Cancel culture

The age old dictum 'you really had to be there' was tailor-made for live music concerts. Let's not even bother exploring the avenue of having a mobile phone shoved in the old visage while some excitable chap enjoins you to listen to a recording he made of the back of a bald bloke's head while an indistinguishable rock group on stage in the background plays a song presumably called 'Tss, Tss,Tss' because that's all you can hear.

Live concerts, we can safely say then, are often great in the moment but mostly insufferable in retrospect.

Bob Dylan's 1979 album Live At The Budokan is a notable exception. I recall spending endless hours lying on the living room floor in our family home, sporting humongous comedy headphones listening to the whole thing on a continuous loop. It was a fascinating record on all kinds of levels – from the magnificent backing singers to the beautifully re-crafted classic songs (most much better than in their original version); from the tight musicianship of a band proudly at the top of their game, to the polite Japanese applause at the end of every song, more befitting of a Women's Institute sponge cake competition than Lord Bobbington playing stadium rock.

Even Mr. Zimmerman himself puts in a decent, rasping shift on lead vocals.

It was with great glee, then, a few years later that I headed down to that there London, eagerly clutching my ticket for a Bob Dylan concert at Wembley, hoping for a performance as stellar as the one I'd learned by heart in suburban Liverpool not so long before. No such luck. The backing singers were nowhere to be seen and most of the songs were entirely unrecognisable to the audience and, it appeared, on the odd occasion to the band themselves.

The best part of the day was gazing down from one of Wembley's twin towers at the hoards of people arriving from miles around an hour or so before the gig. I was overwhelmed by the idea that one man could write something on an acoustic guitar in his back bedroom and that that could have the power to create all this activity – from illegal hot dog stands to police cars dashing hither and yon, sirens blaring.

Last Sunday an outdoor concert I was going to give in Malaga was cancelled at the last minute because of thunderstorms. There wasn't an illegal hot dog or police car to be seen, to be honest, but I do believe that quite a few more people turned up than I was able to apologise to personally. If you were one of them, I'm really sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you very much for coming along.