Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom – review

Standing in a smoky saloon in moody black and white, Dylan strumming a guitar unveils a jaunty When I Paint My Masterpiece.

His crooning is clear, there’s subtle, delicious lyric variations.

Behind him is a four-piece band. They are masked and also relatively anonymous. The first surprise of the evening is that Dylan stalwarts, drummer George Receli and bassist Tony Garnier, are absent.

The setting is more distracting. Shot over the head of punters pulling on cigarettes and gamely bobbing their heads along, it may be the kind of room Dylan would rather play than the soulless arenas he tours around. But while it’s intimate, it’s also distancing.

Most Likely You Go Your Way next. And yes, most likely this concert was going confound and delight in equal measure! It’s a bluesy version, Dylan gesturing with one hand, gripping the mic stand with the other.

Then we move to another setting with a chessboard-tiled floor for a delicate Queen Jane Approximately. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight follows, the soft country lullaby now a rockabilly stomper.

Highway 61 Revisited continues to be revisited with the next couple of tracks, Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues and Tombstone Blues, which Dylan slows, singing a song that was originally designed to be spat out.

By now it’s harder to work out how live the live stream is. Besides being pre-recorded, the performances themselves also seem too good to be true.

In a way that’s great, Dylan’s voice is as good as it’s been this century. But never much of a mimer, his face usually remains obscured behind a microphone or in shadow. The musicians [Alex Burke, Shahzad Ismaily, Janie Cowen, Buck Meek and Joshua Crumbly] too look like they have a harder time pretending to play instruments than they would actually playing.

What Was it You Wanted, the most recent song performed, is sinister and brilliantly devilish. Forever Young, a song transformed so many times in different versions is born anew, with the sincerity of age and experience.

In the songs that follow, there’s no misery. The last couple of years haven’t resulted in a downbeat Dylan. But there’s also no Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Instead there’s reliable classics, none of his most famous songs. To Be Alone With You, Pledging My Time, Wicked Messenger, Watching The River Flow.

Then It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. And with that, after 50 minutes, it’s all over.

To have felt the anticipation that you get just before a concert even when stuck at home was worth the entry fee. The songs were spectacular, restored and revitalised with the Dylan on display was at the top of his game. There’s so little high-quality performance footage of from the last few decades. Shadow Kingdom then is an invaluable record of Dylan being as vital an artist now as he has ever been.

But his songs stand on their own. Strip them back and they become stronger. The try-too-hard-staging, with dressing-up-box cowboys and canoodling couples, was unnecessary.

Ironically for the first ‘live’ show I’ve seen in what seems like forever, I’d have preferred just to have listened to it without the visuals.