Thanks for your continuing response to my recent post about Bob Dylan bootlegs and which of them are your favourites. Among the sundry comments I’ve received, the following response from Paul Metsa from Minneapolis stood out. As anyone who’s seen the footage he writes about will already know, this was an electrifying performance (from which Damien Love and I recommended “Ring Them Bells” in my original post) and Paul’s description of it makes me wish I hadn’t lost the video I had of the concert. But is it really Bob best-ever vocal performance, as Paul claims? What do you think? Either email me at allan_jones@ipcmedia.com or post a comment below. But, first, here’s what Paul had to say: “I think Dylan's performance of ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ from Nara, Japan is his greatest vocal performance of all time. The setting could not have been more sublime. He stood in front of a wonderful orchestra comprised of sympathetic and handsome Japanese classical musicians, all of whom seemed to be smiling. The orchestra, as I remember it, was supplemented by the rock solid Jim Keltner on drums, another guitar player, and, I believe, Ray Cooper on tambourine. Behind him was a 30 foot gold statue of Buddha, while the wind blew threw those beautiful trees. Bob started to sting, and the orchestra slowly swelled behind him. Each and every verse was stronger than the last, building like a powerful steam engine of strings and gongs. Dylan’s voice had a vibrato that evening that would have made Sinatra proud. Verse after verse of apocalyptic visions, pounded home by this wonderful orchestra. Dylan seemed truly energized and inspired in this setting, and by the end, it was as if the song was reflected from the mountains so all souls could see it. An absolutely breathtaking, bravura performance, and folk music at its absolute best, by the finest folksinger of our time. ‘Ring Them Bells’ was to die for as well. Word has it, that when Beattie Zimmerman, Bob's mom, saw the video of the show she commented "Bobby looked great in that new suit coat!" Gotta love that. Also, I read a Joni Mitchell interview that said when they were singing ‘I Shall Be Released’ as an encore, Bob (who looked like he was up to no good) was standing either behind her or next to her, singing the wrong words to her during her verse. She compared it to having someone dip your pigtails in the ink well in grade school. God bless him.”

Uncut is on its way to Glastonbury right now, so keep an eye on this blog for news and reviews all weekend. If there's anything you specifically want Uncut to check out, let us know in the comment box, and we'll try and have a look. In the meantime, John has blogged vaguely on Glastonburys past over at Wild Mercury Sound. Have a great weekend!

Terrible weather forecast notwithstanding, I'm feeling a bit jealous of everyone heading off to Glastonbury this morning. Farah is representing for Uncut, and you should keep an eye on our festival blog, where she'll be filing reports all weekend. The dreary grown-up business of looking for a new house prevents me from going to Glasto this year (if anyone is an expert on South Tottenham primary schools, don't be a stranger. . .). But of course I'm feeling very nostalgic right now. The festival used to always bring out the latent hippy in me, and consequently I used to spend most of my time mooching around the stone circle or the teepee field, wondering whether to join a meditation class, rather than watching any bands or doing any work. One band that I always used to make a point of seeing, though, was Orbital. And so I'm playing this great new compilation by them called "Live At Glastonbury 1994-2004", and trying to hear myself yelping in the crowd between tracks. Along with Spiritualized, I always associate Orbital with Glastonbury, maybe because their music always strived to be transporting, intricately ecstatic. Much as I love bands like Arctic Monkeys, this weekend's headliners, gritty urban realism never really did it for me in the Vale Of Avalon. I remember at my first Glastonbury in 1989 (or the CND festival, as we used to quaintly call it back then) seeing Van Morrison sing "Summertime In England", and thinking it was just perfect, transcendent even. Orbital, of course, took that aesthetic much further. After their "In Sides" album, the Hartnoll brothers got a bit too corny for my liking (though having said that, Paul Hartnoll's new solo album has its Morricone-ish moments). But so many of the tunes on these two CDs - "Kein Trink Wasser", "Impact", "Halcyon" (complete with its daft and invariably uplifting Belinda Carlisle break), "Belfast", "Satan" and, inevitably, "Chime" - have a complex emotional power which isn't, I think, entirely due to my dewy-eyed flashbacks of Glastos past. The version of "Impact", in fact, comes from 1995: if I remember right, Orbital played the Pyramid Stage that year at sunset, just before the famous Pulp show. And while Pulp seized their moment brilliantly, I have a distinct memory that there were more people actually watching Orbital. But then the biggest crowd I ever saw at Glastonbury was for The Levellers, so not a great way of measuring a band's excellence, all told. I lasted about 30 seconds of The Levellers, by the way. I might be a latent hippy, but I could never cut it as a crusty. . .

I know I vaguely promised not to keep going on about this, but some of Smashing Pumpkins' more extreme fans keep dropping by here. Today's contribution comes from Bobby, who remains convinced I haven't heard "Zeitgeist". "Any true Pumpkins fan would know that Zwan was awful," says Bobby. Time I came clean, then, and reiterated that I'm a True Zwan Fan and a fairweather Pumpkins follower. Which is probably why I skipped the opportunity of seeing Pumpkins Mark 4 in London last night. Sounds good, though: according to Farah's report, the show featured covers of "The Star Spangled Banner" and "The End", amongst about 800 other songs. I can't imagine Turbo Fruits ever playing a three-hour set. In fact, listening to their self-titled debut album, it's hard to imagine them keeping it up for 30 minutes. Turbo Fruits are two teenagers from Nashville who also figure in the rather feisty Be Your Own Pet. On the cover , they are blindfolded and tied together back to back. This, we might assume, is the only way the photographer could get them to stay in the same place long enough. Apparently there's a bassist involved called Turbo Max, too. Anyway, they're fun. Total tearaway gonzoid punk with titles like "Fight This!", "I'm Excited" and "Devo Girl". At times they sound like an even brattier Ramones, and though they play dumb, it's clear Turbo Fruits are heavily immersed in outsider rock lore. Not so much that they approach these ramalams ironically, mind: a bash through the MC5's "Ramblin' Rose" is breathless and ingenuous, not some arch manoeuvring into rock tradition. "John beat the drums to hell!" it says in the credits. Sure did. Their Myspace is here, by the way. Sounds relatively mellow and together now I've hyped them up as some insurrectionist noise chimps, but there you go.

Syd Barrett died coming up to a year ago and I’ve just been interviewed for a Radio 2 documentary about his life and music that will be aired on the anniversary of his passing that also includes contributions from his former band mates in Pink Floyd. The chap from the BBC who’s producing the show and doing all the interviews told me he’d been astonished – even as a Pink Floyd fan himself – at the enormous media coverage of Syd’s death and quite flabbergasted to learn that at Uncut we’d entirely remade our issue with only two days until the presses started to roll, replacing a cover and cover story we’d already signed off to pay Syd an appropriate farewell. This seemed to him an amazing amount of work to put into a tribute to someone whose entire recorded legacy could politely be described as meagre – less than 40 tracks in all – and who hadn’t, to boot, made a record in the lifetimes of some of our readers. I tried to explain what Syd meant to us – that we wouldn’t be here without people like him, that for a glorious moment in the 60s only The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix were on comparable trajectories, taking music further out than it had previously ventured, that of the era’s stars, Syd was the white Hendrix, and only Brian Jones seemed more exotic. The solo albums came from somewhere spookier than Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, I rambled on, but remain his most astonishing testament – haunted, charming, disturbing, unique. As we were wrapping up, the chap from the radio told me he’d already interviewed David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Rick Wright for his programme and what they’d had to sat about Syd was eloquent and moving, with Gilmour particularly illuminating about the relationship between Roger Waters and Syd, to whom in Gilmour’s opinion Waters’ songs returned more often than is often recognised. At the time of this conversation, Waters had not been available for interview, due to various sets of circumstances that needn’t detain us here. There had been a vague hope of talking to him at the recent Syd tribute at the Barbican, but that hadn’t happened. There had been loose talk that night of a Floyd reunion, since all four were meant to appear. Gilmour had apparently turned up at the Barbican enthusiastically suggesting they get together to close the evening by playing “Astronomy Domine” – and how good might that have been – but the idea was quickly abandoned when word came from Waters’ camp that he had to leave early for another appointment and wouldn’t be around for the end of the show. And that, as they say, was that