With Bournemouth’s panto season due to launch almost the second Bob Dylan walks offstage, the reverent disciples of the BIC might be forgiven for pointing out that they’re behind him. In a golden cabaret blazer, the 83-year-old poet, philosopher and firebrand of legend opens the first show of his UK tour seated at a centre-stage piano with his back to the crowd, jamming out a seamy noir blues with his circle of players.
That it takes a good few minutes for this earthy rumble to reveal itself as “All Along the Watchtower” barely seems to matter. In his ninth decade, Dylan now seems to exist beyond music – or rather beneath it, rooting in the primal soil of his songs in search of their fundamental crux.
Likewise, the longstanding gripe about Dylan’s tendency to deconstruct and rework his music until it’s virtually unrecognisable live is irrelevant tonight. The tour is primarily a celebration of his 39th album and late-period masterpiece, 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways – the whole album, bar the 17-minute night flight through modern cultural history “Murder Most Foul”, makes up over half the set – and these songs are already deconstructed.
Intimate, dusty and delivered in a voice resembling a conversation between a flu-laden Seventies Dylan and Tom Waits, it’s music about tone, texture and worldly rumination, without any fixed form or hallowed text to adhere to. Folk-rock’s finest songwriter, evolved out of our melody-fixated sphere, now inhabits a deeper plane. Ours is just to love what he’s done with the place.
True, from his occasional croaks and hiccups you might at times think that a coil has broken somewhere in the rusted workings of Dylan’s larynx. Certainly, his grainy muttering buries most of the record’s poetic wisdoms. Though he totters out from behind his piano in crooner mode, the inner universes this modern Walt Whitman unravels on “I Contain Multitudes” are almost completely lost in the mumble.
“My Own Version of You” is a kind of post-modern Prometheus story, Dylan piecing together a Frankenstein’s monster of historical body parts in order to “see the history of the whole human race… carved into your face”. But the smattering of names that emerge out of its flamenco murk tonight – St John the Apostle, Caesar, Marx, Brando – merely suggest a louche tango through time.
Yet Dylan’s band, introduced in Cartman-like mentions between songs, create an enveloping mood with their not so much rowdy as rough and ragged way with the material. “False Prophet”, a slow-burn blues number, builds to moments of jagged brimstone rock’n’roll, Dylan standing up and hammering at his piano as the conflagration smoulders.
“Black Rider” oozes torch-song seduction. Tackling a 1971 classic afresh, he begins the once-country “When I Paint My Masterpiece” as a creeping jazz piece before turning it – I swear – into something akin to a quietened “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” smeared in southern swampland grime.
The intoxicating closeness of Rough and Rowdy Ways struggles to survive a full set, though. To polite cheers from the hushed crowd, the pace picks up as an urgent beat ushers in a coiled and febrile “Desolation Row”, the band gathering thunder and Dylan providing the harmonica lightning. But he arrives at the tropical vibe of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” seeming tired and lacklustre, elbows on the piano, tinkering with the keys and weakly parping his harmonica like a lounge singer approaching the end of a quiet shift. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is simply a dusky boogie blues too far.
It’s unreasonable, of course, to expect exuberant dynamics from an artist in their eighties. But the gig’s back end is at its best when surrendering to the serene. When “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” arrives in light and frothy beat-pop mode. When “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” drifts across like dawn mist over a blue bayou. Or when “Mother of Muses” honours war dead and encroaching mortality in gentle gospel fashion.
The closing “Every Grain of Sand” – tonight’s only song from Dylan’s Christian period, or indeed from the 50-odd years after 1971’s Greatest Hits, Vol. II – is a thing of such fragile beauty that a fight nearly breaks out when someone tries to leave a row midway through. His on-record rummages in the roots of sound are enthralling, but, live at 83, Dylan really stuns when grasping at the heart of a song and lightly squeezing.
