Bob Dylan and the Afro Celts
A strange mixture of people gathered in Finsbury Park for the Feis Music festival. Pronounced ‘fey-ish’, the event had attracted what appeared to be a mixture of merry Irish music lovers, and some aging Bob Dylan fans. Having spent a significant amount of my year thinking about Bob Dylan lyrics the day was a sort of pilgrimage for me, a chance to see the poet-singer in the flesh. I didn’t have any great expectations of his performance, having been warned by various recent newspaper reviews that Dylan (whose 70th birthday was this year) was looking old beyond his years and his voice was shot to pieces. Still, I felt the need to see him anyway, even if I couldn’t hear him.
For most of the day we wandered through the mud from burger stall to stage or queued for pints of Guinness at the bars. Every so often there would be a shower of rain and umbrellas would pop up across the field like mushrooms and we would raise our hoods, shrug our shoulders and repeat in Irish accents ‘well! Rain makes corn’. But the sky stayed stripped with blue all day and rainbows arched their backs across north London.
Dylan was scheduled to play at nine that evening and having no real preference on what we saw before then, we spotted an act on the programme called Afro Celt Sound System. Given that the only act they overlapped with was The Cranberrys (I’m not really a fan), we left the main stage area and went into the tent that housed stage two to find out what the strangely titled group would sound like. I had no idea what to expect from Afro Celt Sound System. They appeared on stage right in front of us (we had wiggled our way through to the barriers); first a tall ginger lad with an electric bagpipe (presumably one of the ‘Celts’ with an instrument I didn’t know existed. Electric bagpipe… jazzy), then a couple of African drummers in traditional dress (the ‘Afro’s?) and more people still: a middle aged man with an accordion and a pipe of some sort, a man who seated himself at a drum set, another drummer in tribal colours. And then the music began… It was slow and deep, tinged with the melancholia of the pipes, but it built energy and pace up until the whole place was filled with tribal drums and their strange fusion of old Celtic sounds and electro beats. I found it impossible to keep still as their peculiar dance music moved through my body and shook me up like a skittle on a drum skin; it had such spirit.
We stayed for their whole set, emerging from the tent for Bob Dylan’s appearance on the main stage and I didn’t mind so much now if Dylan wasn’t great…
I thought his performance was actually very good. But yes Bob, things have changed. He wore his customary military-style suit and wide-brimmed hat, and moved around the stage like a stiff old wooden puppet. And his voice isn’t what it was: unable to carry the melodies he barks the words into the microphone like a gruff old dog. Often he avoids singing his most famous songs, aware it seems that the change from how he used to make them sound is too obvious. In Finsbury Park that day he really indulged us: he sang plenty of songs that I knew well, although it took me to recognise the lyrics before I knew which song it was. He finished his set with ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and left with a humble ‘thank you’ to the crowd. His voice didn’t leave me with the same rush as the Afro Celt’s had, but Dylan is still captivating, is still worthy of the sense of wonder he instils in me. And we kicked our way through empty plastic cups back to the gates of the park and away.