By now, most of us know what to expect from a latter-day Bob Dylan concert. He is not going to play all the hits, and what hits he does play will be presented in radically reimagined fashion, sung in a rasping tone a long way removed from the studio recordings. It’s possible, even in the internet age, that there were some among last night’s 8000-strong crowd at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool who didn’t know what they were in for – but you got the sense that most did, and they didn’t mind. So powerful is Dylan’s legend that they were willing to turn out on a gloomy Sunday night and pay, on average, £100 to watch him march defiantly to the beat of his own drum.
Ostensibly, the drum Dylan should have been marching to is that of Jim Keltner, his percussionist last night and an icon in his own right among rock fans. Instead, he appeared divorced not just from the weight of expectation and his recorded work but, at times, his own backing band. They offered up bluesy, barroom reinterpretations of songs both new – he played all but one track from his latest album, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways – and old, and Dylan played piano and sing-spoke in decidedly loose fashion. Polished it was not. But it was honest: at the age of 83, he remains true to the creative instincts that make him one of the greatest singer-songwriters of all time.
To many, that might make him seem awkward, even obtuse, but to the diehards, this was the Dylan they have come to know and love since the 1980s, when he first set out on a road schedule so relentless that it has become known as the Never Ending Tour. As unpredictable as Dylan’s rhythm and cadence were, the flashes of genius were steady; his voice cracked with palpable emotion on “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, and Rough and Rowdy Ways standout “I Contain Multitudes” felt almost like a mea culpa – an explanation to the audience that he must continue to plough his own creative furrow when perhaps they’d prefer him to be the Dylan they listen to at home. Compounding the sense that the show is entirely on his terms is the fact tat the audience have been asked – as is now Dylan custom – to lock their phones away in pouches on the way in.
He didn’t otherwise speak much between songs, other than to introduce his band, which includes Bob Britt and Doug Lancia on guitar and Tony Garnier on bass. Nearly six decades after one of the most infamous incidents of his career took place in the north-west of England – when his embrace of electric amplification led a heckler to call him Judas at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall in 1966 – he is still ruffling feathers; a member of the crowd walked the length of the arena floor towards the end of an endearingly ramshackle “Watching the River Flow” to address Dylan, and was quickly removed.
The highlight was “Desolation Row”, his epic 11-minute treatise on urban decay. Next year it will be 60 years old, but lyrically it is ageless. Dylan has recently been tapping a spanner by way of percussion when playing the track. We didn’t get that, but we did get something rarer: an enigmatic grin as he delivered the song with gusto. Outside the arena after the show, a quick-thinking busker set up shop, knowing the audience had some pent-up sing-songs left in them. He quickly amassed a crowd of a couple of hundred and led them through a few Dylan classics, including “Like a Rolling Stone”, which did not make tonight’s setlist.
A biopic about him, starring Timothée Chalamet in the lead role, is due out in January and takes its title from that song: A Complete Unknown. We are not likely to glean much more about Dylan the man from the film than we did from tonight’s show; incredibly, for somebody who has been in the public eye for over 60 years, he is still gloriously inscrutable, valuing his art over his celebrity, and marching to the beat of his own drum in perpetuity.