Bob Dylan
Liz Thomson
“I didn’t even know what I was writing about. It was just sent to me”, John Mellencamp has said of Strictly A One-Eyed Jack, his first album in five years.Lauded by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Nora Guthrie, who sees in his work echoes of her father Woody, and Bruce Springsteen, who is writ large on this his 24th studio album, Mellencamp really does seem to contain multitudes. From the first notes of “I Always Lie to Strangers”, Jack’s opening track, you’re hooked, grabbed by the lapels, and happily held close. The style and mood are reminiscent of Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, his great late Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Dylan’s 1980s weren’t great in terms of critical acclaim. As an emerging new fan, I knew that first hand from the scathing reviews accorded Shot of Love by the British music press when it was released in the summer of 1981, it seemed about as welcome as a door-knocking Jehovah’s Witness first thing on a Sunday morning. Saved’s proselytising may have tipped the balance. “The hand is in the hand” Picasso once remarked – describing the most reliable marker of an artists’ skill – and the hands raised up in the album art for 1980’s Saved stuck out in the wider culture like Read more ...
Liz Thomson
The release into a world in lockdown of Bob Dylan’s first original album in almost a decade caught everyone by surprise last year. Rough and Rowdy Ways drew widespread and universal praise. Its coming was heralded by a single, “Murder Most Foul”, a lengthy song, released without fanfare, addressing the Kennedy assassination which was, of course, the subject of great textual exegesis.When Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne sent it to Chrissie Hynde, she was immediately hooked. “Listening to that song completely changed everything for me. I was lifted out of this morose mood that I’d been in Read more ...
Tim Cumming
What is the Shadow Kingdom and how do you gain access to it? In Bob Dylan’s case, it may be found in the film noir classics of his birth – 1941’s The Maltese Falcon onward – and it’s those noir settings, artfully condensed and reduced to a signature sauce, that dictate the tone of the dim-lit tableaux that decorate the settings for Dylan’s first foray into online streaming.It’s something of an event, given the cessation of the Never Ending Tour as a result of pandemic – he last played here in August 2019, that now-bucolic, innocent summer before Covid, and his last stage performance anywhere Read more ...
Liz Thomson
In May 1981, a new-minted music graduate newly embarked on a career in journalism, I was pleased as punch to secure a commission from Capital Radio. Forever Young: Dylan at 40 was broadcast on 24 May. I’ve a tape of it somewhere, this 30-minute programme voiced by a guy more suited to Carlsberg ads. The script – written using a golf-ball typewriter, music cues in its wide margins, hints of Tippex here and there – turned up a couple of weeks ago as I tidied my study. I was 23, younger than Bob Dylan when he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind”, and 40 then seemed rather old.Dylan's career was at one of Read more ...
Tim Cumming
It won’t be long now before concert halls and back rooms, arts centres and festival grounds fill with people again, and live music, undistanced, unmasked, and in your face, comes back to us. In expectation of this gradual reopening of the stage doors of perception, this round-up of recent, new and forthcoming music books surveys an artist roster disparate enough to grace the finest of festival bills.First up is Sam Lee’s Nightingale, a beautifully made hardback, packed with illustrations, facts, stories, lore, and more. While the focus here is avian song and the projective wonders of the Read more ...
mark.kidel
Music has been a solace during a year when we’ve both retreated into our private spaces and reached out more feverishly than ever on social media.There’s been very little live music: I’ve almost obsessively trawled YouTube for the best old footage: from Tina Turner belting it out on stage in 1966 and the delightful videos that Dust-and-Digital load daily on Instagram, to a blistering solo by Eric Dolphy at the Antibes Jazz Festival in 1960, backed by Charles Mingus on bass and Danny Richmond on drums. He tears his way through a simple blues and gospel chord changes with a freedom that’s Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Given Dylan’s last album of originals was in 2012, and his standards phase had concluded with a slightly meandering three-disc set in Triplicate, expectations of anything other than an archival release or new tour announcement from Dylan in 2020 were low – until, that is, some weeks into the first lockdown, when his longest ever song dropped out of a clear blue sky."Murder Most Foul" began with cringey rhymes and rose and revolved into a most extraordinary, time-defying meditation and reverie, pulling from the aethyr all the names of power from the 20th century’s canonical list of musical Read more ...
Tim Cumming
When “Murder Most Foul” was dropped into an unsuspecting world under lockdown, the surprise was palpable, given that eight years had passed since Tempest, filled by Sinatra covers and seasonal tours. That it was a 16-minute epic that took Dylan’s writing into new areas (including No1 on Billboard) – and this on the verge of his eightieth year – is also astonishing. Mixing the modes of popular verse with his own telling twists of imagery and narrative, “Murder Most Foul” was a widescreen, mythological retelling of the Kennedy assassination wrapped up in a lengthy ‘king list’ of players, songs Read more ...
Liz Thomson
We’ve all spent time considering our desert island discs, which is of course why the programme Roy Plomley devised one winter’s night in 1942 is still thriving. The choices are perhaps less favourites than music that takes you back to a specific moment in time, that reminds you of someone, or something, special. “Favourites” are almost necessarily changeable. I prefer to think of music – a track, an album – that has in some way changed my life. Clichéd maybe, yet I suspect that most of us for whom music is a central part of life, not mere wallpaper, could come up with a little list of Read more ...
Richard Williams
A combination of chopped-up newsreel and fever dream, “Murder Most Foul” is Bob Dylan’s most striking piece of work in years. This is the author of “Desolation Row” populating a 17-minute song with a lifetime of remembered cultural fragments, zooming out and panning back and forth from the single pivotal event of the Kennedy assassination, plucking references out of the heavy air.The voice is sombre, the mood subdued, occasionally lit by flashes of the absurd. Images like frames from the Zapruder film – date, time, location, automobile, wound, wife – are gradually eased aside to Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Despair hangs like mildew over the small iron-ore mining town of Duluth, Minnesota, where dreams go to die, and the living haunt the clapped-out buildings like lost souls. This poignant collaboration between playwright Conor McPherson and Bob Dylan – himself born in Duluth in 1941, seven years after this play begins – takes us into a community in which music provides a rare release for individuals scavenging for reasons to stay alive. It was something of a surprise for McPherson to be approached by Dylan to create a theatrical vehicle for his music; when asked why he thought he had been Read more ...