BOB DYLAN : SWANSEA 2025 FIRST

 

Disc One (52:45)

  1. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
  2. It Ain't Me, Babe
  3. I Contain Multitudes
  4. False Prophet
  5. When I Paint My Masterpiece
  6. Black Rider
  7. My Own Version Of You
  8. To Be Alone With You

Disc Two (61:00)

  1. Crossing The Rubicon
  2. Desolation Row
  3. Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
  4. Watching The River Flow
  5. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
  6. I've Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
  7. Mother Of Muses
  8. Goodbye Jimmy Reed
  9. Every Grain Of Sand

Label : no label

Venue : Building Society Arena, Swansea, Wales

Recording Date : November 9, 2025

Quality : Audience Recording (A+)

Review : Fantastic recording of Bob's first concert of three at the Building Society Arena in Wales, November 2025. No surprises in the setlist, each night's the same. This is the first evening.

Concert Review (GWallter) : The lights dim, I fix my earplugs, and five figures walk on to the stage: four backing musicians, all middle-aged white men, and Bob Dylan. Without introduction Dylan immediately sits down and takes his guitar, his back facing the audience. The first track, I’ll be your baby tonight, starts, to a murmur of recognition: it’s one of the few songs out of the seventeen he’ll sing tonight that will stir the synapses of fifty-year-old memories. There’s a pattern to how Dylan plays most of the numbers. He’ll start with guitar while the rhythm and tune are established, then he’ll turn to face the baby grand and take the piano part, mixed occasionally with mouth harp solos. The piano has a nice, honky-tonk tone. When ready to sing, he bends the microphone towards him. The band, two guitars, bass and drums, vary their instruments, sometimes reducing the volume using acoustic versions. It’s a tight sound – maybe too tight: the jazz-lover in me longs for one or two of the players to break loose and improvise. Dylan’s a dark figure, with a shock of grey hair and a face almost always bent over his instruments. We’re too far away to make out its details or expressions. (Many in the audience will sit through the whole set without catching sight of him at all.) There are a few terse nods to the band, but otherwise he’s taciturn. Every few songs he rises, straightens his back, then sits back down. At the end of each number, his fingers immediately flick over the page of his playlist booklet, and he’s off on to the next one, with no break. The singing is strange. Often it’s not singing, but a sort of conversational talking-to-himself. Overall, the experience is like listening to a voice over a very poor phone line: you miss many of the words and most of the sense, and interference distorts the pitch. You begin to wish that you’d made more attempt to memorise the lyrics of at least some of the songs before you came, or that ‘opera surtitles’ had been supplied. The words I’d heard on the album were as powerfully expressive and vivid as ever, though they seemed to carry more than a faint valedictory tone. Yet Dylan’s voice is still capable of hitting the notes and making them count, and he still has that nasal twist in his voice that was so much part of the sound of the young man from Duluth and Hibbing, Minnesota, back in the beginning. It’s a sound that combines assertion with a kind of defiance or contrariness. To my (muffled) ear, the rocking, bluesy numbers from Rough and Rowdy Ways are the ones that work best. In the slower, more contemplative ones, the words tend to fade and the instrumental lines wander: ‘Key West (Philosopher Pirate)’ drifts into meaninglessness. With a faster momentum and driving backing, songs like ‘False Prophet’, ‘Black Rider’ and ‘Crossing the Rubicon’ seem to carry more weight. ‘When I paint my masterpiece’ has a lovely, unexpected Latin beat. Best of all, though, is the final number, the Blakean ‘Every grain of sand’, a song from Dylan’s born-again phase in the early 1980s. It ends with a fine harp flourish. Though maybe ‘flourish’ is a touch hyperbolic: it’s been a powerfully impassive performance. By now Dylan’s been going for well over an hour and a half. There’s been no interval or break of any kind. It’s a remarkable thing for someone who’s 84 years old. How does he do it? More crucially, why does he do it? Maybe it’s just that he knows no other way. Rolling stones tend to keep rolling, and perhaps it’s the endless travelling and performing that keep him from ageing and worse. His beloved folk, country and blues singers tended to do the same. Blind Willie McTell, for example (alas, we’re not treated to the Dylan song of that name). Or Jimmy Reed, who kept on working through illness and neglect: ‘Can’t you hear me calling from down in Virginia?’, sings Dylan in the penultimate song, ‘Goodbye Jimmy Reed’. Or Jimmie Rodgers, who, in ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ (1929), sang, ‘one day I thought I’d settle down / … but somehow I can’t forget my good old rambling days / The railroad trains are calling me away’. The singing stops and the guitars rest. Bob rises from his seat and leads the others to the back of the stage. They stand there, strung out in a row, for a few seconds. Then they leave, Bob a bit slowly and uncertainly. He’s said not a word to us from start to finish. They don’t return, despite the applause and encouragement from the audience. There’s a ripple of renewed, hopeful clapping, but it’s only the crew coming on to unplug the equipment. People rise to leave. ‘Ignoring the fans’ I find admirable. He’s come all this way to play and sing for us, what more do we want? Why should he bother with the fake bonhomie and crowd-pleasing most performers indulge in? What’s wrong with playing to please yourself and your fellow-musicians? With going your own way, and ignoring vulgar expectation? I take out the earplugs. They didn’t seem to work, and outside the Arena there’s an unfamiliar and eerie silence. We walk back to the gaol. Someone says, did anyone think of piping ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ live to the prisoners, to lighten their load? We wonder, too, whether Bob will succeed, during his time in west Wales, in connecting, at last, with the other, dead Dylan. But there is one thing we’re certain about: that we’ve been part of an important, historic event. We’ve managed to see, before his stone ceases to roll, a performance by the greatest singer-songwriter of our times.