left me cold on record – another lilting trip to the bucolic well – but now that I understand it, I love it. As the perfect closer to the fifth and final show, it unfolded not as a retread but as a soothing antidote to the depressed stupor of ‘Terminal Paradise’, seeing the vastness of nature’s pattern, not the bitter poignancy of a single death. You know, like ‘Every Grain of Sand’.

Lenker has, in fact, only ever recorded one Dylan song, a version of ‘I Was Young When I Left Home’ for an obscure recording-studio project in 2015. It was among the first songs he ever wrote. Like him, she was so much older then. She’s younger than that now.

Dylan at 80: two songs

Every Grain of Sand (1981)

"Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake,
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break."

The problem with Dylan's immediately notorious sojourn in evangelical Christianity wasn't that he was failing to give fans what they wanted − when has that honestly ever been the point of Dylan? − or that he'd sold out those earlier ideals: if you could stomach him ripping the piss out of your revolution for much of 1964-6, then surely you could accept him bigging up The Big Man. It was that most of the music was terrible.

The tunes were risible, the vocals largely lifeless, and the words worse, often consisting of him simply paraphrasing the Bible. The genius who at 24 wrote, "Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial/Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while" was now so myopically committed to his newfound faith − and to his thoroughly questionable way of proselytising about it − that he seriously put out a song that goes like this:

Jesus said, "Be ready,
For you know not the hour in which I come."
He said, "He who is not for Me is against Me,"
Just so you know where He's coming from.

Yes, OK, he did say those things, but is that the point?

There are lots of good songs about God, like 'Be Thou My Vision' and 'Down There by the Train', but for much of this almost self-parodic diversion, Dylan didn't seem to know how to write one. For a man who had dismissed his Civil Rights-era anthems as 'finger-pointing songs', he was suddenly doing a lot of finger-pointing, and the results were, almost without exception, deadening. Slow Train Coming has just the funky 'Gotta Serve Somebody' and some vocal sensitivity on the closing number ('When He Returns') to recommend it. In 'Man Gave Names to All the Animals', the bloke who wrote 'Love Minus Zero' appeared to have lost not just his talent but his mind, memorably describing a bear as having a "great big furry back and furry hair", which − while broadly accurate − is one hell of a drop-off. Dylan's follow-up record, Saved, is an album so utterly devoid of empathy and sensitivity it makes the Louvin Brothers sound like, well, Jesus.

All of this − this whole tone-deaf, three-year exercise in one-dimensional, closed-minded, redundant didacticism − is justified by 'Every Grain of Sand', and its 'still small voice of calm', to borrow a line from another great hymn. Gone is the surety and the intolerance of those previous two records, replaced by tenderness, solace and, yes, doubt: a doubt that renders Dylan human and his message divine. He's not calling on you to repent now, or describing a sheep, he is instead content, trading his pain and anger for both beauty and humility ("In the fury of the moment, I can see the master's hand," he sings in the first chorus. "In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand").

As the song nears its close and his voice climbs towards an apparent climax, fittingly you'd be forgiven for fearing the worst. "I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea," he intones, perhaps on his way to a little fire and brimstone − but this time there's no certainty, simply honesty: "Sometimes I turn, there's someone there," he says, "other times it's only me." And by the time the song had gone from doggy demo (there is literally a dog woofing on the demo) to final version, he had gone further, no longer hanging in the balance of "a perfect finished plan" but in "the reality of man", a critical adjustment that underlines something crucial. That this quiet, gentle song, Elvis Costello's favourite of Dylan's back catalogue, and the most peaceful in his entire oeuvre, is also one of his most personal. And that he is a part of creation, not some avenging angel.

When Dylan went Christian, he became essentially uninteresting, aside perhaps from the sheer novelty of Dylan going Christian. And since I'm Catholic and still an absolutely scintillating personality, I can only assume that's because of how he did it. From The Freewheelin' to Modern Times, Dylan has always stolen (and sometimes, like when he stole from a still-recovering Nic Jones, that was Not OK), but when he took the tune of 'Nottamun' Town for 'Masters of War', he was acting in the folk tradition; when 'Where the Blue of the Night' became 'When the Deal Goes Down', he was stretching back to the Great American Songbook and signposting where he'd (unwisely) be going next; and, in both songs, crucially, those earlier inspirations were merely springboards for new explosions of creativity. There is nothing distinctive or creative about his use of other texts in the first two Christian albums: what we have here is more like a Body Snatchers situation, in which he is the unthinking mouthpiece for someone else's ideas, regurgitated wholesale. (The only difference I can think of is that the Body Snatchers didn't have a glossy funk-rock ensemble featuring Mark Knopfler on lead guitar.)

'Every Grain of Sand' is the sound of Dylan rejoining both the artistic community and the human race, as he mixes Blakean imagery that conjures incalculable size through its intimate focus, with a vulnerability, even fragility, revealed so rarely in Bob's work. "The sorrow of the night", "the bitter dance of loneliness" and "the broken mirror of innocence", though, are no match for his faith, which you sense is stronger now that he can admit he only has some of the answers, only some of the time.

***

Abandoned Love (1975)

"My patron saint's off fighting with a ghost, he's always off somewhere when I need him most."

In July 1975, Dylan drifted into a Ramblin' Jack Elliott set at The Other End in Greenwich Village, consented to play on a couple of numbers, and then started singing something of his own. Joe Kivak was there: "After a couple of lines, we realised he was performing a new song, with each line getting even better than the last ... it still is the most powerful performance I've ever heard." The bootleg recording is pure lightning-in-a-bottle stuff: Dylan in an emotional trough but at a creative zenith, singing, heartbroken but clear-eyed, for a handful of people in a tiny club about the breakdown of his marriage. When he says simply, "Wherever the children go I'll follow them," you're not sure if he's referencing Nights of Cabiria, the Bible or just the fact that he might not see his kids any more. Dylan had form in reducing audiences to rubble, but to tears? Not so much.

The song is, I suppose, the final part of a trilogy which began with the hypnotic, endless 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' (1966), and continued in a more literal form with 'Sara' (1976, but written earlier), combining the lyrical preoccupations of the Blonde on Blonde era (where "gods are dead" and "queens are in the church") with the burgeoning Tex-Mex theatricality of Desire and a devastating emotional sincerity that rears its head but rarely in his work. By the time Dylan got around to recording it later that month, he had managed to strangle it in glib, jaunty, violin-led full-band pointlessness, its poetry evaporating on impact. It was ultimately chopped from the record in favour of 'Joey', a shallow hymn to a mobster, and the only version in public circulation is the studio one, released on Biograph (1985) and later Side Tracks.

Perhaps playing it as he did at The Other End was just too painful. It has its allusions but they're always in service of a bracing directness. The song is, in the modern parlance, 'relatable'. It's definitely the most I've ever got out of a man telling me about his divorce.

Review of 2019: Part 2 – Live

Part 1 was about books. Part 2 is about events and tbh it never gets as many hits, as you can famously read a book that someone read last year, but you cannot attend a gig in the past.



Gigs of the year:

When I wasn't reading, writing, working or being stabbed in the kidney by that surgeon I mentioned, I've mostly been at gigs. I've seen Knopfler, Clapton, Mariah Carey, the Lake Poets, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Michael Giacchino and three nights of film scores at the Royal Albert Hall, old favourites David Ford, June Tabor (with Oyster Band), Bjӧrk and Kate Rusby, thrilled to Topic Records' 80th Anniversary show – which introduced me to Emily Portman and Lisa Knapp – and celebrated the long-awaited return of folk hero Ruth Notman, who's been busy in the interim training to become a nurse. And then there was that weird event where I went to an 'immersive screening' of Ghost World, and found myself watching more than an hour of ragtime jazz performed by director Terry Zwigoff and mad sexist Robert Crumb, punctuated by rants about political correctness. Yay!

But here are the 10 gigs that meant the most to me in 2019:



10. The Milk Carton Kids (Barbican) – I’ve got a bit of a thing about Inside Llewyn Davis, the wintry film in which the Coens brothers shrug off their arch, aloof smugness, and burrow into the psyche of their sullen anti-hero, a titular traditional singer wandering freezing Greenwich Village as the folk revival approaches. I can only play four songs on the guitar and three of them are from this film. So when I heard there was a spin-off concert film, Another Day, Another Time, I thought I better see it. And that's how I discovered The Milk Carton Kids, and a lot more besides. The duo's deceptively complex songs at first seemed frozen in time and genre – almost a pastiche of early Simon and Garfunkel – but over time they've diversified and gone deeper, pain and fear bringing not weariness but grace. Their biggest show so far, at London's Barbican, was a fast-paced treat mixing frenetic flatpicking, heartbreaking close harmony and the best between-songs badinage since the Manics stopped saying awful things for attention.


Yes she was, and yes I did.

9. Ariana Grande (The O2) – I liked Ariana Grande, the gay-friendly feminist who became a hero to my home city of Manchester, but I can’t say I liked her music. Then a friend played me ‘Into You’, that intoxicating blast of dance-y horniness, followed by ‘thank u, next’, the sad, wise title-track of her fifth album, and I stopped being a stupid dick who doesn’t know anything. A lot of rubbish gets talked about middle-aged men who spend more than a hundred pounds to go and see Ariana Grande live by themselves, but to me I am a legend. While the O2 isn’t the best place to see any kind of show – it’s essentially a warehouse in which the atmosphere simply evaporates, and everything is just too far away – Grande is a great performer, and when she isn’t also dancing (which takes the edge off the majesty), she has an insane set of pipes. Some songs I loved already (‘Into You’ was spectacular, ‘Fake Smile’ exuberantly misanthropic), and others came to life in concert: the knockabout ‘Be Alright’, the desperate ‘Breathin’’, though the numbers utilising the walkway that looped towards our section of the arena both raised the spirits and underlined just how good it would be to see Grande in a smaller and less antiseptic space. As she ripped through ‘thank u, next’ for the climax, she and the dancers skipped around it, waving Pride flags.



Lily! Martha! Certainly-one-of-the-Thompsons,-not-sure-which-one!

8. Rufus and Martha Wainwright: A Not So Silent Night (Southbank Centre) – The siblings in London together at Christmas for the first time in a decade. The older generation may no longer want to travel, but their own was out in force, including half-sister Lucy Wainwright Roche and their cousin (and personal favourite), the marvellously-monikered Lily Lanken. This all used to be about roots music and family, but Rufus is now the artistic brains behind these jamborees, and he’s made the whole thing so incredibly gay. It’s delightful. Among the guests were Dan Gillespie Sells, Neil Tennant and Sophie Ellis-Bextor, alongside various members of the inter-connected Thompson clan, Guy Garvey and Jenni Muldaur. The show was intended to celebrate the festive season but also the work of Kate McGarrigle, the matriarch who made her last public appearance at the previous London show in 2009. Being in a packed house watching Ellis-Bextor act her way through Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s ‘First Born’, a deep cut from their second record and a song that’s very personal to me, was a surreal experience – as was hearing a second live version of ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ this year; that’s the signature song of my musical idol, Sandy Denny. Lucy Wainwright Roche’s vocal here was better than Olivia Chaney’s, but she didn’t have half of Fairport behind her. Chrissie Hynde’s contributions may have been tuneless, but the rest of the show was scintillating, especially Martha’s Janis Joplin-esque ‘Mary Had a Baby’, her duet with Lanken on Jackson Browne’s left-wing atheist carol, ‘Rebel Jesus’, and Rufus’s ‘O Holy Night’, sung a capella and in French. I went in as a Rufus agnostic, but left as a fan. My affection for Martha Wainwright, you can take as a given. This was just about the perfect Christmas evening.



7. Rhiannon Giddens (Southbank Centre) – An extravagantly gifted performer, whose vocal texture, range, expression and timing is of the sort that most people can only dream about. This show saw her collaborating with Sicilian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, his self-deprecating patter and exceptional tambourine solos providing the perfect counterpoint to her spiky lectures on African-American experience and full-lunged outpourings of empathy and collective grief. The shade is balanced by the light. When you know what it’s about, ‘At the Purchaser’s Option’ is as gruelling as beautiful music can ever get, but her uproarious cover of Ethel Waters’ ‘Underneath Our Harlem Moon’, which reinstates the author’s original, unsanitised lyrics, is an uproarious, swinging showstopper, and the Celtic folk of ‘Molly Brannigan’ showcases the facility with a quickening vocal line that made me fall in love with her in the first place.



6. Johnny Marr (Southbank Centre) – I grew up as a huge Smiths fan (thanks Dad), but it had never really occurred to me that I might go to see Johnny Marr live. Then I heard him on the Adam Buxton podcast, asked for his book for Christmas, and ended up buying a ticket to his Meltdown show on the night itself. An encore of ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’ and ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’ will do me, though I was surprised how much I liked his solo stuff – especially the obscenely catchy ‘Easy Money’. I think this show gave me more simple pleasure than any other this year. And Marr himself is so easy to like, which isn’t something one can necessarily say about all the members of the Morrissey-Marr songwriting partnership.



5. 33 Revolutions Per Minute (JW3) – This was such a magical night: an event inspired by Dorian Lynskey’s history of protest songs (which I wrote about here), featuring a gallery of gargantuan contemporary talents. Ayanna Witter-Johnson got the biggest ovation of the evening for her captivating ‘Redemption Song’ – accompanying herself on stand-up cello – but it was one of a string of highlights, from Kathryn Williams’ clear-throated cover of ‘American Tune’, to David Ford’s explosive takes on ‘John Walker’s Blues’ and the ‘Fixin’-to-Die Rag’, and a climactic, unexpected and thoroughly incongruous ‘Up the Junction’ from a very late Chris Difford. It was that kind of night. A few months later, I saw Williams hosting a Daylight Music show at Union Chapel, she and Ford doing a few numbers of their own, and spotlighting various protégés, including Phil Langran, whose ‘Time’s Dark Wing’ is simply one of the finest songs I’ve ever heard.



4. Richard Thompson: 70th birthday party (Royal Albert Hall) – A once-in-a-lifetime show, for those who incline towards folk, with virtually every existing luminary of the British scene coming to pay homage. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and an eclectic one, with guests typically doing one song of theirs and then one song of his. Surprises include Bob Mould’s chugging, punkish ‘Turning of the Tide’ (above), Thompson, his son Teddy and Maddy Prior duetting on a heightened ‘Grey Funnel Line’, and Loudon Wainwright’s ebullient ‘Swimming Song’, alongside more expected treats, like the birthday boy’s own ‘Beeswing’, delivered with a delicacy befitting its title. There’s also Kate Rusby returning to ‘Withered and Died’, half of Fairport Convention’s classic Liege & Lief line-up backing Olivia Chaney on ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, and Harry Shearer alienating the half of the audience who clearly haven’t seen Spinal Tap with an in-character (and interminable), ‘She Puts the Bitch in Obituary’.



3. Bob Dylan; support: Neil Young, Laura Marling and Cat Power (Hyde Park) – At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back. Full review here.



2. Big Thief (The Roundhouse) – In January, I saw Adrianne Lenker on-stage in a church (London’s Union Chapel), performing wistful acoustic folk ballads behind a thatch of fringe, murmuring awkwardly through the void in her teeth. Three months later, she’s had a buzzcut, got a replacement tooth and is just screaming, amid a maelstrom of noise in a beer-soaked Roundhouse. This has been a big year for Big Thief, the most exciting band on the planet, ending with two albums in most ‘best of’ lists, and this was their biggest show to date. They can do it all, and at the Roundhouse they did: the hush and whimsy of ‘Spud Infinity’, the apocalyptic squall of ‘Not’ (the year’s best song?), the pure release of ‘Masterpiece’. No-one is writing more interesting material than Lenker’s tortured, introspective, pastoral alt-folk, nor delivering it with such exquisite abandon. The band, though, are not merely a vehicle for one woman’s genius, there’s a chemistry there: the fleet-fingered flat-picking of crooked-grinned Buck Meek, James Krivchenia’s lolloping, long-armed beats, Max Oleartchik... playing the bass (look, I don’t know much about music). I saw them again at Bush Hall in October, premiering new record Two Hands, and it was another experience entirely: every bit as vital, the band still figuring out the songs, groping towards greatness and frequently finding it. Next year I’m going to follow them on tour.



1. Robyn (Alexandra Palace) – Total catharsis, Robyn-style: the sexiest, saddest songs in the pop canon, battered across with the ultimate in quicksilver charisma, clad in white knee-length boots. I’ve never seen a performer with greater stage presence, a firmer grasp of a show’s necessary theatricality, or better dance moves. During ‘Dancing on My Own’, a celebration of jealous, heartbroken melancholia that represents some kind of peak, 10,000 voices join hers, and Robyn bursts into tears. Then it’s a wall of noise – an outpouring of love, and gratitude, for the returning queen of chilly Swedish electro-pop, doing her first UK shows in nine years – that goes on and on and on.

***

Theatre of the year...

... is probably a stretch, as I only saw 10 plays, and there were definitely more than 10 plays out there. Because I'm extremely clever, I didn't end up seeing anything I didn't broadly enjoy, though my tolerance for the annoying affectations of musical theatre (as opposed to the most naturalistic and intimate musical film) seems to be shrinking. While Come From Away (Phoenix Theatre) built to a rather lovely climax, fashioning something largely feelgood out of 9/11, Dear Evan Hansen (Noel Coward Theatre) dealt with its own subject – teen suicide – in a less than humane, intelligent way, though it had some fine moments. Hansard (National Theatre) broke no new ground, and largely recycled its audience's own liberal prejudices, though it was highly entertaining and extremely well-acted by Alex Jennings and Lindsay Duncan. The Lehman Trilogy (Piccadilly Theatre) went the other way, struggling to get ahold of its themes across three theatrically inventive but rather exhausting hours.

These were my favourites:



6. Anna (National Theatre) – Ella Hickson, who wrote the best play of 2018, returned with this gimmicky thriller, which was about itself and not much else. The audience was complicit in the surveillance state of East Germany, strapping on headphones and hearing only what the heroine heard, as she tried to survive in an atmosphere of spiralling paranoia (and, if we're being very literal about it, in a soundproof box with the rest of the cast). After The Writer, it felt like a slight comedown, but it was neatly conceived and made the most of its quirk, with some neat twists and a couple of great jump scares.



5. Present Laughter (The Old Vic) – Simply Noel Coward done well, with Andrew Scott having the time of his life as a vain, selfish, philandering actor who's making his entourage's life hell in '30s London. It wasn't deep, but it was riotously funny.



4. All My Sons (The Old Vic) – Classy adaptation of the early Arthur Miller play, with – and please excuse the banality – one of the handsomest sets I've ever seen: a quietly idyllic back garden in a small American town. Jenna Coleman couldn't hold her own among a heavy-hitting cast, and Bill Pullman couldn't project to the cheap seats, but he, Sally Field and Colin Morgan captured Miller's anger and anguish – tragedy on an intimate but epic scale.



3. The Starry Messenger (Wyndham's Theatre) – Space, adultery and adult education: this was none-more-Lonergan, with an exceptional performance from Matthew Broderick as a frustrated science lecturer trapped by the quietly festering American Dream. How it can be that, and make me laugh as hard as it did, is some achievement. Elizabeth McGovern, also billed above the title, had little to do until the final act.



2. A Very Expensive Poison (The Old Vic) – Lucy Prebble returned with this freewheeling, meta-textual romp through the Litvinenko tragedy – where, as with Dylan's 'Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll', perhaps the greatest tragedy happened after the killing. The material positively swaggers, throwing everything into the mix, but the right everything, at the right time, and no-one I can think of, in any medium, writes better off-kilter one-liners. Reece Shearsmith is perfect as a supercilious, bombastic and seductive Putin, at one point hanging out of a box to tell everyone to go home, as the story is clearly over.



1. Rosmersholm (Duke of York's Theatre) – Ibsen at his bleakest and most pointed, as influential former cleric Rosmer (Tom Burke) strives to understand his relationship with free-spirited Rebecca (Hayley Atwell) – and reconcile his friendship with smooth-talking hatemonger Kroll (Giles Terera) – as an election approaches, and the vultures of the press circle. This electrifying, overpowering adaptation saw writer Duncan Macmillan tease out the parallels with our current national binfire, played out by a note-perfect cast amid the light shafts and dust motes of an ancestral home that boxes in its characters as vividly as their political and personal dilemmas.

***

Other live stuff/exhibitions:



My favourite comedy set of the year was Stewart Lee's new show: Snowflake/Tornado, a succession of inspired, airtight routines about liberalism, Alan Bennett, Netflix, Fleabag, anti-PC campaigners and 'saying the unsayable', the last of which consists of him gurning, spitting, sputtering and striving to make noises for literally ten minutes. This show might be the best thing he's ever done. It's certainly the hardest I've laughed this year. He is simply on a different level to almost any other political comic working today, and probably the second funniest person in his house.

James Acaster's Cold Lasagna Hate Myself 1999 was often brilliant, but genuinely required a better working knowledge of shit TV than I've got to hand. It was also great to see Bassem Youssef doing his first English-language show, and to watch Daniel Kitson confounding a good portion of his audience by pretending for quite some time that his set would consist of him reading out a cabinet's worth of index cards listing his possessions. It didn't. Discovery of the year was Sarah Keyworth, who somehow emerged triumphant from a showcase at Union Chapel also featuring Sara Pascoe, Rose Matafeo and Phil Wang (and Arthur Smith).



And at work I got to be involved with Letters Live, one of the best nights of the year (even when Rory Stewart resigned from the Tory Party on stage and I had to work until 1am). Louise Brealey, pictured, – who can pack so much emotion, so subtly, into any material – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and (much to my surprise) Alan Carr were the stand-out stars.

Across the road, Dr Matthew Sweet, Pamela Hutchinson and David Benedict probed the Warner Bros canon in a lovely Proms Plus talk, and at the BFI Malcolm McDowell provided some insights and lols that turned out to be rather well-rehearsed when I decided to venture onto YouTube in search of further #content.



My favourite exhibition of the year was also the smallest, and it was, of course, your penis, a tiny addendum to the Design Museum's gargantuan (and impressive) Stanley Kubrick: The Exhibition, which collected some of his stunning news photography for Look Magazine. Visual art-themed jaunts spotlighted work by Matisse, William Blake, Abram Games and Eva Hesse – while the IWM's oddly disjointed Making a New World delved into WWI from a few odd and interesting angles – but Olafur Eliasson: In real life at the Tate Modern (above) was so great because it was so unlike anything else I'd been to, with a rainbow in one room and a world of coloured fog in another.

***

Thanks for reading. I'll chat about films a bit in the next (and final) part.

Bob Dylan at Hyde Park, London

Friday 12 July, 2019



They came, they drank, they talked. And off in the distance, the other side of a 'Golden Circle' sparsely populated with affluent boomers, Bob Dylan delivered what must be the best performance I've seen him give in 10 years*. At a time when seeing Bob had begun to feel more like a duty than a treat, he came roaring back.

Dylan doesn't really do crowdpleasing shows: at least, not for the casual gig-goer ticking another legend off their bucket list. It may be that he simply won't − after all, such popular staples as 'saying hello to the audience' are relatively easy to execute − but I've begun to think that he simply doesn't know how.

Seeing Dylan is purely about the music, those songs are in permanent flux ("It used to go like that and now it goes like this," he barks on Live 1966, before launching into a paranoid, gasping 'I Don't Believe You'), and such personality as you can glean and harvest comes from his treatment of five decades of material, some increasingly peculiar physical posturing − is he a self-satisfied cowboy courting adulation or a man with a bad back? − and the intrusion of his crooked grin, which on bad nights is kept within the crusty exterior, but flashed across Hyde Park for half the damn show.

That approach has its virtues and its vices. His shows are erratic: I've seen great ones, weak ones, and everything in between. And there's something to be said for an artist who can turn up on time, display a certain basic level of gratitude towards their fans, and play what the masses want to hear. But there's also something cheering, and instinctively hilarious, about a performer who is ornery enough to neglect the pallid norms of stadium rock − be it punctuality, platitudes or sing-along set-pieces − and charged with the creative inspiration to make every night different, even if sometimes that appears to be merely because he's in a bad mood.

I'll tell you something, though. For those leaving the fields of South Kensington uttering those tritest of generalities, now worn so threadbare they're practically transparent − "His voice has gone", "You can't tell which song it is till halfway through", "He could at least speak to the crowd" − know this: Friday night was the closest to a straight hits show that I've ever seen Dylan play. Who knows why, I can offer only tinpot psychology: he wanted to best Neil Young, he wants to impress Neil Young, he was just in the right mood… whatever, he kicked off with three cast-iron '60s behemoths, and seemed almost eager to please, committed to every last song, though with that indelible caveat that he's Bob Dylan and if we're going to do this, we're still going to do it his way.

---

Before we get onto the main business, here's a quick word on the support:


A picture of Cat Power owned by a fairly non-litigious photographer.

I was most excited about seeing Cat Power, the scuzzily brilliant vocalist whose unhappy, often half-murmured laments seem almost singularly ill-suited to a big field in which people won't shut up. Time and again, she got the techs to turn up her mic, but despite throwing in a Dylan cover ('He Was a Friend of Mine', a fantastically if self-sabotagingly abstruse choice), it was only during a clutch of grungier numbers that her spellbinding set cut through to an audience waiting − for reasons unknown − for Neil Young. The songs from her current record, Wanderer, had a sensitive, beguiling if sometimes inaudible quality, coupled to a strutting stage style I hadn't anticipated, though the knock-out highlight was the title track from The Greatest, half-shorn of the anomalous shoo-wop style that defined that extraordinary record. It was weird, and oddly moving, to watch such life-stopping brilliance in a vacuum of complete disinterest.

Up next was Laura Marling, who has junked her treading-on-eggshells style for a more Carly Simon-ish approach (or was it just the wind buffeting her hair, like in that 'You're So Vain' video?). I have infinitesimal amounts of patience for British folkies who go all American, but Marling has some nice hooks and a flair for digging out a killingly sad line just when you think she's slipping into broad-brush mundanity.


Kermit the Frog's let himself go.

And then there was Neil Young. Imagine Neil Young being your favourite artist, it's like your favourite food being a packet of ham. There's a bit in Peep Show where Jez tells Mark that he loves Nancy, and Mark says: "You love her? What do you love about her?" That's me trying to understood people who love Neil Young. What do you love about him? His guitar? Still, the first CD we had in my house growing up was Live Rust and I seem to have absorbed most of his other stuff through cultural osmosis. Either way, I didn't expect to enjoy his set half as much as I did. A blistering 'Over and Over' was squeezed between the woozy 'Mansion on the Hill' and the appealingly corny 'Country Home' at the start of the set, and that was the perfect beginning, with what on record becomes an interminable jam session working just right in a live situation. And for an hour Young struck just the right balance, the set reaching its climax with a lovely 'Heart of Gold'.

Then his self-indulgence fuse blew, and every song started going on for four minutes too long, following the same format: song, jam, attempted audience ovation, Young fiddling frantically with the tremolo, drum solo, another jam, more tremolo... The apparent aim was to continue the song until everybody had stopped clapping. As a final insult, he then broke into 'Rockin' in the Free World', which is fun but also highly embarrassing, the Kissification of Neil Young. Is there anything more excruciating than saying 'rockin''? Except, that is, for the song's muscular Reaganism. Twice we thought the track was over, only for Young and co to burst into another chorus, which is a great idea for a comedy sketch, if not for a set of live guitar music.

I'd hoped for 'Like a Hurricane', but by the time it came along, I'd had about enough Neil Young for one year. This was partly due to him and partly due to me, as I'd been stood in one place for over four hours and was anxious to set off for my wee so I'd be back in time for Bob.

---

The screens were blank. And for a moment, it seemed like Dylan's recent but noted aversion to having anybody see his face close-up (at Hop Farm he was shown from a distance; his stage lights have been getting dimmer; in the recent Rolling Thunder Revue doc, he is painted a most curious shade of auburn) was going to result in the funniest audience-baiting of modern times**, but as he wandered on stage in a muted fit of anti-climax, the vast panels crackled into life. Young had shared screen-time with his band, but there was no such egality here: the camera fixed on Dylan's small, stooping frame for the next 105 minutes.


'Ballad of a Thin Man', 1966.

With a justifiably self-satisfied grin, Dylan launched into 'Ballad of a Thin Man', the 1965 track irrevocably associated with his reinvention as a braying individualist with great hair who was enthusiastically kicking apart his legacy as a protest singer, and sneering at anybody who asked him not to. It's an absolute monster of a song, with a fantastically snide and direct central refrain: "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is/Do you, Mr Jones?", the name typically squawked amid a squall of noise as "Jooooahhhhhrrrrnnnns". It's a perfect choice to kick off this type of show, as at this point several members of the audience who've never seen Dylan before, and are confronted with a jowly, wire-haired, tactiturn little man in a rhinestone jacket jabbering 54-year-old words in a half-swallowed 80-a-day rasp as he happily plinky-plonks on his piano will indeed be wondering what is happening here. Perhaps you have to have Dylan in your blood to react to this with a rush of utter euphoria, but I don't know any other way. Dylan will spend the rest of the evening reshaping his songs in the most exhilarating manner, but with this one, it's enough to just deliver your statement of intent, and give it both fucking barrels.

'It Ain't Me, Babe' is up second, and one of the highlights of the night, its hero now not so much nobly apologetic as cheekily elusive, a quality one more associates with the fantastically unfaithful 20-something Bob. The word "babe" is intoned with such gleefully dismissive malevolence that you really do begin to suspect the protagonist is avoiding this lovesick woman more for his own sake than hers. James Taylor may appear to genuinely like his own audience, and Paul Simon's voice may be in better nick, but no-one but Dylan would excavate a song from 1964 and then warp it out of all recognition: not just its tune or its style, but its actual theme.

He follows that with an explosive 'Highway 61 Revisited', the closest you'll get to him acknowledging that now and then people would like to hear the hits, perhaps with one of them sounding similar to the record. This song's a great gauge, incidentally, for how good a Dylan show is going to be (though unfortunately by the time this litmus test can be performed, you have bought your ticket, train pass and accommodation, and are midway through the show): whenever I've seen Dylan at his best, he has spent it grooving, grinning and very occasionally (Sheffield 2009) genuinely dancing. And it's such a great song: the best organ-driven Biblical comedy record of psychedelic '60s rock. After that 'Simple Twist of Fate', from 1975's Blood on the Tracks, feels slightly bland: it's a wonderful song: small, sad, wry and lyrical, but it feels swallowed up in this space, the reading almost perfunctory.


1974.

I've written about Dylan before and said in 2013 that, while you rarely get unequivocally great Dylan shows any more, you can usually rely on a run of three or four songs where he's really cooking, where he cares enough to make it count. I did wonder, as 'Simple Twist of Fate' meandered meekly out from the vast speakers strapped around Hyde Park, whether perhaps we might have had our three-song run.

So sometimes you worry. And then sometimes you can only laugh, in slack-jawed amazement, at this maddening, occasionally ridiculous genius, who takes absurd risks with his material, even in front of 70,000 people. On record, 'Can't Wait' is a stinging, ominous, Tom Waits-ish lament, a hymn to utter isolation, a paean to pain near the close of Dylan's saddest album, Time Out of Mind, recorded as his health dwindled, en route to a brush with death. On Friday, it's not. On Friday, it's a fantastically funky James Brown number, with Dylan a white-suited ringmaster, holding the mic-stand at a jaunty angle as he defiantly raps the lyrics from out front, turning one of his most heartbreaking lyrics ("It doesn't matter where I go anymore, I just go") into nothing short of a punchline.

'When I Paint My Masterpiece', which follows, is fine, but the song's main virtue is how its rapturous but yearning melody lends harmony and power to some rather trite lyrics, so when you junk that tune in favour of something pleasant but basically unmemorable, you're neutering it. And then we're into a stompy, somewhat impenetrable 'Honest with Me', from 2001's Love and Theft, which I'm sure Dylan would be proud to learn (and I'm only mildly ashamed to confess) I didn't recognise until at least two minutes in, and I know that album back-to-front.


1997.

We get four from Time Out of Mind in total, and the second is the best of the lot. The album is, I think, and after everything, my favourite of all Dylan's records: a wintry, introspective retrospective. It sounds like the last testament of a dying man, and it nearly was. 'Trying to Get to Heaven' is probably the single greatest thing on it: essentially an update of 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door', his earlier defiance and desperation replaced by a wry and weary yearning pockmarked with pain ("You broke a heart that loved you/Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore"). Dylan is never content to trade on 22-year-old emotions, though, and last night the song became more like a whimsical quest, lines of alienation rendered playful, until the hammer-blow of its protagonist's essential pointlessness. "I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down," he sighs, "now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door."

At the end of the song, as at the end of many of these songs, he stands up for the final few bars, then begins to wander off, as if he's remembered that the remote is in the other room, and the screens cut to black.

'Make You Feel My Love' is a song that was stolen from us by Adele, and some absolute roasters near us insisted on singing her version over the top of it, but just as Dylan never wrote sadder, starker words than on Time Out of My Mind, he never wrote a more direct love song than this one***. At Hyde Park, it's an effectively conventional reading, and while we'll never get a better reading of the unexpectedly and breathtakingly seductive line that closes the penultimate verse ("You ain’t seen nothing like me yet") than the one on the album, I suppose he can keep trying.

You can certainly never accuse Dylan of not backing himself, and he continues to display a vaguely misguided loyalty to 'Pay In Blood' and 'Early Roman Kings', two of the more didactic tracks from his last album of original songs, Tempest, Both are rather long-winded, both benefit from his full-blooded investment in their mixture of threats and fantasy, and both are barked in the same unflinching but essentially unchanging tone. Unfortunately, both are also heard in direct comparison to 'Like a Rolling Stone', which he stretches out languorously between them.


2012, the time of Tempest.

The first seven or eight times I saw Dylan, he played 'Like a Rolling Stone' fairly straight, usually as an encore with a familiarly cacophonous organ part. He's stopped doing that now. If you want to sing along, you really have to be on your toes. At first, it seemed like Bob was actively trying to prevent this, then you realised it was more like delayed gratification: a piano-led rap; a jazzy, dialled-down and almost painfully slow lead-in to the chorus; then this ferocious burst of rock; and finally the potential for a fists-in-the-air resolution with the beats of a football chant. By the final two choruses, he was almost egging the audience on, through some flamboyant embellishments to the words.

After 'Early Roman Kings' comes the best five minutes of the whole show: a heartstoppingly beautiful version of 'Girl from the North Country', with Bob singing: like, really singing, exposing himself not just through the emotional vulnerability of his performance, but the vulnerability of his voice. It's not what it was in 1963, it's not even what it was in 2005, and for the most part his live vocals are nowadays snapped out or throatily hollered. So a stripped-down country-folk ballad, accompanied only by a piano line and the aching strains of a pedal steel, is a hell of a thing to try. What results is simply one of the most moving experiences I've had at a concert. Incredibly, Dylan wrote the song at 21, but it is an old man's song: reflective, regretful, nostalgic in the most acutely painful way. He sings it here with his heart on display; the vocal wistful, even desolate, negotiating the loss of innocence, love and youth. He sings it like it has only just become true. And like telling someone may make it hurt a little less.

That he can mine such pathos from a simple old song, then continue hammering his most elegiac record, Time Out of Mind into baffling new shapes is the mark of a man for whom reinvention is everything. Isn't that better than a greatest hits show? The fourth and final track from his 1997 record is 'Love Sick', which Dylan famously leased to Victoria's Secret, due to his long and enduring commitment to underpants. It's an enduringly fascinating collision of dystopian imagery coupled to a doth-protest-too-much renunciation of love itself, all because some bird has apparently put him through the wringer. Live, it runs the gamut from unrepentant to vulnerable, needy and ultimately knowing.


Alicia Keys (more of whom below).

For the best part of 10 years, 'Thunder on the Mountain' was one of the two main blues jams in Dylan's set, along with 'Summer Days', which I don't like nearly as much, though it's more interesting live than listening to it in your front room. Both dropped out for a while, but now 'Thunder on the Mountain' is back. The album it opens − Modern Times, the final part of a loose career-revival trilogy − came out during a happy period of my life, and Dylan did it at the two best shows I've seen him play: in Sheffield in 2007 and 2009, so it means a lot to me for those reasons. Having said that, I think he mostly wrote it to try to get Alicia Keys to kiss him, an endeavour that I believe was unfortunately unsuccessful. He has recently changed the wording around her birthplace on the track, though whether this will do the trick, I'm not sure. It's a rumbling, suitably thundering blues adventure that runs appropriately up and down the scales as Dylan mixes the unapologetic doom-mongering of Time Out of Mind with the absurdism and cheery punning of Love and Theft, and while it lacks the emotional sensitivity, freewheelin' poetry or acidic, steel-shelled mythology-shredding that constitutes Dylan's most enduring work, it's a lot of fun.

'Soon After Midnight' is something else entirely: Dylan's stab at a Great American Songbook standard, before he decided to go and record a load of fucking terrible versions of other people's. It has a lovely, yearning feel to it, half-familiar, as if overheard from someone else's wood-fronted '30s radio unit, and it has some of those wonderful pay-offs that mark Dylan's best work post-Time Out of Mind: when he sings, "I'm in no great hurry/I'm not afraid of your fury", you doubt his resilience, then he nails your fucking feet to the floor with the saddest of clinchers: "I've faced stronger walls than yours." And you wonder whether fighting the expectations of the 1960s almost broke him in two, and doubt that anything else would be half as hard. With all due respect (which actually isn't all that much), if you think Neil Young doing 18 songs that sound broadly the same is as interesting as Dylan segueing from heartbroken country to epic blues and then what appears to be a depressive Bing Crosby record, I think it unlikely that we will ultimately get on.

The main set ends with 'Gotta Serve Somebody', one of the handful of great songs to come out of Dylan's dalliance with evangelical Christianity. I've been going to see Dylan as regularly as money and geography can permit since 2002, and this is the first time I've seen him play it. The lead single from his first Christian album, 1979's Slow Train Coming, it's essentially a strident list song about people who are, at some stage, gonna have to serve somebody. I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that he means God. The studio version (a favourite of Sinéad O'Connor) is funky as hell − a bass-driven track that neatly mixes simple encouragement, finger-wagging and what sounds suspiciously like a series of threats − but since Dylan had already given us our serving of funk in the singularly improbably shape of 'Can't Wait', he does this as a simple rock number, one of the most confounding creative decisions of the night. I say 'one of', as at the end of the song he comes and stands at the front of the stage with his hand in one pocket, and just sort of lightly sways, in what I presume is his weird attempt at some straightforward rock-star posturing.


Would you trust this man with your revolution?

The encore begins in familiar fashion: 'Blowin' in the Wind' as it's generally played nowadays, its polemical power lost somewhere between now and then, presumably because its author doesn't seem to care about its questions, only the cynicism that greets them. He follows that in the only way a committed crowdpleasing people person can: with 1965 album track, 'It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry', an emblematic 'thin wild mercury sound'-era song, that period when genres seemed to be flowing through Dylan like water, and everything that came out of his pen and gob was effortlessly sublime. There are two moments in Dylan's career that will never be unsurpassed in terms of effortless cool. One is when Al Kooper rang Dylan (ultimately to resign from his touring band) and asked what he was up to. "I'm eating toast and listening to Smokey Robinson," replied Dylan. The other is in this song, when Bob's voice first casually joins the jaunty tune: "Well, I ride on a mail train, baby, can't buy a thrill," he offers, in a purposefully dismissive rejection of regressive folk norms. "Well, I been up all night, leanin' on the windowsill."

In Hyde Park, the song becomes the night's second legit blues jam, not as expansive (or lengthy) as 'Thunder on the Mountain', but with a relentless, lolloping beat that meshes astonishingly well with the song's hip, flip pronouncements: the mythos of Depression-era train-hopping filtered through the wired mind of a man busily shedding his hairshirt. In this bluesy guise, you could imagine it nestling between 'Workingman's Blues #2' and 'Beyond the Horizon' on Modern Times.

And that's your lot. It's the best I've seen Dylan for a decade. If you disagree, then I can only chastise you for your rank ingratitude.

Thanks for reading.

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Footnotes:

* "I dread to think what the others must be like, then!" is not good banter.
** pun intended
*** I suppose a rival would be the (somewhat risible and madly popular) 'Lay Lady Lay', the hit single from 1969's Nashville Skyline

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Setlist:

Ballad of a Thin Man
It Ain't Me, Babe
Highway 61 Revisited
Simple Twist of Fate
Can't Wait
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Honest With Me
Tryin' to Get to Heaven
Make You Feel My Love
Pay in Blood
Like a Rolling Stone
Early Roman Kings
Girl From the North Country
Love Sick
Thunder on the Mountain
Soon After Midnight
Gotta Serve Somebody

Encore:
Blowin' in the Wind
It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry