My Review of Bob Dylan in Hyde Park 12/7/19

Review of Bob Dylan in Hyde Park 12/7/19

So my trip to see Bob Dylan perform in Hyde Park on Friday 12/7/19 started with my son’s and my flight from our home near Tel Aviv on 11/7/19 into Luton Airport with the passport control officer asking, ‘Reason for visit’? To which I replied, ‘To see Neil Young and Bob Dylan at Hyde Park’ to which he replied, Yeah, you and half your flight too’! Around the time that Dylan had converted to Christianity from Judaism I had converted from Christianity to Judaism in 1979 and as a London police officer, I had subsequently faced unlawful racism from my fellow police officers and had taken the Metropolitan Police to court and had beaten them, proving them to have unlawfully discriminated against me on racial grounds, and I had then emigrated with my family from the UK to Israel in 1996 after the court case was concluded and I am now a successful song lyricist and in the couple of years I was off sick waiting for my court case to start I had become one of the largest supplier of Dylan concert videos even supplying members of Dylan’s band with concert videos, I was known then as ‘Dave Thomas from Wembley’. Anyway, so we traveled from Israel to my Mum’s London Swiss Cottage home for the concert and also for the Robbie Williams concert at Hyde Park on Sunday. My son’s first Dylan concert had been Brixton 95 with Elvis Costello guesting and I had last seen Dylan in concert at Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv in June 2011 and that hadn’t been one of Bob’s best but I understand from the doctor who took care of some of Bob’s band members and who looked after Bob before and after his concert, that he wasn’t in the best of health when he arrived in Tel Aviv from London and this was one of the rare reasons (then) that the set list was exactly the same as for London.

Hyde Park is a convenient central London venue to hold a concert because of easy public transport accessibility even with a sell-out crowd of 90.000, although the usual restriction that ‘you can’t enter with larger than 500 cc bottles of drink’ or ‘with bottles that have been opened’ is somewhat annoying as they sell these and also bottles of beer at 5 pounds a plastic bottle inside the venue but what was a positive note was is that the yellow jacketed stewards constantly offered cups of water to the spectators throughout the concerts and also no security hounded anyone for taking photo’s or even filming the concerts which was a nice surprise knowing Bob’s dislike.

We arrived in the middle of one of the support acts, Laura Marling’s set. I’d never heard of her before and to be honest I found her to sound a bit like Joni Mitchel but with outdated style and lyrics but soon the ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ Neil Young was onstage and I must admit to having never seen Neil Young before live and I was captivated by the energy he displayed on stage, even though he is 5 years younger than Bob, and I’m not sure it was the best decision from Bob to come on with his regular recent set list and give his usual-static-sit-behind-the-piano performance following on from all the energy that Neil showed. Bob’s performance was good and solid but it just seemed the wrong choice to follow on after Neil Young’s energetic performance. The venue’s sound was excellent I thought and Bob’s set list was more or less the same as it has been for the past few months except for the recent change to dropping ‘Things Have Changed’ as the opener and replacing it with Ballad of a Thin Man followed by It Ain’t Me Babe/Highway 61 Revisited/Simple Twist of Fate/Can’t Wait/When I Paint My Masterpiece/Honest With Me/Tryin’ To Get To Heaven/Make You Feel My Love/Pay in Blood/Like a Rolling Stone/Early Roman Kings/Girl From The North Country/Love Sick/Thunder on the Mountain/Soon After Midnight/ Gotta Serve Somebody and encores:- Blowin’ in the Wind/It Takes A Lot to Laugh, 19 songs in all and all performed very well although I have seen the video’s of most of Dylan’s recent concerts so for me there was no big surprises but it was a nicely performed and well sung set list and of course seeing the living legend, Bob live is something you’ll never forget and for sure concert videos will follow, hopefully in better quality than the ones I took on my smart phone:)!

Paul Robert Thomas, London. 12/7/19