Thin, wild, mercury music...

Blimey… Bob’s gone and won the Nobel Prize for Literature! Pundits will be queueing up to complain that he doesn’t deserve it… but not me. Sara Danils, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, was fulsome in her praise. “Start with Blonde on Blonde”, she said… which is exactly what I did. I remember cycling from school to Corby to buy Blonde on Blonde, probably in 1966: not only my first album, but the first ever double album and the first gatefold sleeve. I cycled back, with the album taped to the crossbar of my bike.

For weeks this was the only record I owned, so it got quite a bashing on my Dansette record player. There were four sides to play, which helped. The music was fascinating, surreal, ambiguous, ambitious; it sounded like a man in full control of his powers. Bob knew exactly what he was doing. Other albums followed Blonde on Blonde into my record collection: Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited (which included the magisterial Like a Rolling Stone… the first rifle-crack of a drum-beat telling me that rock music had changed for ever).

Literature? Hmmm… His songs don’t always read well off the page. But that’s not the point. The words, the music, that voice: somehow it all gelled together to create something special. I ‘discovered’ Bob when I was 14; since then he’s been a constant musical presence in my life. Like all relationships, it’s had its low moments: Under the Red Sky, Bob? But what luck to have opened my music-buying account with a classic album like Blonde on Blonde (rather than an LP by the Black & White Minstrels, which was the dubious choice of one of my school-mates). Keep it rolling, Bob…

Cirencester...