Bob Dylan Live: Stirling Castle Part One 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 One of the story.

Really hadn’t thought I would want to write about Bob’s Stirling Castle show in July 2001. After writing up the five September 2000 shows I hadn’t done anything since then with regard to words on Bob for months and I didn’t think in the build up to Stirling the fires would be re-ignited either. However after seeing him I realised I was wrong, way wrong, that the energy was there to make me want to sit and put down on paper my impressions of the whole damn trip.

September 2000 had been special for me after all. Five Bob Dylan shows in five different cities over a period of about a week or 10 days and getting into more than one or two scrapes into the bargain. That brilliant feeling of arriving in a new town or city with the knowledge I was there to see Bob Dylan play live that evening was simply unbeatable, unbelievable and unrepeatable!!! A privilege that can only happen if you are lucky enough to have the liberty, plus a little bit of cash. This time it was different. There was only one show I was going to for a start and it also happened to be a hell of a long way from London, up in the grounds of Stirling Castle and within spitting distance of the Highlands of Scotland.

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Bob Dylan Live: London Wembley Arena 6th October 2000

This show is from October 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

Well I got see Bob at Wembley but it was a close run thing, really was a close run thing. I was due to meet Madeleine and Ngawang, a Swedish-Tibetan couple with whom I was going, outside Wembley Park tube station at 7pm in order to give them their tickets for the show on arrival, but massive problems on the tube meant that I didn’t get to Wembley Park until 7.15 because everything was running late. There was no sign of them but I wasn’t too worried about that because it was pretty clear everyone going to the show by tube was in the same boat as far as being delayed was concerned and that it would only be a matter of time before they appeared.

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Bob Dylan Live: Portsmouth Guildhall 25th September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

It was raining all day on Monday, which was the day I was due to go and see Bob Dylan in Portsmouth. I had to go to work at Wisdom Books in the morning, the small book distribution company I was co-director of, along with my colleagues Duncan “Dunc” Huston and Lee Richards. By two I was out of the office and on the road to get to my fourth Bob Dylan show within a week, after already having seen him at the Birmingham NEC, Sheffield Arena and Cardiff International Arena. I left with plenty of time to spare because I had no idea what to expect in terms of traffic on the way from London down to the south coast of England where Portsmouth was located. The M25 turned out to be pretty clear, a fluke no doubt, and within an hour I had reached the other side of Heathrow to take the junction for the A3 now heading due south. I had decided the A3 was a better way to get to Portsmouth rather than the M3 down to Southampton and then swinging across along the coast road. Dunno why, intuition I guess.

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Bob Dylan Live: Cardiff International Arena 23rd September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

After Sheffield I had to get down to South Wales the next day to see Bob Dylan at the Cardiff International Arena with my old friend Huw Jones who came from the same place as me, namely Penarth, a pleasant town on the western edge of Cardiff and overlooking the Bristol Channel. Unlike me Huw had never really left, apart from a few years down in Swansea doing an apprenticeship in stained glass window making. In fact it had been in Swansea when I had first got to know him, way back in the early 80s when I was studying at the University of Swansea and from where in 1983 I emerged with a 2:1 BA Hons degree in History, something which at the time I was quite rightly extremely proud of. Huw was not studying at the university of course, but had been doing his stained glass apprenticeship down in Swansea Bay and living in a cold bedsit located in an area of town called Morriston. He used to come to the Students Union coffee lounge and play the pinball machines there night after night, and where I have to say he got to be a bit of a wizard. Due to his almost continuous presence it was not long before I started to hang out with him, along with a guy called Rik Dixon who was from Norwich and a fellow student of mine in the university. Over the course of the next few years the three of us had more than one or two high old times together, when more often than not we were under the influence of weed, hash and other assorted psychedelic drugs. But all that I guess, is a different story!

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Bob Dylan Live: Sheffield Arena 22nd September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Columbia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

The second in my series of five Bob concerts for the year 2000 was the Sheffield Arena. Birmingham NEC had been on the Wednesday and Sheffield was now on the Friday. There was a day of work in between at Wisdom Books, the small book distribution company I helped run and was now a co-director of, not that such a thing added up to much, as the number of people employed at Wisdom was precisely six. I took the whole of the Friday off because I intended to drive up to Sheffield to see the show and then head back to London the same night. This time I would not be going solo as I was due to make the trip with Marc Murphy my old friend and colleague who had once also worked at Wisdom back in the early 90s until that is, we had to let him go due to there not being enough business at the time for us to afford to keep him on. Marc was now working in a very different kind of world as for a number of years he had been the assistant of a man called Klaus, a Danish entrepreneur living down in Caterham, Surrey who specialised in the buying of chemicals from countries like China and India and then selling them on to drug companies in the United States for a nice healthy profit.

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Bob Dylan Live: Birmingham NEC 20th September 2000

This show is from September 2000 when I went on the road in the UK to attend 5 shows by Colombia recording artist Bob Dylan who by that point was over 10 years into his Never Ending Tour.

September finally came and with it, just a week before the shows were to begin, a full blown fuel crisis in the UK with protesting farmers and truckers blocking oil refineries and causing the whole fucking country to grind to a halt. Petrol stations completely ran out of fuel as the population indulged in scenes of panic buying, even to the point of clearing out the shelves of the supermarkets. Slam bangers baggin’ it. Pathetic wankers! Make no mistake, the situation had the potential to completely screw things up and for a few days I had visions of my shows going up in smoke with even Bob not being able to get about the country, let alone me in my Nissan Primera. For a while the situation seemed to be very bleak indeed but finally there was a breakthrough between the government and strikers for things to slowly get on the move again. Thanks to my dad and the fact that he was monitoring the news on an almost hourly basis, I had filled up my Nissan right before things had deteriorated and so had enough petrol to see me through, thus avoiding the horrendous queues which lined up outside the filing stations. By the end of the mini crisis I was able to top up my tank the day before my trip up to Birmingham with a minimum of fuss, feeling both relieved and excited, but also half looking over my shoulder just in case the whole thing erupted again.

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