I was making some notes on the new Sonic Youth album, “The Eternal”, this morning, when it occurred to me that writing “pop” down again and again was pretty absurd – one of those delusional fallacies that people who don’t listen to too much actual pop have, I guess, when a rock band starts working in a notionally punchy way. It’d be a bit daft, then, to call “The Eternal” a pop record. But for the Youth’s first indie “official” album in a couple of decades, there’s a pointed irony that it finds the band in one of their more accessible and economical moods. On the first few listens, “The Eternal” seems immediate, but not quite as engaging as recent Sonic Youth albums. It has a very crisp, uncluttered sound in general, and doesn’t seem like it has many secrets to discover over time. Then, a dozen or so listens in, it starts repaying the work put in. Like “Sonic Nurse” and “Rather Ripped” before it, “The Eternal” is a nice way into the sometimes intimidating world of this great band. But while those two records moved elegantly towards a sort of negotiation with more orthodox rock, “The Eternal” favours a compacted, tight reiteration of their old, clanging and surging schtick. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of “Dirty”, with a similar sense of discipline, of wilder instincts being reined in, and with the presence of a mainstream indie-rock producer, in this case John Agnello (in “Dirty”’s case, Butch Vig) behind the desk. On songs like Kim Gordon’s “Malibu Gas Station”, you can sense the band moving towards one of their trademark squalls, but when it comes, it’s ruthlessly brief, as if they’re revelling in self-denial, ancient punk strictures, rather than billowing freedom. The band’s notes to each track are littered with references – to Noise Nomads, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, The Dead C, The MC5, Neu!, The Wipers, The Germs and so on. Generally, though, Sonic Youth have rarely sounded so utterly like themselves, or even, maybe, how both fans and critics of the band imagine Sonic Youth to sound. As a fan, it’s still wonderful to hear them take flight, as they do during Lee Ranaldo’s “What We Know”, though those repeated listens reveal more about the new enhanced focus of the band: there’s a certain clarity to the vocals, mixed uncharacteristically high, which, for better or worse, pushes the lyrics to the fore. There’s also a tighter rhythmic base, with Mark Ibold settling alongside Steve Shelley into basslines that often feel a touch more linear and conventional than sometimes in the past. Again, this serves to make “The Eternal” less of a freewheeling trip, but one which motors along with a pleasing directness; Ibold is notably brilliant on another Kim Gordon song, “Calming The Snake” (one vaguely reminiscent, perhaps simply because of the line “Come on down”, of “Death Valley ‘69”) It is Gordon, in fact, who seems to dominate “The Eternal”: her songs “Sacred Trickster” and “Massage The History” bookend the album, and her words provide a charged mission statement, not least when the record begins with her intoning, “I want you to levitate me.” One of the last things you hear, deep into the ten minutes of “Massage The History” (a beautiful oceanic swoon that may be distant kin to “The Diamond Sea”) is her singing, in a brilliantly expressive whisper, “Come with me to the other side… Not everyone makes it out alive…” Perhaps it’s endemic of my personal Sonic Youth biases that, amidst all these short sharp songs, it’s the more pensive and unravelling “Massage The History” and “Antenna” which stand out here, the latter being an elegaic Thurston Moore chugger closer in spirit to some “Sonic Nurse” tracks. There’s also, though, a Ranaldo song called “Walkin Blue” which, surely inadvertently, conjures up one of the unlikeliest Sonic Youth references I can think of, melodically recalling Blur’s “There’s No Other Way”. A bit late to go baggy, perhaps…

There’s a telling clip buried somewhere in “Archives Volume One”, where Neil Young is poring over a tableful of photographs and clippings with Joel Bernstein. Here, it seems, everything is ready for this release. Young talks enthusiastically about the recording of the Massey Hall show he’s been listening to – and then you notice the date of the footage. It is 1997. Not only has Young been talking up this project for decades, he also seems to have had most of the material sorted and to hand for most of that time. Spending yesterday in the company of “Archives”, a couple of things crossed my mind. One, it may be churlish to complain about the endless prevarication surrounding it, now “Archives” has finally arrived, but the epic build-up to this release now seems critical to its legend – as Young himself clearly understands by including such clips. And two, the somewhat ridiculous notion that Young was holding back the release until technology caught up with his vision does, surprisingly, seem to make sense. I’ve been working here with the DVD version, which can be a frustrating business, as you can’t view all the archival pictures, lyric scrawls, reviews, badges and so on while playing the music. It does seem most suited to a more flexible format like the much-vaunted (by Young himself) Blu-Ray. Or to a less flexible format, like simple old CDs. That’s how I, more or less, treat “Archives” on my first pass through, just focusing on the beautifully-sequenced audio tracks. There’s a very obvious problem here in that, as has been discussed at length, relatively little unheard music turns up. While it’s not exactly a hardship to hear great swathes of, say, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, many of us hoped for something a little less familiar. Now, I think that may be based on a misunderstanding of “Archives”. It’s not a rarities set for obsessives, it’s more of a multi-media cultural autobiography that must necessarily include definitive recordings alongside all the ephemera. For completists, Disc 00 will probably be the most gripping, covering as it does the putative efforts of Young, first in the Ventures-ish Squires, then with Comrie Smith, then finally by himself, unveiling uncanny versions of “Sugar Mountain” (in a less quavering lower register), “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” and some serviceable lost songs. From there we zip through Buffalo Springfield (and two more unheard songs, not hugely memorable on first listen), onto the early solo years and, with Disc 03, the “Live At The Riverboat” solo set from 1969. The vibe here is very similar to that of the “Sugar Mountain” 1968 album released a few months ago (and mystifyingly not included in “Archives”; was it uncovered too late for the deadline, perhaps? As late as 2001, say?), right down to the amiable, lengthy chatter and showstopping “Last Trip To Tulsa”. Disc 04 includes maybe the one really essential unheard song on the whole set, a merrily wracked Crazy Horse track called “Everybody’s Alone”, before artfully plotting the crossover between Young’s solo work and his engagements with CSNY. That point’s made even more forcefully on Disc 05, where a run of “After The Gold Rush” songs dovetail into “Ohio”, CSNY live versions of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” and "Tell Me Why" and, brilliantly, “Music Is Love” from Crosby’s “If I Could Only Remember My Name”. Disc 8 heads into “Harvest” country and salvages the mightily extended "Words (Between The Lines Of Age)" from the “Journey Through The Past” soundtrack, plus the “War Song” single with Graham Nash. Throw in the Massey Hall and Fillmore East live sets that we already know, plus the “Journey Through The Past” film which, I must admit, I haven’t yet watched, and that seems to be your lot. Which is great, really, and which works exceptionally well as an early career retrospective. A second pass through the DVDs, however, starts revealing some of the riches that justify the bells-and-whistles treatment. It’s the dept of detail that intrigues: the poster for the Riverboat date, for example, that shows Young’s gigs were between ones by Mike Seeger, Doc Watson, Spider John Koerner and Jerry Jeff Walker. Or, better still, the film clips hidden in the timelines on each disc. A Johnny Cash TV special, where Cash delivers an anti-drugs homily before cutting to Young playing “The Needle And The Damage Done”. A Dutch TV doc where the camera crew follow Young and Elliott Roberts on the former’s ranch and meet up with the titular “Old Man” and his son, fresh back from the army. A session with the LSO in Barking Town Hall, with Jack Nitzsche swigging heartily from a can of Long Life. There’s a fingerpicking solo café show from 1970, with an intently fingerpicked version of “The Loner” segueing into “Cinnamon Girl”, and a finale of Young teaching the latter song to a fan in a park (quite effectively, seeing how our Production Editor was playing it a few minutes after watching the clip). And best of all, a 1969 TV show with CSNY playing an absolutely glorious “Down By The River”, with a great Stills/Young duel (could’ve done with this one as an audio track, too). I’m sure there’s more here. Let me play some other records for a day or two, then take another look.

Four or five listens in, I figured it might be useful to postpone the new playlist for a day and blog some preliminary thoughts on the new Wilco album, “Wilco (The Album)” (not crazy about the title). Jeff Tweedy has already been talking it up as something of a return to more “experimental” terrain which, at this point, seems to be a bit of a stretch. But then I always thought that “Sky Blue Sky” was a deal more experimental than a lot of people made it out to be, albeit in a more discreet way than something like “Less Than You Think”. “Wilco (The Album)” marks the first time that the same Wilco line-up has stuck together for two albums (three if you count the “Kicking Television” live set), and perhaps consequently it feels that there’s been less of a conscious rethink of how the band sound this time out - less than ever before, maybe. “Wilco (The Album)”, then, feels like an artful stretching of “Sky Blue Sky”’s mellow aesthetic. It’s not, as some of us might have hoped, a collection of jams that showcase this most skilled and intuitive of groups: like one of their obvious antecedents, The Grateful Dead, you sense that Wilco might be a band whose expansive potential generally only comes to the fore live. It is, though, a fantastic collection of songs that suggest Tweedy is at peace with his entire career now, rather than feeling he has to rebel against it. In songs like “Wilco (The Song)” (come on, though…) and “I'll Fight”, there’s that bright, bold sound, pitched somewhere between power-pop and the Rolling Stones maybe, that he managed so well on “Being There”. “Deeper Down”, meanwhile, is a gorgeous chamber-pop piece that hints at how “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” might have turned out had Jay Bennett got his way – ironic, given, that Bennett seems to looming ominously back into view if this Pitchfork news story is anything to go by. “Solitaire” even, delicately, could be described as alt-country if you were out of Tweedy’s earshot. These are some of the most immediate and striking songs Wilco have come up with in years. “You Never Know” is gloriously anthemic, with hearty strums, keening riffs, faint Cockney Rebel “Make Me Smile” harmonies, a recurring observation that “Every generation think it’s the worst, thinks it’s the end of the world”, and a general vibe reminiscent of George Harrison circa “All Things Must Pass”. “Everlasting” compounds that, being a noble and towering love song that may be distant kin to “Isn’t It A Pity”. Keep listening, and the details come into focus: Glenn Kotche’s fluttery, empathetic rolls when Tweedy sings of waves; the ineffable delicacy of Nels Cline’s soloing on the fade, over a glimmer of horns and a second backwards guitars. Once again, one of the great pleasures here is hearing such a great band playing with such harmonious intensity and economy. It’s Cline, though, who sneakily grabs your attention, not least on the precise, lyrical soloing on “One Wing”, a worthy successor to “Impossible Germany” on “Sky Blue Sky”. It’s “Bull Black Nova”, however, where he finally gets the free pass in the studio that’s been denied him in Wilco thus far. “Bull Black Nova” is tremendous, with a metronomic swing like “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”, but an edgier feel, compounded by a distinct Sonic Youth clink to the thicket of guitars, Tweedy sounding more fraught and clenched than he has in years, and a sense that Cline has been allowed to bring all his wailing gizmos to the party. It’s here that the promise of a wilder record is most overt; elsewhere, I suspect the strangeness in the details of these lovely songs will reveal themselves more slowly…

As Bob Dylan, garbed in another of the natty Pimp-My-Confederate-General ensembles that have served as his working clothes these past few years, steps onto the stage of the Playhouse in Edinburgh on Sunday night into a jolting “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, there is the small matter of him having just this afternoon officially clocked up his first Number One (with a bullet!) album in the UK for almost 40 years. These things perhaps don’t mean what they once did, if they ever meant much. But you could forgive any members of the audience foolish enough to think that, just maybe tonight, he’ll finally relent, and start playing, you know, some songs from it. He doesn’t, of course. He’s busy doing other things, and increasingly mesmerising they become. Something special happens in this small theatre tonight. Still, after it’s over, one of the thoughts you’re left with remains the bizarre, yet increasingly plausible notion that Dylan might actually have forgotten he’s made a new record at all. The previous night saw Dylan and band setting up shop in Glasgow’s SECC, the large, stupefyingly ugly tin hut on the Clyde that has been his regular Scottish haunt for the past 20 years. He’s played great shows here – the best maybe a rattling, acousticy hoedown in 2000, when his singing yelped and stretched and soared in a way it doesn’t today – but it’s against the odds presented by the size and soullessness of the venue, and his heroic refusal to counteract it with any bullshit along the lines of lightshows, screens, pyrotechnics or and-I-mean-that-most-sincerely stage patter. The feeling the place gives off is of having been designed by someone who honed his craft creating holding pens for cattle, a sense intensified tonight by a Keystone Cop-style mix-up at the doors, which sees a sizable portion of the audience left stranded, queuing, and near to riot just outside the arena while the Tannoy counts down that “Bob Dylan will be taking the stage in two minutes.” As it is some fifteen minutes go by before Uncut manages to slip in, just as the band launch into a pounding “Maggie’s Farm,” before we’re held up and ordered to wait at the side of the stage again by the hard-pushed SECC staff. It’s a fine vantage point, though, and there’s time to note that Dylan, leaning over his keyboard mic in a white bolero hat, looks a little snarly at having had to wait this long to get going. He soon seems to be enjoying it, though: wandering out to the centre of the stage to blow harp on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” he’s stepping into his jiggle-the-legs-bend-the-knees-and-point-your-finger-like-a-pistol dance, the Dylan equivalent of throwing out Tom Jones moves, and causing a similar kind of stir. Things grow more intense as he straps on a guitar for a long, quite infernal take on Time Out Of Mind’s “’Til I Fell In Love With You,” a black, stewing, metallic reading, Dylan’s voice lying at the bottom of it like a lost, cracked leather glove in a long-dry river bed. It kicks off the most arresting run of the night. In its new waltz-time setting, “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” is no longer the bitter, ripped-from-the-front-page finger-pointing damnation, but a memory-piece, aching with regret and perspective. Modern Times’ “The Levee’s Gonna Break” seems to have become a place Dylan goes to stoke up strength, his growl, often cracking tonight, growing cleaner and more urgent as he whips each verse by. He’s recharged for a glorious, very moving “Workingman’s Blues #2,” a song that has grown several new lines along the way, and feels increasingly like the post-millennial Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” an anthem for anyone mature enough to dig Merle Haggard, weary and worn down, but defiant, an anthem you can carry right in your breast pocket. It leads into a far more desolate tale of working men and hard times, “The Ballad Of Hollis Brown,” now sounding like something Ennio Morricone might have composed for a martial sequence cut from a Leone western, being played by The Bad Seeds, Dylan’s haunted-fairground organ never sounding quite so chill. Then a very committed “Visions of Johanna,” very faithful to the original, give or take the low purr of the voice and a few garbled lyric slips. (During this song, the stage is suddenly bathed in a black and white Milky Way light effect; maybe Dylan does do lightshows after all but, on tonight’s evidence, it’s on a radically random setting, and mostly at “off.”) From here, though, the focus seems to dissipate, most hilariously during a protracted “Honest With Me,” as the members of Dylan’s group look with increasing desperation at his perennial bass-player and band-leader Tony Garnier, all trying to figure out whether or not Dylan has finished the song. (It eventually turns out he still has a verse to go). The fact he’s playing a relatively rare “Every Grain of Sand” brings tears to a few faithful eyes, but the prayer gets lost somewhere in the girders high above, and seems to provoke an effect on the bladders of far more, as an exodus to the toilets begins around a quarter of the way through. While “Ain’t Talkin’” builds a sly, slow-burning ominous groove, it’s down to “Like A Rolling Stone,” simultaneously imperious and celebratory, to pull the night soundly back to heel. Perhaps only a half-great show from these seats, but, standing for a long ovation stage front under the blazing houselights at the close, Dylan seems genuinely pleased with his work. How does he feel after Edinburgh, though? It’s maybe just the inevitable consequence of being in such a small venue after such a hangar – and tonight, Uncut has managed to get seats just a couple of rows from the stage - but, damn it, something seems to happen here. The Playhouse, if you’ve never seen it, holds about 3,000 and was built in the 1920s, back when they still designed venues for human beings. Originally a cinema, it was modelled after some of New York’s plushest little movie palaces, meaning lots of red and gold: pop grandeur going a little to seed, it’s a bit like the funky place Kermit had in The Muppet Show, as nice as that. Anyone who saw Neil Young or Tom Waits here last year will know that performers really do seem to respond to it. Tonight, from Dylan, now wearing his black hat if that means anything, it draws a robust “Tangled Up In Blue,” made memorable for being dressed up in a prowling, insistent bassline that suggests a slow-cartoon-chase, and an hypnotic, almost eerie “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven,” Dylan’s high organ sounding like it it’s blowing in from somewhere very far away. To cut right to the chase, the small miracle of Edinburgh, the one I’ll remember, is built around Dylan rediscovering guitar again. For most shows in recent years, he’s played one song at most on the thing and, tonight, when, for the second number, he leaves his usual stage-left position by keyboards, pulls it on and wanders front and centre for an unexpected, rather beautifully broken and husky purr through “Lay, Lady, Lay,” as comfortably distressed as a pair of ‘70s denims, that would seem to have done with it. Between songs, though, when the stage lights go out, we’re close enough to see that there is an unusual amount of between-song conversation going on up there in the dark, Dylan exchanging messages with Garnier and his pedal-steel player Donnie Herron. When we get to a clamorously urgent “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, he’s suddenly out in front, guitar strapped on again, ripping out clanging, rusty (in all senses) notes, leaning into the song as though remembering what it feels like to stand out there, the song charging and clattering at his back, the faces before him, the band around him straining intently to see what he’s doing and react accordingly. When the lights go down, there’s more huddled consultation, and when they go back up, there’s Dylan back front and centre on guitar again, now trying out “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met).” It’s almost as if he’s reacquainting himself with the song, strumming the melody line as though studying it, and then rushing to fit the lyrics in after it, in a space where words shouldn’t fit, but somehow, tonight, do. By the end, he’s almost soloing, picking out one of his thick, chewy, fuzzy little three-or-four note motifs over and over again in a way he hasn’t quite for almost a decade. Okay, steady on, three songs with a guitar – hardly front page news. But, tonight, it alters the chemistry of the sound and the dynamic on stage immeasurably. When Dylan returns to keyboards, there’s a rawer sense of the night being on the hoof, and off the cuff. The best examples come with a speeding “Highway 61 Revisited,” Dylan at the organ wrapping his vocal around the insistent motif he’s stabbing out, a little figure that suggests little garagey tribute to “Spoonful”, and during a splenetic “Summer Days,” which begins with Dylan not even playing at all, simply leaning jauntily on the keyboard and watching his band, eyebrow cocked, the way Duke Ellington sometimes did. Midway through the song, he starts hitting out this same screaming vamp on his organ over and over again, until it becomes clear to the band he’s asking them to take solos. Garnier’s onto it straight away, taking his turn, twirling and thumping his standup bass like Slim Jim Phantom, but lead guitarist Denny Freeman seems oblivious to what’s going on, leaving Dylan still playing out that ever more insistent organ vamp, eyebrow increasingly cocked, until the bass player actually turns to the perplexed guitarist and shouts “Play!!” startling Freeman into a short run of fine, fiddly wire-sharp rockabilly twanging. The best is saved for the encore, which, after another round of muttering in the dark, finds Dylan stagefront on guitar again. His voice is soft, warm old leather now, leading the band and a cooing chorus from the audience through a “Just Like A Woman” that moves tenderly, is raw, raddled and raggedy, and always just-plain-gorgeous. Glorious enough, in fact, to make you forget until much later that he still hasn’t played anything from the new record live, which seems a wee bit insane. Next stop finds Dylan in Dublin, where it might become clear whether or not this new-fangled guitar business was a one-off, or the way ahead. Who knows, he might even debut some of Together Through Life – there is that mention of James Joyce on the album, after all. Then again, it might be Molly Malone, on spoons. DAMIEN LOVE The set list for Bob Dylan’s Glasgow SECC show was: Maggie's Farm Don't Think Twice, It's All Right 'Til I Fell In Love With You The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll The Levee's Gonna Break Workingman's Blues #2 Ballad Of Hollis Brown Visions Of Johanna Honest With Me Every Grain Of Sand Highway 61 Revisited Ain't Talkin' Thunder On The Mountain Like A Rolling Stone (encore) All Along The Watchtower Spirit On The Water Blowin' In The Wind The set list for Bob Dylan’s Edinburgh Playhouse show was: Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat Lay, Lady, Lay Tangled Up In Blue When The Deal Goes Down Rollin' And Tumblin' Tryin' To Get To Heaven Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again Sugar Baby High Water (For Charley Patton) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) Po' Boy Highway 61 Revisited Ain't Talkin' Summer Days Like A Rolling Stone (encore) All Along The Watchtower Just Like A Woman Blowin' In The Wind

As Bob Dylan, garbed in another of the natty Pimp-My-Confederate-General ensembles that have served as his working clothes these past few years, steps onto the stage of the Playhouse on Sunday into a jolting “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, there is the small matter of him having just this afternoon officially clocked up his first Number One album in the UK for almost 40 years with Together Through Life. These things perhaps don’t mean what they once did, if they ever meant much. But you could forgive any members of the audience foolish enough to think that, just maybe, he’ll finally relent, and start playing, you know, some songs from it. He doesn’t, of course. He’s busy doing other things, and increasingly mesmerising they become. Something special happens in this small theatre tonight. Still, after it’s over, one of the thoughts you’re left with remains the bizarre, yet increasingly plausible notion that Dylan might actually have forgotten he’s made a new record at all. The previous night saw Dylan and band setting up shop in Glasgow’s SECC, the large, stupefyingly ugly tin hut on the Clyde that has been his regular Scottish haunt for the past 20 years. He’s played great shows here – the best maybe a rattling, acousticy hoedown in 2000, when his singing yelped and stretched and soared in a way it doesn’t today. But it’s against the odds presented by the size and soullessness of the venue, and his heroic refusal to counteract it with any bullshit along the lines of lightshows, screens, pyrotechnics or and-I-mean-that-most-sincerely stage patter. The feeling the place gives off is of having been designed by someone who honed his craft creating holding pens for cattle, a sense intensified tonight by a Keystone Cop-style mix-up at the doors, which sees a sizable portion of the audience left stranded, queuing, kettled almost, and near to riot just outside the arena while the tannoy counts down that “Bob Dylan will be taking the stage in two minutes.” As it is some fifteen minutes go by before Uncut manages to slip in, just as the band launch into a pounding “Maggie’s Farm”, before we’re held up and ordered to wait at the side of the stage again by the hard-pushed SECC staff. It’s a fine vantage point, though, and there’s time to note that Dylan, leaning over his keyboard mic in a white bolero hat, looks a little snarly at having had to wait this long to get going. He soon seems to be enjoying it, though: wandering out to the centre of the stage to blow harp on “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, he’s stepping into his jiggle-the-legs-bend-the-knees-and-point-your-finger-like-a-pistol dance, the Dylan equivalent of throwing out Tom Jones moves, and causing a similar kind of stir. Things grow more intense as he straps on a guitar for a long, quite infernal take on Time Out Of Mind’s “Til I Fell In Love With You”, a black, stewing, metallic reading, Dylan’s voice lying at the bottom of it like a lost, cracked leather glove in a long-dry river bed. It kicks off the most arresting run of the night. In its new waltz-time setting, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” is no longer the bitter, ripped-from-the-front-page finger-pointing damnation, but a memory-piece, aching with regret and perspective. Modern Times’ “The Levee’s Gonna Break” seems to have become a place Dylan goes to stoke up strength, his growl, often cracking tonight, growing cleaner and more urgent as he whips each verse by. He’s recharged for a glorious, very moving “Workingman’s Blues #2”, a song that has grown several new lines along the way, and feels increasingly like the post-millennial Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”, an anthem for anyone mature enough to dig Merle Haggard, weary and worn down, but defiant, an anthem you can carry right in your breast pocket. It leads into a far more desolate tale of working men and hard times, “The Ballad Of Hollis Brown”, now sounding like something Ennio Morricone might have composed for a sequence cut from a Leone western, being played by The Bad Seeds, Dylan’s haunted-fairground organ never sounding quite so chill. Then a very committed “Visions Of Johanna”, very faithful to the original, give or take the low purr of the voice and a few garbled lyric slips. (During this song, the stage is suddenly bathed in a black and white Milky Way light effect; maybe Dylan does do lightshows after all but, on tonight’s evidence, it’s on a radically random setting, and mostly at “off.”) From here, though, the focus seems to dissipate, most hilariously during a protracted “Honest With Me”, as the members of Dylan’s group look with increasing desperation at his perennial bass-player and band-leader Tony Garnier, all trying to figure out whether or not Dylan has finished the song. (It eventually turns out he still has a verse to go). The fact he’s playing a relatively rare “Every Grain Of Sand” brings tears to a few faithful eyes, but seems to provoke an effect on the bladders of far more, as an exodus to the toilets begins around a quarter of the way through. While “Ain’t Talking” builds a sly, slow-burning ominous groove, it’s down to “Like A Rolling Stone”, simultaneously imperious and celebratory, to pull the night soundly back to heel. Perhaps only a half-great show from these seats, but, standing for a long ovation stage front under the blazing houselights at the close, Dylan seems genuinely pleased with his work. How does he feel after Edinburgh, though? It’s maybe just the inevitable consequence of being in such a small venue after such a hangar – and tonight, Uncut has managed to get seats just a couple of rows from the stage - but, damn it, something seems to happen here. The Playhouse, if you’ve never seen it, holds about 3,000 and was built in the 1920s, back when they still designed venues for human beings. Originally a cinema, it was modelled after some of New York’s plushest little movie palaces, meaning lots of red and gold: pop grandeur going a little to seed, it’s a bit like the funky place Kermit had in The Muppet Show, as nice as that. Anyone who saw Neil Young or Tom Waits here last year will know that performers really do seem to respond to it. Tonight, from Dylan, now wearing his black hat if that means anything, it draws a robust “Tangled Up In Blue”, made memorable for being dressed up in a prowling, insistent bassline that suggests a slow-cartoon-chase, and an hypnotic, almost eerie “Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”, Dylan’s high organ sounding like it’s blowing in from somewhere very far away. To cut right to the chase, the small miracle of Edinburgh, the one I’ll remember, is built around Dylan rediscovering guitar again. For most shows in recent years, he’s played one song at most on the thing and, tonight, when, for the second number, he leaves his usual stage-left position by keyboards, pulls it on and wanders front and centre for an unexpected, rather beautifully broken and husky purr through “Lay, Lady, Lay", as comfortably distressed as a pair of ‘70s denims, that would seem to have done with it. Between songs, though, when the stage lights go out, we’re close enough to see that there is an unusual amount of between-song conversation going on up there in the dark, Dylan exchanging messages with Garnier and his pedal-steel player Donnie Herron. When we get to a clamorously urgent “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, he’s suddenly out in front, guitar strapped on again, ripping out clanging, rusty (in all senses) notes, leaning into the song as though remembering what it feels like to stand out there, the song charging and clattering at his back, the faces before him, the band around him straining intently to see what he’s doing and react accordingly. When the lights go down, there’s more huddled consultation, and when they go back up, there’s Dylan back front and centre on guitar again, now trying out “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”. It’s almost as if he’s reacquainting himself with the song, strumming the melody line as though studying it, and then rushing to fit the lyrics in after it, in a space where words shouldn’t fit, but somehow, tonight, do. By the end, he’s almost soloing, picking out one of his thick, chewy, fuzzy little three-or-four note motifs over and over again in a way he hasn’t quite for almost a decade. Okay, steady on, three songs with a guitar – hardly front page news. But, tonight, it alters the chemistry of the sound and the dynamic on stage immeasurably. When Dylan returns to keyboards, there’s a rawer sense of the night being on the hoof, and off the cuff. The best examples come with a speeding “Highway 61 Revisited”, Dylan at the organ wrapping his vocal around the insistent motif he’s stabbing out, a little figure that suggests little garagey tribute to “Spoonful”, and during a splenetic “Summer Days”, which begins with Dylan not even playing at all, simply leaning jauntily on the keyboard and watching his band, eyebrow cocked, the way Duke Ellington sometimes did. Midway through the song, he starts hitting out this same screaming vamp on his organ over and over again, until it becomes clear to the band he’s asking them to take solos. Garnier’s onto it straight away, taking his turn, twirling and thumping his standup bass like Slim Jim Phantom, but lead guitarist Denny Freeman seems oblivious to what’s going on, leaving Dylan still playing out that ever more insistent organ vamp, eyebrow increasingly cocked, until the bass player actually turns to the perplexed guitarist and shouts “play!!” startling Freeman into a short run of fine, fiddly wire-sharp rockabilly twanging. The best is saved for the encore, which, after another round of muttering in the dark, finds Dylan stagefront on guitar again. His voice is soft, warm old leather now, leading the band and a cooing chorus from the audience through a “Just Like A Woman” that's raw, raddled and raggedy. Glorious enough, in fact, to make you forget until much later that he still hasn’t played anything from the new record live, which seems a wee bit insane. Next stop finds Dylan in Dublin, where it might become clear whether or not this new-fangled guitar business was a one-off, or the way ahead. Who knows, he might even debut some of Together Through Life – there is that mention of James Joyce on the album, after all. Then again, it might be Molly Malone, on spoons. DAMIEN LOVE The set list for Bob Dylan’s Glasgow SECC show was: Maggie's Farm Don't Think Twice, It's All Right 'Til I Fell In Love With You The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll The Levee's Gonna Break Workingman's Blues #2 Ballad Of Hollis Brown Visions Of Johanna Honest With Me Every Grain Of Sand Highway 61 Revisited Ain't Talkin' Thunder On The Mountain Like A Rolling Stone (encore) All Along The Watchtower Spirit On The Water Blowin' In The Wind The set list for Bob Dylan’s Edinburgh Playhouse show was: Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat Lay, Lady, Lay Tangled Up In Blue When The Deal Goes Down Rollin' And Tumblin' Tryin' To Get To Heaven Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again Sugar Baby High Water (For Charley Patton) I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) Po' Boy Highway 61 Revisited Ain't Talkin' Summer Days Like A Rolling Stone (encore) All Along The Watchtower Just Like A Woman Blowin' In The Wind