Brussels – Closely Related to Chester

Bob Dylan at Bozar: no phones home

The first time I saw Bob Dylan was in Belgium in the 1980s, at Anderlecht football ground. His band occupied a stage at one end of the pitch while we stood at the other. We could scarcely see him nor make out the songs he was singing, so distant was the band and so successfully did Dylan disguise his well-known words and tunes.

The second time was at a concert was in Uruguay in 2006, at the Conrad Hotel in Punta del Este. The audience was made up of rich young Argentinians on holiday, calling their friends by mobile phone and then waving to one another across the stadium. I strained to listen Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone”, one of the anthems of my youth, but the Argentinians paid little attention. They were a different generation. For them it was all about being seen in the right place, and they spoiled my experience.

When I learnt that Dylan was playing once more in Brussels, this time in the intimate and beautiful Palais des Beaux Arts, I didn’t think twice. He is now 84 years old – no spring rooster crowing at the break of dawn. We bought tickets and travelled from Italy to Brussels for the concert.

What attracted me most to this concert was that it was without phones. Dylan had decided to disarm philistines and hangers-on, people addicted to capturing images that they will look at once and then discard. He seemed to be caring for genuine fans like me. At last, I might hear the world’s finest song-writer close-up and without distractions. In his heyday Dylan was a mighty poet, not read in school-books but listened to on the radio, on TV, a troubadour singing for the poor and dispossessed, for freedom, for the whole world. There were other great singer song-writers – Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, but Dylan soared above them all. And maybe, in 2025, with his new-found concern for the quality of the audience’s experience, he might even reward us with recognizable versions of his greatest hits.

We arrived at the Bozar an hour early, before the Art Deco entrance doors were unlocked. Our phones were locked away in pouches resembling church money collection bags, except that we allowed to carry them with us. We now had an hour to wait, time to sip a glass of wine and watch as people of all ages walked into the concert hall and stood around. Hundreds of people were happily talking to one other. No heads were buried, fixed on screens, communicating with people elsewhere. We were all together, fully present in the same public space.

With fifteen minutes to go, we took our seats in the “baignoires” – boxes like old-fashioned baths, just twenty yards from the stage. This was the closest I had ever been at a Dylan concert. The hall was packed, buzzing with anticipation, the bells ringing for ten minutes to go and then five, until, right on time, a group of ancient musicians, dressed in black, appeared on stage. I was reminded of when we used to wait on the Lisburn Road in Belfast for the bands to arrive on 12th July: all of us looking down the road waiting and listening for the music to begin.

The lights were yellow and low. Dylan, surrounded tightly by his band, started with his back to the audience. The first song brought tears to my eyes. “I’ll be your baby tonight” was on the double LP Greatest Hits 2 which my brother John and I bought for Christmas in 1973. We listened and danced to this music in John’s room until the record player needle broke. It was harder to recognize “It ain’t me babe”, the only one of his early songs that Dylan played. A protest song of sorts, both a personal and public one. He was once more reminding us that he is only the poet, not the leader, not the messiah.

After that it got harder to make out the words in Dylan’s octogenarian guttural growl. I refused to believe Paola when she whispered to me he was singing “When I paint my masterpiece”, perhaps my favourite Dylan song. The tune was different, the rhythm was samba, but she was right. We made out the words “I left Rome and landed in Brussels” and a cheer broke out across the Belgian audience.

Most of the other songs were new – well, new to us. We have not kept up with the 50 plus albums Dylan has brought out in his lifetime. Dylan still seems to enjoy singing the songs he chooses on the night, not the songs the audience wants to hear. He and his band played without a break for eighty minutes. Chapeau ! From time to time he stood up for a few seconds and then sat down. He left the stage with no goodbye, thanks or encore, but we felt that he had given us good value.

In 1964, at the height of his fame as a folk singer of protest songs, Dylan closed the album “The Times They Are A-Changin’” by taking “The Parting Glass”, a traditional song that he got from the Clancy brothers, and transforming it into “Restless Farewell”. It was a rebuke to critics of magazines like Newsweek who sought to tie him down, to know who had influenced him, and what cereal he ate for breakfast. The song ends with the lines:

‘So I’ll make my stand

And remain as I am

And bid farewell and not give a damn’

Robert Zimmerman did not disappoint us this time. His idea to lock up our phones made all the difference. And I found it reassuring that he still presents his audiences with an enigma: A complete unknown/With no direction home/like a rolling stone.

Exile in Paradise

In 1685, during the reign of Charles II, the covenanter William Hanna of Wigtown in south west Scotland was banished to Barbados for his refusal to acknowledge the King’s religious authority. Britain had established an important colony on the tiny Caribbean island, with sugar plantations, worked first by indentured labour and later by African slaves. It is not known whether my namesake made it safely across the Atlantic to captivity in Barbados. Many ships were wrecked on the voyage there and he may have drowned on the way.

Three centuries later Barbados, with a population of 250,000, had become an independent country, the proud ‘craftsman of its fate’ and a growing tourist destination. It was a model democracy, with a long established Parliament. It still exported sugar and rum, and produced some of the finest cricketers in the world. Tourists thought of it as paradise.

Barbados was also the location for the Delegation of the European Commission to the Eastern Caribbean. A strange set of circumstances decreed that Barbados would be my first Delegation, and that I should enjoy a more fortunate exile than my courageous Scottish forefather.

Marking the page

The packers arrive tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. As I look down from our flat to the avenue below I see that the police have already reserved a place for the removal van. This is the 17th flit of our married life.

This evening, as the sun streams through our window, at the end of a beautiful Spring Sunday, we are making our final choices of what to bring to Edinburgh and what to leave in Brussels.

In the beginning we were going to move everything of value. However last week we learned that, as a result of Brexit, we will have to pay VAT, Customs Duties and a customs charge on all the goods we take to the UK. So we have decided to leave our most expensive belongings in Belgium for the time being.

Among the books I found a copy of Kipling’s Jungle Books inscribed ‘Annie from R. October 3rd 1925’. Between pages 261 and 262 I found this picture, cut from a greetings card. On the back it says – ‘black headed shrike on bougainvillea. Drawing by the Rev B.C.R. Henry’

At the bottom corner you can see the year of the drawing is 1957. That is the year my Grandfather died. I have just read the first story entitled ‘Mowgli’s brothers’. We are introduced to Akela, Shere Khan, Baghera, Baloo – compelling stuff. I seem to recall that Gran read us these stories when we were young. Perhaps the marker shows that one of my grandparents was in the middle of reading the book when they died.

My grandsons Finn or Max are about the right age to appreciate these stories. I’ve just shown Finn the book on a phone call. As I thought he knows the film but doesn’t know the book. So this one is being added to the Edinburgh pile. I hope I’m not charged extra VAT because it is a first edition. I can’t wait to see my grandchildren again.

As a result of all our moves around the world we possess mountains of bits and pieces of things of little commercial value, but much sentimental value-added. Yet we have always found that the best moment in a move is when the packers have gone and the place is empty.