Like a lot of the musical stars of the sixties and seventies Bob Dylan hasn’t grown old gracefully. His shows these days are notorious for being very hit and miss. On a good night he is as good as he’s ever been and on a bad night… well lets just say people quite often get up and walk out. But then again does this all really matter because most of these people here tonight are just here to say they’ve seen Bob Dylan, aren’t they? Aren’t they?

There’s a varied mixture of young and old in tonight’s audience. A lot of people there will have probably seen him in his heyday of the late sixties. Many will not even have been born at that time. And fortunately tonight it seems we’ve caught him on a good night. Walking on the stage dressed in a brilliant, stylish black suit he looks just the part, just how you wish your ageing rock stars would look. The stage set is all very basic with a white background and very little else really. But then when you're Bob Dylan you don’t really need gimmicks.

The songs are a mixture of old and new and only a die-hard Bob Dylan fan would have known all of them. He misses out a lot of his great songs such as Tambourine Man, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door and Lay, Lady, Lay. But there’s still space for Like A Rolling Stone, Blowing In The Wind and Country Pie.

A lot of the songs have changed drastically over they years. Some for the better - Like A Rolling Stone and Blowing In The Wind - which both sound better than they’ve ever sounded, and some for the worse - One Too Many Mornings - which seems to have lost all its beauty in its 30 year journey to Birmingham tonight. But you can’t blame him for wanting to change the songs; when you’ve been playing them for 30 plus years then you need to keep them interesting.

The songs have lost a lot of the power that they once possessed. You have to remind yourselves that in their day these songs would have been devastating in the political messages they brought across. This is hard to imagine in an age when singing about political issues like this is seen as ‘un-cool.’ He ends tonight with perhaps the most famous of these protest songs, Blowing In The Wind, sung with such beauty that it can’t help but touch everybody there.

Sam Cook.

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