Cat Power Sings Dylan 1966

Venue:

Bridgewater Hall Manchester

Date: 02/06/2025

Cat Power has been touring her song for song live performance of Bob Dylan’s 1966 tour setlist for the best part of 18 months. Indeed she recorded and released her performance at the Albert Hall (the real one) in late 2023 (@Junior-Wells reviewed it here at the time).

I’ve heard the record and enjoyed it without being blown away. And of course I know exactly what the setlist is going to be, so I wasn’t sure I could be bothered to go to this. But in the end curiosity won out, and I am very glad it did.

The show starts with the acoustic set of course, although unlike Dylan, Power confines herself to vocals, accompanied by one of her band on acoustic guitar and another on harmonica. The sound is impeccable, the lights are low, and there’s an intimacy in her vocals which means the cavernous and characterless Bridgewater Hall is made to feel almost like a late night jazz club. But as the songs follow each other there is a homogeneity in the slow tempo Power gives them all. Its pleasant enough but not really catching fire. And I found myself distracted by her sometimes mannered vocals, not least because they took the clarity out of some of the lyrics on songs like ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Desolation Row’. These are some of the greatest lines in pop music and some of them are getting thrown away.

But then I reflected, and gave myself a good talking to. Hasn’t Dylan been doing this all his career? He has always reinvented/mangled (take your pick) his songs and made them something different from what they were before. His songs are not set in aspic; they’re a template on which he applies countless variations. So of course Cat Power should do the same. And whilst I haven’t gone back yet to listen to her album, I think these performances have evolved considerably over the passing months.

A case in point is a thrilling ‘Just Like A Woman’ when she changes the gender of the subject – suddenly a woman singing that ‘He breaks just like a little girl’ gives the song a whole new energy and feeling.

A great ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ brings the acoustic set to a close. With the briefest of pauses her six piece band, all in black and none of them even born when the original tour took place, take the stage. And there is just a hint of what a shock the electric set must have been back in the day as we go from the intimacy and quiet we’ve had so far to the raucous blues of ‘Tell Me Mama’. I’ve always preferred the acoustic set of the ‘Royal Albert Hall’ recording (sacrilege I know) but there’s no denying that here and now the concert takes a real lift and it makes me think that maybe that was what 1966 was like for those open minded enough to listen. Of course the sound then was probably terrible and here it’s perfect, so that helps. The highlight of the electric set, considerably to my surprise, was ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’. It’s a riveting performance that has all the contempt of Dylan’s version but adds something I’ve never heard in the song before – a sense that the person speaking is also lost; that she too may know that something is happening here but she really doesn’t know what it is either. She’s confused and scared too.

And another highlight was ‘One Too Many Mornings’ which I’d almost forgotten is in the set. I hadn’t thought of it before until hearing it now, but how absolutely typical of Dylan that the one ‘old’ (all of two years) self-written song he threw into the set wasn’t ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, or ‘Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright’ or ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ – it was this under-appreciated album track. What a truly great song it is, and one which Power does full justice to.

And so to an irrepressible ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ (we may be in Manchester but there’s no cry of ‘Judas,’) and all too soon it’s all over.

Great performance in its own right but one that also made me reflect back on the original and want to listen to it again. This is no tribute act; it’s so much better than that. A tribute show takes the notes of the original and seeks to painstakingly recreate them so you hear exactly what you know and love. Here, Cat Power respects the material thoroughly, and the arrangements are generally pretty close to the originals. But she takes the songs, inhabits them, and makes them her own. As good as the originals? No, they could never be that. But fresh, alive and worth hearing? Absolutely.

The audience:

Plenty of grizzled old blokes like me of course, but way way more (relatively) young people than I expected. I texted my daughter to tell her and speculated that maybe they’d seen ‘A Complete Unknown’, or were just Cat Power fans. She told me that she was introduced to Cat Power because her version of ‘Sea of Love’ is in the film of ‘Juno’ which she and all her mates loved then and love still. So maybe that was it.

It made me think..

Will we see more of this kind of thing? Taylor Swift doing Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison? Beyoncé doing Sam Cooke at Harlem? Boygenius doing CSNY’s Four Way Street? I’d go…

2