You could infer a lot from the way Bob Dylan’s backing band arrange themselves on stage. They form a kind of huddle around their leader, who these days performs mostly at a grand piano centre stage: sometimes seated, more often standing, occasionally not playing it all, but leaning against it, elbows on the lid, as he sings or plays harmonica. Perhaps there’s something protective about this formation. After all, Dylan is now 83; quite an age to be on the ninth leg of a three-year world tour. But even as an octogenarian, Dylan very much gives off the air of someone who can look after himself, thank you.
It seems more likely their position speaks of a state of high alert. These are musicians for whom the term seasoned professional was invented – longstanding crack sessioneers, men whose collective CV encompasses everyone from Paul Simon to Steely Dan to sundry former Beatles – and yet you somehow get the impression that even they aren’t quite certain exactly what’s going to happen next. An artist who pronounced himself freewheelin’ in 1963 seems no more inclined to keep to any script 61 years on. Best to stick close to the guy in charge and keep your eyes peeled for clues as to where he’s headed. As they hawkishly follow his unpredictable vocal phrasing and a piano style that’s simultaneously florid and ragged – Art Tatum by way of Les Dawson – he’s still capable of wrongfooting them: there are moments when you could swear the band start building to a climax or slowing to a conclusion, only to discover their leader has other ideas.
This is, of course, the way Dylan has done things on stage for decades now: in a world of backing tapes and tightly drilled setlists, you’re very aware that this is music happening in the moment, before your very eyes and ears. Likewise the sound of familiar songs being wrangled into unfamiliarity, the singer having decided many years ago that the best way of coping with the monumental weight of his own oeuvre is to keep hacking it into new shapes: it used to go like that and now it goes like this, as he once snapped at a particularly restive British audience.
The one time he touches a guitar, he unleashes a shaky solo that resolves into an affectingly weary version of It Ain’t Me Babe, the original’s sneer transformed into a sigh. The band strike up with something that sounds not unlike a Buddy Holly-esque slice of rock’n’roll, powered by rumbling drums, but which turns out to be Desolation Row. When I Paint My Masterpiece is afforded a staccato arrangement that gives the song a faint but noticeable resemblance to Irving Berlin’s Puttin’ On the Ritz. The crowd at the Royal Albert Hall are accustomed enough to his approach to reserve the kind of applause that usually greets the opening notes of a greatest hit for the moment in the song where Dylan hits a lyric they recognise: oh my God, it’s that.
More startling is how the tracks from 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, which provide the bulk of the set, have changed from their recorded versions. As good an album as Dylan has made in the last 30 years, it’s filled with dark imprecations and apocalyptic imagery, and frequently glowers with bluesy malevolence. There are points where that mood is recreated tonight – weirdly, one of the album’s funniest songs, My Own Version of You, takes on a crawling, sinister air – but they’re very scattered. Its songs usually seem softer, sadder, more reflective, the ominous tone of I Contain Multitudes replaced by warmth.
Indeed, in the latter part of the show, you find yourself reaching for the adjective “elegiac”. It’s dominated by the quietest songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways – Mother of Muses, Key West (Philosopher Pirate) – alongside a version of It’s All Over Now Baby Blue rendered as a fragile, fractured piano ballad. Watching the River Flow, widely presumed to be a meditation on writer’s block, suddenly feels like a song about the passing of time: “This old river keeps on rolling, though, no matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does flow.”
It ends with Every Grain of Sand, the greatest of Christian-era Dylan’s expressions of faith, but one that seems to take on fresh resonances sung by a man who’s 44 years older than the man who wrote it. People have doubtless bought tickets in the belief this is their last chance to see Dylan live, and perhaps it is, in which case he provides a fittingly idiosyncratic finale. But as his band members would no doubt tell you, it’s a brave or foolhardy person who makes confident predictions where Bob Dylan is headed.
