Last Night in Brighton (by Jack Walters)
2025-11-07, Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK
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Last night, Bob Dylan played Brighton for the first time since 2002 (with Nick Cave spotted in the audience!). Jack Walters reports in:
At 84, Bob Dylan has lived a thousand lives and has worn more masks than a Venetian masquerade ball, putting the lecherous Byron to shame. And yet he is still on the road; his Coyote spirit alive. One gets the impression that Dylan has, somehow, performed in Solomon’s Temple, aboard the Arbella, with Bob Wills at one of Burt “Foreman” Phillips’ County Barn Dances, and at the March on Washington—well he did. But you get the point: Dylan seems to contain all these references. Wherever and in whatever century, Dylan performs. And we, the audience, are a station to his Calvary or, prosaically, witnesses to his journey, meeting and leaving him in shadows, wondering if performing, at its most dignified, truthful, sublime, is, paradoxically, best rendered in distance—if possible, absence.
When Dylan last performed at the 4500-cap, Brutalist-designed Brighton Centre in 2002, he opened with “I Am the Man, Thomas,” a jaunty bluegrass number about Thomas the Apostle, bringing Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas to life with light, drama, beauty. Anyway, that was then (when Dylan was a cowpoke), this is now (when Dylan is half-hidden).
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