Nick and I travelled without smartphones to the venue to avoid the hassle of them being stored away, then waiting for them to be unlocked; this made for an old style concert experience, at least for the build-up.
Once through the security check and inside, we mulled around the speckled hen bar and tried said beer for our pre-concert drinks, getting to our seats in good time to admire the view and soak up the atmosphere in this place of homage.
The band appear on-stage nearing quarter past 8 and it took two songs for me to work who was doing what and where Bob was, it was more by slow elimination – he was certainly not the drummer, nor the person at the back to the drummer’s right playing the big guitar – that could only be the bass, and neither guitarists at the front as they had no Mic’s, so ok, it has to be the diminutive figure on the medium-sized grand
The evening kicked off with a long jam intro, like a Neil Young concert Nick pointed out – were we in the right place?! Fortunately the jam turned into a few distinguishable lines of All Along the Watchtower.
We were sat behind the sound desk, and to be fair the vocal clarity did improve after the first couple of songs, or I was just getting used to his phrasing. In fact his vocal intonation was spot on – the nuances all present and correct.
Later Bob came from behind the piano for some of the songs, he shuffled around a bit, he hogged the piano side a bit, but didn’t come front and centre at all as a typical main person would – his short and spindly frame bent over slightly and his jet black hair looked young, but no, he didn’t play “Forever Young”.
Although we were not allowed to bring in electronic devices or anything to write things down, it was the “standard” tour’s setlist.
There was plenty of new stuff from the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” album, but the crowd loved the oldies.
From my non-expert listening or interpretations there were no folk accompaniments, there was a heavy emphasis on blues, which is not any criticism rather the opposite, there was complexity and variety, many were structured on 12 bar lines, including “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” sprinkled with distinctive, classic blues turnarounds. On these, his vocals come across Cohen-like. Then there was a change to an uptempo, subdued rendition of “It’s all over now ..” which slowed down into “I’ve made up my mind …”
It was like he’d turned the Albert Hall into one big blues bar – Dylan’s bar – as he knocked them out one after the other, staccato piano jabs, sounding honky-tonk in places, interspersed with harmonica in others, a bit of a dance shuffle now and again, that long curved caress of the Mic cable to bring it under control; the master at his craft. I get the impression he lives for the stage and can’t keep away from it, just like Chuck Berry, whom we saw in Italy on our hols in 2010 with Wanda Jackson, Berry would have then been a year older than Bob now.
Peering down to the control/sound desk, staffed by engineers at each of the three consoles, we notice it’s spot on 10 o’clock and shortly thereafter the music grinds to a halt, the band leave the stage without so much as an acknowledgement to us, there’s a tense period of darkness where it seemed they might come back, then the lights come on and it’s all over.
Bob had weaved his magic on us and we headed home: past the official merch store inside doing a bit of business and numerous knock-off pavement stores around the back doing very little, past the Royal College of Music and along Exhibition Road, heading towards a solitary busker at the far end near the tube station belting out “The Times they are a changing”; it was the same song we’d heard by another musician in the middle of the museum’s tunnel from South Kensington, on our way to the concert.
And it captured the zeitgeist appropriately – as they were changing and had changed: abruptly over the last week in the US, fast, dazed and brutal; and gently over the course of our lives, slow, deliberate and sentimental.
References
Setlist FM – noticing the standard fare served up for successive evenings
Spotify playlist – exactly the same as the setlist above
Guardian Review – the melancholic atmosphere, the audience response when the title of a old song they recognised was sung, the wrong-footing of the band as Dylan chopped and changed mid-song, his playing of the guitar on one which I’d missed
Guardian Review from 2022 – not from last night, but earlier on the same tour
Technical details – the setup for guitars seemed:
left hand-side acoustic and Gibsons
right hand side Fenders and acoustics, interspersed and mixed about for each song.
There were no pedal boards on stage, so both guitarists would be DI’d into the mix console, not sure how this works to get effects for each song and solo.
An insightful review Phil. This really gives a great impression of the atmosphere inside the Albert Hall. It sounds as if Dylan is the reluctant star with the audience eavesdropping on a private performance by him with his band. An enjoyable read.