Bob Dylan doesn’t have fans. He has disciples. That is the only conclusion I can reach after I moved heaven and earth to secure an entrée to the finale of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour at the Royal Albert Hall.
Now, one of my prouder boasts is that I was the rock and pop critic for the Oldie Magazine until my recent retirement so gigs, I’ve been to a few. But none was like this.
First of all, we had to secure our phones in locked pouches, as if in preparation for some sort of spiritual cleanse or silent retreat, but that wasn’t what made the evening so transcendentally maddening, but also so unmissable. Let me try to explain.
If you’ve been to a Bob Dylan concert in the past six decades, you will understand. I hadn’t been before, so I didn’t.
On the dot of eight, the legend ambled on stage as if looking for something he’d left behind, swiped the microphone, and that raspy voice rose to the rafters as the audience rose to its feet in ecstasy. What did they know that I didn’t?
It was only when I looked up the set-list later that I discovered that Dylan opened with All Along the Watchtower. It was beautiful – but unrecognisable. The same went for It Ain’t Me Babe, and Desolation Row.
Most of the 17 songs last night were from Rough and Rowdy Ways, his gorgeous 39th album that I played on repeat when it came out in 2020 so I knew when he was singing Black Rider and the heart-tugging masterpiece, I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You (a take on Offenbach’s Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman).
Occasionally I heard a snatch of lyric and it was only then that I could work out what each song engraved on my heart was – but most of the time, this didn’t matter. The man in the bronze jacket with the curly dark hair that he fluffed and patted a few times was THE Bob Dylan! And he was in London! For perhaps the last time!
It was a minimal, distilled evening for the true believers, for connoisseurs. My date described it as “like late Auerbach, etched, flinty and fading genius lit up against an almost Beckettian bare stage with just four musicians,” which was so good and so true I told him I would steal it.
This was what mattered, the singer not the song – as it was a competition even among the superfans to guess what he was singing.
We had no iPhone lights and nobody singing along, only Dylan's voice, and that was enough. More than enough. And that was clearly what he felt too, for after 90 minutes precisely and 17 songs he gave us a harmonica solo then walked off stage as if he’d finally found what he’d been looking for – and his worshipful audience rose to its feet for perhaps his last standing ovation in London.
