I was born to be on this Bob Dylan podcast, says Geoff Dyer

Podcasts will soon be like porn. Every interest, desire or idle flicker of curiosity will have been anticipated and catered for. Whatever you’re into there’ll be a podcast devoted to it, waiting to make itself heard. That’s easy for me to say because I’ve already found my perfect match: Is It Rolling, Bob? in which ‘Actors Kerry Shale and Lucas Hare talk to interesting people about Dylan’.

Since nothing is more interesting than Dylan it follows that there is nothing more interesting than this podcast. I was alerted to it by my friend the writer Rob Doyle who had heard about it from his dad. (My friends, increasingly, are the children of my contemporaries; is this what Bob meant by staying for ever young?) I barely even knew what a podcast was back then but as soon as I got to the webpage, or whatever it’s called, I could tell that we — this podcast and I — were meant for each other. At the top there’s a row of books about Dylan: a photo that might as well be a mirror of the Dylan section of my own library. For a while I was content to listen to David Morrissey and Jude Rogers et al. saying interesting stuff about Dylan, but things changed after I saw the Scorsese documentary about the Rolling Thunder Revue at the Prince Charles in London. It’s on Netflix and, in the unlikely event that you’ve not already done so, you can watch it tonight. But to see it on the big screen in a packed cinema on a Thursday afternoon in June was… Well, it was a lot better than waiting for similar footage to crop up in the course of the four-hour bloat of Renaldo and Clara as I’d had the stamina to do — twice — in the late 1970s.