Category: Music

                   Masters of War and With God on Our Side can be considered to be the most didactic and moralistic examples of Bob Dylan’s early ‘protest’ material. Jesus and Judas are mentioned in both songs. Dylan’s uses these two figures to represent polar moral opposites – good and evil, faith and...

    Farewell Angelina is one of Bob Dylan’s most remarkable ‘unreleased songs’. Dylan’s own rather uncertain take was recorded during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions in 1965 but not released until The Bootleg Series Vol. 1 (1991). The song was then passed to Joan Baez, who recorded it as the title track...

This was recorded at the DOCKYARD CLUB, PORTSMOUTH on 28th November 2021. This is a slightly wonky recording of my talk at a fabulous ‘Dylan and the Dead’ weekend, organised by John Roberts. In between the bands I entertained the gathered multitudes with an intro to my book DETERMINED TO STAND: THE REINVENTION OF BOB...

HURRICANE  AND JOEY:  TWO CINEMATIC NARRATIVES FROM DESIRE     When the album Desire was released in early 1976, many Dylan fans were delighted that, in two of the songs, Dylan appeared to have reverted to the role that made him famous – that of a ‘protest singer’. Both songs were based around the lives...

   It is a commonplace that Bob Dylan made possible the emergence of a whole generation of singer-songwriters. It is not surprising, therefore, that a number of them have chosen to pay ‘tribute’ to him in song. Not all of the references to Dylan have been complimentary, however. Writing a song about the greatness of...

1963 was the year Bob Dylan ‘made it’. At the beginning of the year he was still a little-known folk singer with one album to his name – a rather startling collection of blues and folk covers with a couple of derivative originals – which had sold very poorly. By the end of the year...