Lest we forget, for a long time there most of us Dylan-ites were glad just to see the man could get his boots on of a morning, but post Chronicles, the stakes have been upped. Yes, arthritis has confined him to the piano (visions on the old Joanna, if you will), and the voice is ragged (what did you expect, Pavarotti?), but he’s very much plugged into his own back catalogue. And other people’s too: he’s been prone to opening with Link Wray’s ‘Rumble’ of late, and the Brixton Academy show saw him encore with a stab at ‘London Calling’. So we can only conclude that the folk here for a second sold out Point date – cheese and wine ladies in furs rubbing shoulders with homeless looking dudes discussing set-lists – are not merely paying their respects to the don while he can still stand, but on the off chance he might actually toss off something transcendental for the last night of the tour.
And whaddya know, he pulls it off maybe a half dozen times over the course of a 105-minute show.
The auguries are auspicious, if eccentric: no support, no piped music other than the muted strains of ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’, and an intro so over-the-top it has to be a piss-take (“Ladies and gentlemen, the voice of the 60s counterculture, rock’s poet laureate who receded into drug addled haze, found God etc… would you please welcome Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan!”).
The band file on and kick into ‘Drifter’s Escape’ like a superior Louisiana swamp blues combo, but Bob sounds fucking great – gravel-y, road-worn, lived in. They hit the first peak on the next one, ‘Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)’, a nightmare odyssey south of everybody’s borders, with a vocal at once jazzy and sardonic. The rest of the set veers from the solid-but-not-inspired (‘It’s Alright Ma’, ‘Every Grain Of Sand’) to the surprisingly delicate and lovely (‘Love Minus Zero/No Limit’, ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’) to the absolutely barnstorming (a wild and fiery ‘High Water (For Charley Patton)’ with blistering banjo break from Donnie Herron).
But the real stolen moment is ‘Visions Of Johanna’. Against a starry backdrop, Bob lulls us with this hushed surrealist roominghouse hymn, and the silenced rabble swoon. There follows a rollicking ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, and for a finale, ‘All Along The Watchtower’ delivered as a live-feed satellite dispatch from the opening moments of the apocalypse.
Jeez, as the man said, I can’t find ma knees.

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