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With Bournemouth’s panto season due to launch almost the second Bob Dylan leaves the stage, respectful BIC disciples could be forgiven for pointing out that they are behind him. Dressed in a gold cabaret blazer, the legendary 83-year-old poet, philosopher and arsonist opens the first show of his UK tour, seated on a central piano, his back to the crowd, playing a sleazy black blues with his surroundings. of players.

That it takes a good few minutes for this matter-of-fact rumble to reveal itself as “All Along the Watchtower” hardly seems to matter. In his ninth decade, Dylan now seems to exist beyond the music – or rather beneath it, rooting himself into the original soil of his songs in search of their fundamental point.

Likewise, the long-standing complaint about Dylan’s tendency to deconstruct and rework his music until it becomes virtually unrecognizable live is irrelevant tonight. The tour is above all a celebration of his 39th album and masterpiece of the late 2020s. Rough and rowdy manners — the entire album, excluding the 17-minute nighttime flight through modern cultural history “Murder Most Foul,” is more than half the set — and those songs are already deconstructed.

Intimate, dusty and delivered with vocals that sound like a conversation between ’70s Dylan and a flu-ridden Tom Waits, this is music about tone, texture and rumination of the world, without any fixed form or sacred text to adhere to . The best folk-rock songwriter, from our melodic sphere, now inhabits a deeper plane. Ours is just to love what he did with this place.

It’s true that from his occasional croaks and hiccups, one might sometimes think that a coil had broken somewhere in the rusty workings of Dylan’s larynx. Certainly, his gritty mutterings bury most of the record’s poetic wisdom. Although he staggers behind his piano in crooner mode, the inner worlds that this modern Walt Whitman reveals on “I Contain Multitudes” are almost completely lost in the mumbling.

“My Own Version of You” is a kind of post-modern Prometheus story, with Dylan piecing together a Frankenstein’s monster made of historical body parts in order to “see the history of the entire human race…etched on your face.” But the handful of names emerging from the flamenco darkness tonight – St. John the Apostle, Caesar, Marx, Brando – simply suggest a louche tango through time.

Yet Dylan’s band, introduced in Cartman-like mentions between songs, creates an enveloping ambiance with its less rowdy than rough and jagged way with the material. “False Prophet,” a slow-burning blues track, builds to moments of jagged brimstone rock ‘n’ roll, with Dylan standing up and pounding his piano as the fire smolders.

“Black Rider” exudes the seduction of the flamboyant song. Tackling a 1971 classic again, he begins the old country “When I Paint My Masterpiece” as a crawling jazz piece before transforming it – I swear – into something akin to an “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” soothed coated in filth from the southern swamps.

The intoxicating proximity of Rough and rowdy manners however, struggles to survive a full set. To polite cheers from the silent crowd, the pace quickens as an urgent beat ushers in a coiled, feverish “Desolation Row,” the band mustering the thunder and Dylan providing the lightning of the harmonica. But he arrives at the tropical ambience of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” sounding tired and dull, elbows on the piano, tinkering with the keys and weakly strumming his harmonica like a lounge singer nearing the end of a quarter of quiet work. “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” is simply dark, over-the-top blues boogie.

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It is of course unreasonable to expect exuberant dynamics from an octogenarian artist. But the concert background is at its best when it surrenders to serenity. When “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” arrives in light and frothy beat-pop mode. When “I decided to give myself to you” drifts like the mist of dawn on a blue bayou. Or when “Mother of the Muses” honors the war dead and encroaching mortality in a gentle, evangelical way.

The final “Every Grain of Sand” – the only song tonight from Dylan’s Christian period, or even the 50 or so years after 1971. Greatest Hits, Vol. II – is a thing of such fragile beauty that a fight almost breaks out when someone tries to leave an argument mid-way. His recorded excavations into the roots of the sound are thrilling, but, live at 83, Dylan truly stuns when he grabs the heart of a song and squeezes it lightly.