Bob Dylan and Brigitte Bardot were outriders, rule breakers, iconoclasts who became icons of the sixties revolution. When Dylan in 1965 played Like a Rolling Stone at the Newport Folk Festival, this electric tidal wave was a manifesto, his resolve to take folk, country and jazz out of their boxes and meld them into the […]
Tag Archives: bob dylan
JUST BE YOURSELF
People may tell you to just be yourself, but what they usually mean is ‘just be like me.’ It is human nature to believe we have made good choices and our children should set off down the same path. The reverse is also true – clever sons rue the errors of their fathers and […]
BOB DYLAN PLAYS LITTLE RICHARD
Bobby turned on the radio late one night in 1957 and the sound of Little Richard hammering out Tutti Frutti over over the airwaves changed his life. Tutti frutti, oh rootie / Tutti frutti, oh rootie, ooh Next day in the storeroom at the back of his father’s appliance store in Hibbing, Minnesota, he blew the dust off […]
THE ENEMY OF THE UNLIVED MEANINGLESS LIFE
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life. This line struck me like the unexpected blow with the cane Zen teachers use to spark fire in the souls of acolytes on the edge of Nirvana. I thought: who am I? Where have I been? Where am I going? Has my own life been full and worthy, […]
THE ANSWER IS BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND
Blowin’ in the Wind was a song drifting through the ether waiting for someone to reach out and grab; a lyric ‘that the times seemed to call forth,’ to quote critic Greil Marcus. Dylan scribbled the words down in ten minutes, he said. ‘If I hadn’t written it, someone else would have done.’ Blowin’ in the Wind is […]
JOSEP PLA WAS MY FIRST SPANISH TEACHER
Josep Pla was my first Spanish teacher. If I drop the odd anachronism into the conversation, don’t blame me, blame the great Catalan writer, journalist, bon vivant and, it has been said, forerunner of magic realism. It all started after spending Semana Santa climbing the dirt track to Sant Pere de Rodes with my wife […]
THE FOURTH MAN
Nobody remembers the fourth man in the Olympics. Or the climbers who followed Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay to the peak of Everest. Who took to the stage at the Royal Ballet after Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn? In the 2012 Olympics, Mo Farah won gold in the 10,000 metres. He went on to win the 5,000 metres […]
IT’S NOT DARK YET
Afdera Fonda knew everyone. She was the daughter of Baron Raimondo Franchetti, the explorer and ambassador to Abyssinia considered the one man who could unite the North African tribes behind the Axis Powers in the Second World War. The bomb that killed him in a plane flying from Cairo to Addis Ababa had been planted […]
BOB DYLAN FOREVER YOUNG
When Bob Dylan inspires us to stay forever young, he is not pondering the ageing process. You can’t hold back the hands of the clock. A fresh ring appears every year on the tree. The map of our face is being redrawn constantly by life and its myriad experiences. On the surface, Forever Young is […]
Dylan and Orwell Light the Way
Dylan and Orwell. Different times. Different genres. But both were lighthouses beaming out shimmering brilliant words to light the way. I was in hospital aged 14 with a cracked skull after a tree fell on my head during a lightning storm in Epping Forest. My dad gave me a copy of 1984 while I was […]