= Bob Dylan - Bob Links - Swansea, Wales - Reviews - 11/11/25


Reviews
Swansea, Wales
Building Society Arena
November 11, 2025

[Stephen Brooks], [Daisy Evans]

Review by Stephen Brooks


Bob was in great voice on his final of three nights in Swansea. Behind the
piano, surrounded by instruments and band members he wasn't easy to see
(and I was middle of the front row!). But at 84 Bob has arranged things to
suit himself, and it works musically, switching between piano and guitar
while seated and keeping to the same setlist each night. Somewhat
amusingly when Bob did stand (several times), he did so with his back to
the audience facing the drum kit or, at the very end, he stood momentarily
peering at the audience from the rear of the stage. No speaking, no
introductions, no encores, no phones... you could say Bob's reinvented
the live music experience!! It feels like he's there doing his thing
regardless of the audience. 

Bob's piano playing is quite unlike any other. I've heard him play
various forms including quite brilliant piano solos at the RAH last time
around, but last night it was predominantly his one note at a time
noodling approach. Same on guitar. I guess he thinks it fits the music,
maybe it does? The rest of the band are constrained of course and keep to
a structure so the dissonance of what Bob does is prominent in the mix. In
any case there's something wonderfully accessible about Dylan's
freeform piano and guitar.

For me the most noticeable thing last evening is the extent to which, over
time, Bob has improved every song from Rough and Rowdy. Through replaying
those songs, with their extraordinary deeply personal lyrics, they've
become much more interesting compared to the original recordings. If he
returned to record Rough and Rowdy again today I think it would sound more
powerful than ever.

Conversely though, I felt most of the songs Bob played from earlier albums
sounded like they'd been played too much. For example, I don't know
how he could improve on Every Grain or Masterpiece compared to the last
European tour and now he's jollied them up to a point that the emotion
feels less strong. I remember too he performed better versions of
Desolation Row and Baby Blue last time around (at RAH), although these
were both well received by the Swansea crowd.

I visited Dylan Thomas' birthplace the following morning (it seemed rude
not to!). Off now to catch Bob in Coventry.

Stephen Brooks
London.

[TOP]

Review by Daisy Evans


He ain't no False Prophet

This glowing show at the beautiful, swanky "Building Society Arena" was light 
on the RAWR branding, and rich on the adventure of the songs and what he has 
to tell us. If only we could all let him give us what we need and not always 
be baying for what we want. 

The sound is both sparce and weighty, bluesy, breezy, constructing itself 
from a tight circle around the Baby Grand; - notice very minimal head 
movements from all the players - like trained actors. There was a beautiful 
sense of space in the instrumentation and attention to dynamics, (which had 
been just on one pitch in RAH 12 months ago).

The band came on (and it's Dinner at Eight as usual) and Bob abruptly turned 
his back on us. As he told us - "I play both sides against the middle" - and 
his relationship with his audience remains a conundrum. We should take what 
we have gathered from coincidence and not question it. Is it a coincidence 
that in later years, Bob Dylan who says he sometimes forgets the sound of 
his own name, the man who has no alibi, sits awkwardly at the piano, flared 
trousers flapping round his ankles, turns 180 and riffs mysteriously on some 
kind of invisible guitar? A snaking jam-session takes shape and a cubist 
"I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" erupts. Is he suggesting something? Sharp naked 
lights halo his hair and another one projects a voodoo shadow on the plain 
curtaining above the stage. His back and his front have somehow merged into 
one - and as this anti-maestro tells us at the end during "Every Grain of 
Sand" - "In the broken mirror... Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, 
other times it's only me. I am hanging in the balance of the reality of 
man". Eye contact is negligible, but the searing harp flourished most 
tellingly in It's All Over Now, Baby Blue communicates its own version of 
direct human interaction. In the old days the crowd would cheer and holler 
when the harp started up - but now it's only me. Whoops. 

When I Paint my Masterpiece was laid down along a Cuban rhumba/bossa nova 
texture which floated its eternal musings and assertions out to all who 
cared to hear. Indeed, smooth like a rhapsody. This for me was the 
aesthetic gem of the show but there was more: 

There was humour, there were pure jokes: During the transcendent Key West- 
where perhaps he had heeded the heckling in Brighton so that, though it 
was far from hurried, like all his songs, it had a driving momentum all 
of its own. The dynamics of the music were punctured by fractions of pure 
silence - into one of them he cuts, with a kind of jokey threat: 

"I don't love nobody - gimme a kiss
Down at the bottom - way down in Key West."
 
There was love. Love itself is not a huge theme for late Dylan, but a 
current theory in Dylanland abounds that "I've Made up My Mind to Give 
Myself to You" is a love song to the audience, the hearers, the pilgrims, 
the legions of true fans and not to some imagined love-object in the shape 
of an individual woman. He sings "I'm giving myself to you I am, from Salt 
Lake City to Birmingham"and from Helsinki, Finland to Dublin, Ireland 
via Dylan Thomas' birth place of Swansea, perhaps this is being enacted 
every time he takes the stage - though that is not quite the way he would 
put it. He doesn't so much take the stage, as the stage takes him, and we 
can take him, the band and the music they create out into the world, via 
the rackety Queen's Hotel bar round the back of the venue, with the global 
Bob-followers and other chancers, swapping stories and beers.
-
To go back to the start, Bob Dylan being no false prophet, is the enemy of 
the unlived meaningless life. This show was all of that and more. In 2022 
at Bournemouth, I exited distraught after Every Grain of Sand's epic sweep 
and a gutted feeling that that was a final encounter. But hey, since then 
and catching the band many times since I have learned simply to have faith. 
Love you Bob.

[TOP]

Review by

[TOP]

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