Never say goodbye

Michael Henderson considers the perennial appeal of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan turns 70 next week, and from Duluth to Derby they will blow out the candles. The Minnesotan troubadour, who rolled into New York the year Kennedy became president, will pay no attention. As he wrote in one of his better songs, ‘Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint.’ Like Ken Dodd, a different kind of minstrel, he will stop performing only when they put him in a box.

It would not be unkind to say he has been crooning like a 70-year-old for some while. His voice, which was never an instrument of beauty, lost whatever shape it may have had at least a decade ago. At one concert in Brixton, Andy Kershaw, the BBC radio presenter and Dylan fan, lost patience with all the mumbling and muttering, and shouted, ‘What song is this, Bob?’

Yet still the followers linger, waiting for a sign.