Bob Dylan at London Feis 2011

A strange night last night.  It was a great performance from Bob and the band (as you can see above, he actually moved around and played three different instruments, rather than staying behind the keyboard; he even acknowledged the audience at the end by saying “Thank you, friends”!) but the event itself, the inaugural London Feis, was pretty bad.  It was not the production team’s fault that there had been bad rain throughout the day, but I did feel there was a lack of foresight in the planning of the arena, allowing the main thoroughfares to become mudslicks when they could simply have put down some boards.  The crowd was also a distinctly nasty one, at least in the area in which I found myself for the act which preceded Bob, Christy Moore.  There was total disrespect shown for both Moore (who was playing a stripped-down, relatively quiet set with another guitarist) and the rest of the long-suffering crowd by a few braying pinheads.  This may well have been an unfortunate blip in an otherwise friendly crowd, I can’t say.  But it was a pity, because I’d never seen Moore, who seemed to be a more interesting artist than I’d previously given him credit for.

By the time of Bob’s set, though, we managed to manoeuvre ourselves into our natural habitat (the bearded older men who were wearing Shepherds Bush-era tour t-shirts) and things improved greatly.  The opener, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”, was easily the most contrarian move of the night: otherwise, it seemed to be a surprisingly “average punter”-friendly selection of hits.  This is not to say they were uninterestingly performed — the band were absolutely cooking throughout, while “Baby Blue” had a fabulous and unusual new arrangement and “Cold Irons Bound” was both fantastically groovy and riveting — but I’m still by no means a Dylan completist, and it’s a pleasant surprise to me when I’m familiar with a song.  This, however, did come back to bite me in the bum: I have no interest in having one of the precious slots on the setlist wasted on something I couldn’t care less about,  and no less than three were wasted (in my opinion) last night on “Hard Rain”, “Rolling Stone” and “Watchtower”.  Normally I’d also include “Blowin’ in the Wind” in that selection but I liked the fresh arrangement it got, whereas the other three felt a bit perfunctory in performance.

I was pleased by the inclusion of “Summer Days” (though I wouldn’t class the performance as one of the best of the night) and both “Highway 61″ and “Ballad of a Thin Man” were brilliant.  They were very different in effect but they were united by a quality that I observed last night in Dylan’s current delivery, which gives the lyrics the aura of a devastating stand-up routine.  This is no bad thing.

See comments for setlist.