Rougher and rowdier (take 2)

So many people told me how much they’d loved the first of Bob Dylan’s three nights in London this week that, having written a rather grumpy response to his performance in Nottingham last Friday, I went on the secondary market to buy tickets for the third and final night, also the last show of the 2023-24 edition of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour.

The most telling words came in an email from the historian David Kynaston, who expressed “a powerful sense of gratitude that here I was seeing him at the Albert Hall in 2024, some 55 years after he’d been a speck in the distance at the Isle of Wight, and with all sorts of thoughts about the intervening years – the ups and downs of his different phases, how they rhymed or didn’t rhyme with my own life, his constant presence in one’s interior landscape – coursing through my mind.”

His constant presence in one’s interior landscape. That did it for me. And because I thought it might help give me a different perspective, this time I left my notebook and pen at home, setting aside the working habit of a lifetime.

Buying those tickets turned out to be the year’s best decision. In the warm and dignified surroundings of the Albert Hall, almost everything I found frustrating about the Nottingham show, rooted in a sonic harshness, was smoothed away. The sound was perfect, the vocals were clear and perfectly balanced against the instruments, Dylan’s piano-playing was always relevant to the song, he made each note of every harmonica solo count, and in the moody lighting of those old tungsten lamps the musicians clustered around him as if they were playing together in someone’s front room.

One thing he does is allow the audience to see the music’s working processes. Nowadays he has a set-list that seldom varies, but last night there was an unusually strong sensation of being invited in to watch and hear decisions being made on the fly, in the moment.

At times it had the delicacy of chamber music. “Key West” — a song whose setting he’s played around with throughout the tour — was particularly exquisite in that respect. So was “Mother of Muses”. The new arrangements of “All Along the Watchtower” and “Desolation Row” came into much clearer focus. The music ebbed and flowed with freshness and grace. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” and “False Prophet” located the Chicago blues sound so fundamental to Dylan’s feelings about how a band should be organised. The spare treatment of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” was heartstopping. The closing “Every Grain of Sand” was a serene benediction.

Without his refusal to be consistent or predictable, he wouldn’t be what he is. But last night he drew us in, and I think most people there would have felt unusually close to him. If I really was seeing him for the last time, it ended with seeing him at his best.