Bob Dylan Live: The Fleadh, Finsbury Park, June 20th London 2004

The 2004 Fleadh was in Finsbury Park on Sunday June 20th and the headlining act was Bob Dylan. This post describes the experience of going to what was my second Fleadh, the first time being back in 1993 when – you’ve guessed it – Bob was headliner again, supported on that occasion by a good tempered Van Morrison. For the whole of the day I was in the company of an old time associate by the name of The Wizard, a self-proclained Tantric master from Hertfordshire.

In Fleadh 93 there had been a memorable Bob and Van duet on Van’s One Irish Rover from his critically acclaimed mid 80s album No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, as well as a stunning opener to Bob’s set in the form of Hard Times from Good As I’ve Been to You the album which had got the whole thing going for me in the first place as far as having Bob in my life was concerned. That particular Fleadh occurred during the time between 1992s Good As I’ve Been to You and World Gone Wrong released in 1994. These were Bob’s two albums of traditional folk and blues covers, coming during a period when everyone thought his pen had run dry and that he might never produce an album of original material ever again. Things would change quite radically in that regard however with the release of Time Out of Mind in 1997, a work which saw Bob enjoy major critical rehabilitation and served as the platform for what are now the later years of his long career. A platform consolidated by 2001’s warmly received Love and Theft which, believe it or not, came out on 9/11. Since then as far as this new millennium is concerned, Bob has yet to look back.

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Bob Dylan Live: Cardiff International Arena 18th June 2004

On Thursday 17^th June 2004 I made my way down to South Wales in order to see Bob Dylan play at the CIA the following night. I had decided that it would be better to drive down the day before and stay at my parents’ flat in Penarth, a pleasant seaside town just to the west of Cardiff and where I had lived for the first six years of my life before rolling up and down the length and breadth of the land due to the work my dad was involved in. Driving down on Thursday evening would ensure avoiding any possible Friday jams on the roads, especially the M25 and upper part of the M4 which could be bastards to deal with if things weren’t looking pretty. It turned out to be a good decision because even taking into account the detour I had to make to my parents’ house in Harpenden in order to pick up the keys to their flat, it still only took me around 3 ½ hours to get to Cardiff.

So much was it a good decision that the only thing I really had to think about on the way down was whether or not I should visit my old friend Rik Dixon whom I hadn’t seen in about three years, possibly four, and who lived in an attic flat in Penarth which he shared with his long term partner Hazel. For quite a long time I sat there behind the wheel of my Nissan weighing up the pros and cons, trying to figure out if it would be a good idea or not to climb those stairs up to Rik’s place, and the further I made my way down the road the more I felt like it would be a good thing to do. On in the background for the duration of the journey was Bob’s far from perfect but still quite likeable Under The Red Sky from 1991, where for me the best songs on it were the title track, Unbelievable, Born In Time, God Knows and, coming in a distant fifth, Cat’s In The Well.

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Bob Dylan Live: Gettin’ My Tickets & Bein’ Burglarized

June 2004 and two Bob shows are coming up. It seemed like it was not so very long ago that I had finished writing up Three Bob Shows which covered the three bob shows that I had been to in 2003; Sheffield, Birmingham and London in that order. Great shows, naturally, although I have to admit that I did get into a couple of scrapes along the way, which led me to believe at times I was getting a bit of beating from the gods and that I’d better learn to stay on the right side of the road. Enough of that for now, suffice to say that I just about managed to come out of it with the sun still shining brightly over my shoulder as far as my love of Bob was concerned and at the end of the day that was all that mattered.

Early June, hay fever season, a bit of a distraction for me at some points to say the least, because on a bad day I can suffer from it pretty badly, flat on my back for hours and hours on end. Guess you just have to keep on riding with head held high, despite the fact I get up some mornings feeling like I have been boxed around the around the ears, walking around whilst sneezing continuously all the way to the coffee machine in the kitchen. No doubt whatsoever that I am looking forward to the 2004 shows, which will be numbers 22 & 23 respectively as far as my precious list of Bob concerts are concerned. Looking forward to upcoming Bob shows can be for me like seeing visions of glory, but having never done anything glorious in my life it is not possible for me to accurately define or describe what those visions might actually be. The main thing was that there was no way I would not be making it to them, only if strange lightning struck, or if some other such particular act of fate came along to cut through me like a knife.

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Bob Dylan Live: London Hammersmith Apollo 24th November 2003

This one is a write up of the third of three shows I saw Bob play back in 2003. Whilst the first two were run of the mill arena shows, one in Birmingham and one in Sheffield, this one was always going to be special – a return to the legendary Hammersmith Apollo in West London. Sure enough, Bob didn’t disappoint, pulling some stone cold nuggets from out the bag, including a song which he hadn’t played in 26 years. Nice one!

So it was now a case of two down one to go as far as my three Bob shows for 2003 were concerned. There was a whole two days in between the NEC show which I had taken Khangla Metok to on the Friday and the Hammersmith Apollo show on the Monday. That was a long weekend to get through in other words, a very long weekend indeed when I knew that Bob was in town and playing places like the Shepherds Bush Empire which would no doubt be packed to the rafters and full of adoring fans. This time I was going to see Bob with Dunc Hutson one of my partners in crime at Wisdom Books, the small distribution company specialising in books on Buddhism, which I helped run as well as being co-director of, not that such a thing added up to anything more than a hill of beans. Dunc had come to see Bob with me once before, the first of the two London Docklands Arena shows in May 2002, and at the time he had been suitably impressed with what he had witnessed. He must have because when I told him a couple of months ago that Bob would be back in London in November, he jumped at the chance to come along with me and see him again. Therefore on the Monday I finished early at Wisdom and arranged to meet Dunc at my place in the late afternoon in order for him to park his car before we took the tube down to Hammersmith from Woodford.

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Bob Dylan Live: Five Never Ending Tour Shows 2013 – 2019

Following on from my overview of Bob shows from the 1990s and also shows in the period 2005 – 2009, this post covers me seeing Bob Dylan live at the Tempodrom, Berlin on two dates in 2013, the Royal Albert Hall in London 2015, the Cardiff Interantional Arena 2017 and finally Hyde Park, London 2019.

It was to be just over two years later when I next saw Bob by way of going to two shows in Germany on October 24^th & October 26^th 2013 at the Tempodrom in Berlin. Just so happened that I was over there paying a visit to my old friend Thomas Deilecke. The tickets had been bought well in advance of my visit and I guess they were the main reason why was I was making the trip over there, not solely of course, because it was great meeting up once again with Thomas, but Bob was most definitely in my sights, no doubt about that. He was actually playing an unbroken three night stint at the Tempodrom, a concert hall in the middle of Berlin built in the fashion and shape of a circus tent, and we had tickets for the first night and the third.

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Bob Dylan Live: Seven Never Ending Tour Shows 2005 – 2011

Following on from my brief overview of Bob shows which I went to in the 1990s, this post covers me going to see Bob Dylan play live at on three occasions at the Brixton Academy in 2005, once at Wenbley Arena in 2007, once at the London Roundhouse in 2009 and finally a brace of shows at the Cardiff International Arena in 2009 and 2011.

In writing about Bob Dylan Live post 2006 mention first has to be made of the three Brixton Academy shows I saw Bob play in November 2005. For some reason I did not write these up at the time so they didn’t make it into Carnival Of Jesters, my 2000 – 2006 live show write ups, although of course they should have. It is an anomaly which now nearly fifteen years later I can’t really explain, other than to say it was probably the case that work at Wisdom Books must have been pretty stressful at the time. This would no doubt have made the prospect of writing up reports on those three shows beyond my capabilities, which is strange because I know that I really enjoyed them. Needless to say it is way too far down the line now for me to remember them in any great detail, beyond running through the set lists which I have recently had to refer back to.

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Bob Dylan Live: Ten Never Ending Tour Shows from the 1990s

Yes, that’s right, there were no less than 10 Bob shows in the 90s that I went to – 4 at the Hammersmith Apollo, London in 1993, 1 at The Fleadh, Finsbury Park, London in 1993, 2 at the Brixton Academy, London in 1995, 1 in Hyde Park, London in 1996, 1 at Wembley Arena in 1997 and last but not least 1 at the Cardiff International Arena which was also in 1997. What you can read below is a brief description of all of them, prefaced by an account of how Bob came into my life, or if we wanna go Biblical, how I found Bob.

Now I first got into Bob towards the end of 1992 thanks to Good As I’ve Been to You which I bought from a CD shop just off Walthamstow Market in North East London. Yes, Good As I’ve Been to You was my first ever Bob Dylan album, which in some way is kind of ironic since it is a work of traditional folk and blues covers with not a single original Bob Dylan song on it. Just saw it there in the CD racks of the shop and when I picked it up to take a closer look there was something about the photograph of Bob on the front cover which made me want to buy it there and then, immediately, on the spot. It is certainly the case that I hadn’t been intending to get it when I walked in but when I got to play it later that evening, after clocking off from another day of work, I was simply knocked out and from that point onwards have never looked back.

Bob’s voice was ragged and dirty from having been around the world a million times over and done pretty much everything you could hope to do as a top-tier 20^th century recording artist. When it came to popular music at that time, there were a handful of names which immediately came to mind for the majority of people and The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan would almost certainly have been among them. It was probably the case that in any given city throughout the Western world you would have been able to bet your bottom dollar that the vast majority of buskers out on the streets and in the parks would have been able to play at least one Bob Dylan song. Yet here he was on the cover of Good As I’ve Been to You looking pretty fed up, world weary and almost at the end of the line. Guess in some strange way it would be true to say my heart went out to him, it really did and pretty much from that moment onwards I was on his side, wanting to see him pick himself up again and get back to where he belonged.

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Bob Dylan Live: Docklands Arena London 12th May 2002

This show is from 2002 when I went down the road in my home town to see Bob Dylan play another show at the now long defunct London Docklands Arena on May 12th when he was touring the UK on another leg of his Never Ending Tour. It was around nine months after his Love & Theft album which was released on September 11th 2001, and the show features a number of songs from it which I was hearing him perform live for the very first time.

So the first night with Bob down at the London Docklands Arena had been a good one but what would the second one hold in store? When I woke up the following morning I was pretty tired from the night before. The excitement of seeing Bob again, along with the mild stress of taking along Duncan “Dunc” Hutson, where all the usual thoughts manifest of whether or not a first timer to Bob is going to enjoy themselves or simply think the whole thing is a load of old bollox had taken their toll. The consequence of this was that I felt every inch of my 40 years of age when I finally hauled myself out of bed. The late night walk back to Canary Wharf through the rain the night before had also put me through my paces, as well as the drinking both during and after the concert by way of three plastic bottles of Carlsberg followed by a late night pint of very tasty Grolsch. So all in all my energy levels were not at their greatest.

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Bob Dylan Live: Docklands Arena London 11th May 2002

This show is from 2002 when I went down the road in my home town to see Bob Dylan play a show at the now long defunct London Docklands Arena on May 11th when he was touring the UK on another leg of his Never Ending Tour. It was around nine months after his Love & Theft album which was released on September 11th 2001, and the show features a number of songs from it which I was hearing him perform live for the very first time.

It’s now well over a month since Bob Dylan’s two shows in Docklands, May 11^th & 12^th 2002. The time between seeing the man and writing my thoughts down is getting longer as the years go by, which makes me ask, are the fires still burning when it comes to Bob? Well yes, I have to say they are. After seeing the shows I had always intended to write something, and I guess it has just been laziness which has stopped me from doing so. The inspiration has been there though, make no mistake about that. Make no mistake partner or else we’ll just have to go round the back and settle this thing with a pair of shooters. All it has needed is the final push for me to sit for a few hours and set it all down.

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Bob Dylan Live: Stirling Castle Part Two 13th July 2001

This show is from July 2001 when I went on the road up to Scotland from London to attend a show by Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan given in the grounds of Stirling Castle and who by that point was over 12 years into his Never Ending Tour. This is the Part Two of the story.

By 7 or so the sound check was over, with Bob and the boys now probably back stage having a snack or even a light meal before the show, plates of Scottish smoked salmon, maybe haggis. Things were running late, it said on the tickets the gates to the castle would open at 6.30 but we were already way past that and they still remained firmly shut. No one seemed to mind however, the setting was great, the vibe nice and peaceful, so no one was getting unduly excited or agitated that still not much was happening. We began to move forwards at around 7.15 with people on high alert for any possible queue jumpers who might just try to barge in as we slowly made our way towards the castle gates. There was none of that thankfully, which meant that in a stop start kind of way we slowly got closer and closer to the inside of the castle, a steady but sure advance to get within those walls. Finally we reached the castle gates and it was with more than a degree of high excitement that we handed over our tickets to let the stewards tear off the stubs. We were in! Now it was simply a question of taking a brisk walk up the steep incline into the castle grounds before a mad dash in order to find the best place possible to see the show.

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