Fifty-odd years ago, Bob Dylan was provoking his fans into furiously taking sides and berating him with a shout of “Judas!” while their political representatives snoozed through the day’s business. How times change. On the night the Houses of Parliament resounded to accusations of treachery, Dylan opens his latest UK tour with a show so serene and benevolent that it barely rattled the Palladium’s chandeliers.
Not bland, though. At 81, Dylan retains his creative energy and still insists on doing exactly what he wants. The first of four nights in London finds him pursuing the approach that characterised Rough and Rowdy Ways, his most recent album, released two years ago. Nine of its 10 expansively structured tracks are included in his 17-song set, missing only the one that gave him the first US No 1 hit single of his 60-year recording career, the 17-minute Murder Most Foul. In place of that epic meditation on the Kennedy assassination come versions of songs composed between 1966 and 1981, all refocused by loose arrangements for the five accompanying musicians whom Dylan, no longer playing guitar, now leads from an upright piano.
Since that piano faces the audience, not much of Dylan can be seen, at least from the stalls. Against a plain backdrop, bathed in nicotine-stained light, he and the band begin with half a minute of a kind of free-jazz version of Steven Foster’s Oh! Susanna before finding their way into Watching the River Flow, the first of the older songs, now radically reshaped.
The current approach, evolved over the past decade, blends his love of Chicago blues, rockabilly, Western swing, and the Quintet du Hot Club de France. It gives Dylan a sound as identifiable as the one he found when he went electric in the mid-60s, but with a great deal more flexibility. The skills of his musicians – Bob Britt and Doug Lancio on guitars, Tony Garnier on string bass and bass guitar, Charley Drayton on drums and Donnie Herron on steel guitar, fiddle and electric mandolin – make many things possible, principally a constant sense of dramatic ebb and flow.
Now Dylan can change gear in mid-song, suddenly introducing I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight, originally a country song, to the Latin-flavoured riff from Roy Head’s Treat Her Right, or he can sing the ominous Black Rider almost entirely out of tempo. The interplay between Britt and Lancio is a highlight on several songs.
There is still room in Dylan’s shows for the surprising, the approximate and the provisional. Key West (Philosopher Pirate), a highlight of the recent album, is treated to a brand new set of chords, completely changing its mood, while there is a moment when the finger-snapping version of Johnny Mercer’s That Old Black Magic appeared to be falling apart, only to be gathered up.
Dylan pops out from behind the piano a couple of times to stand beside the instrument, acknowledging the audience’s applause and seeming in good spirits. “Thank you, art lovers!” he says as the applause for When I Paint My Masterpiece, another of the older songs, dies away.
His singing is, as ever, a study in itself, now closer to gruff, staccato speech. His inventive phrasing is at its most eloquent in the lovely I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You and its most audacious in Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine), when he delays the final words of the title line so teasingly that they seem in danger of taking up residence in the next song.
So there is no Blowin’ in the Wind, no Like a Rolling Stone, not even All Along the Watchtower, the most frequently played song of his entire concert career. No Hard Rain or Masters of War, which would have suited the times. Probably he wants nothing, particularly nostalgia, to overshadow the new songs. But at the very end there is Every Grain of Sand, an exquisite benediction, 40 years old, here reshaped into a lilting waltz. After delivering the final verse, he puts a harmonica to his lips for the first and only time. And there it is. That sound, lifted by the audience’s roar of delight, going straight to the heart once again.
• Bob Dylan tours the UK until 5 November.
