Robyn Hitchcock - Dylan's Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert The Borderline London 1996

Robyn Hitchcock - Dylan's Royal Albert Hall 1966 Concert, The Borderline, London, Britain, 5-25-1996

Paul says: On May 26, 1966, Bob Dylan gave a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London that became legendary. (Mostly that was due to a popular bootleg that actually turned out to be from a concert in Manchester a few days earlier, but the set list was the same.) Thirty years to the day (well, one day off), Robyn Hitchcock gave a concert in London with the exact same set list. So it was all Dylan covers. He later released much of this concert as the official album "Robyn Sings," but that had some problems I will explain shortly. This, in my opinion, is much better than the official album.

Before I go any further, I want to say this album posting wouldn't have happened without the editing work of musical associate Lil Panda. A couple of weeks ago, he emailed me and told me he'd made a bunch of improvements to this concert. Then I got his permission to post it here. I asked him to summarize what he did, and this was his response: "I separated the ambient audience from the music, left only the applause. Then did azimuth, phase correction, voice de-click, and a slight EQ boost." So kudos to him, because he's far better at that stuff than I am. Hell, I barely even know what azimuth is, much less how to fix it.

Now, let me explain how this compares to the official live album "Robyn Sings." In fact, only half of that album was taken from this concert at the Borderline, specifically, the second half. The first half was taken from a variety of concerts in 1999 and 2000, and consisted of all Dylan covers. In terms of exact overlap, the songs on both "Robyn Sings" and this album are tracks 12 to 24. That makes up about half of the total run time.

As I've said before, I much prefer full concerts to those taken from lots of different sources. I think that's a more honest live album. So just having the full concert here is a big improvement over the official album, in my opinion. But it also turns out the official album had numerous problems. Oddly for an official release, it clearly was taken from an audience bootleg type source. One can tell because of a constant background noise of the crowd all through the songs, as well as other problems. Lil Panda fixed most of those, as mentioned above. I also took the extra step of running all the songs through the UVR5 editing program, to get rid of the lingering ambient crowd noise that Lil Panda missed. So, in addition to this being more complete than the official album, it also sounds better. 

To quote Wikipedia, Dylan's 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert (which, as mentioned above, actually took place in Manchester) "is famous for Dylan's confrontational stance against a heckling audience who objected to his electric instrumentation." Hitchcock didn't talk much during this concert, as he usually does, to stick closer to the original comment. But some of his banter between songs actually repeat what Dylan said in the 1966 concert. For instance, at one point Dylan muttered incoherently until the unruly crowd quieted enough to try to make out what he was saying, and Hitchcock repeated that exactly.

Let's just say Hitchcock is an extremely big Dylan fan!

Oh, by the way, the last two songs, "Dignity" and "Queen Jane Approximately," are the only two songs not played in Dylan's 1966 concert, though they are Dylan covers as well. "Queen Jane Approximately" had been written at the time and could have been performed, but "Dignity" is a song Dylan wrote in the late 1980s.

Anyway, thanks again to Lil Panda for his work on this. Enjoy.  

This album is an hour and 30 minutes long. 

01 talk
02 She Belongs to Me
03 talk
04 Visions of Johanna 
05 talk 
06 4th Time Around 
07 talk 
08 It's All Over Now, Baby Blue 
09 talk 
10 Desolation Row 
11 talk 
12 Tell Me, Momma 
13 I Don't Believe You [She Acts like We Never Have Met] 
14 talk
15 Baby, Let Me Follow You Down
16 Just like Tom Thumb's Blues 
17 Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat 
18 talk 
19 One Too Many Mornings 
20 Ballad of a Thin Man 
21 talk 
22 Like a Rolling Stone 
23 talk
24 Dignity 
25 Queen Jane Approximately 

So even Paul at the ATSE jumps on the bandwagon set by Twlightzone of covering Robyn Hitchcock and whilst this isn’t my favourite by him (something about I don’t want a whole album of Dylan Covers Thea Gilmore etc take note) really but heck its Dylan songs whatcha gonna do!