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Your support makes all the difference."How Cool Is This?'' reads the sign overlooking the crowd in the Nottingham arena, a reference to its status as home of the National Ice Centre. Tonight it's about as cool as it's been in a while, hosting the opening night of Bob Dylan's first UK tour since the recent media frenzy surrounding the No Direction Home documentary. He certainly looks cool, in a natty black outfit with red piping and one of those Zorro hats that are becoming de rigueur with hit blues dudes.
Dylan always springs a few surprises in his shows, whether by changing his set list without telling his band or altering the phrasing of much-loved songs. He's still playing the entire set from behind an electric piano (and, curiously, an unused lap steel guitar), but his usual two guitars / bass / drums back-up band has been augmented by a multi-instrumentalist who adds significant new colour to the songs with fiddle, banjo, pedal steel guitar and (another) lap steel.
Many of the audience may have been tempted to attend by No Direction Home. If so, they may have been disappointed by the relative paucity of Dylan classics, the singer opting to play a set heavily laden with material from his last studio set, Love and Theft, a collection of blues pieces that plays like a tour of 20th-century American roots forms.
For the first few songs, however, they would be in a Sixties comfort zone, as "Maggie's Farm" was followed by "The Times, They Are A-Changin'''. Not that the comfort of familiarity comes without its price, however, in this case levied by Dylan's clipped delivery, in which the accents come in all the wrong places.
The addition of banjo brings an appropriately traditional touch to the two moral fables "Blind Willie McTell" and "John Brown". But there are echoes of traditional modes throughout tonight's performance, from the nimble jump-blues of "Summer Days and Summer Nights" to the languid Western swing of "Floater".
"Like a Rolling Stone" and "All Along the Watchtower'' duly appeared as encores - the latter providing the last of the evening's surprises in the little echoes applied to Dylan's voice at the end of lines, the first time, to my knowledge, he has ever used such overt studio effects on his vocals. How cool is that?
SECC, Glasgow, tonight; NEC, Birmingham, tomorrow; Brixton Academy, London SW9, Saturday to 24 November. A version of this review has already run in some editions
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