Bob Dylan, Glasgow, November 16 & 17, 2025 reviewed: Things aren’t what they were…

There’s ice in the air

Here he comes again. The 2025 iteration of the Rough And Rowdy Ways show rolls into Glasgow on the weekend that a long, strange stretch of unseasonably clement weather at last sputters and dies, replaced by a cold front barrelling straight down from the Arctic. There’s suddenly ice in the air as Bob Dylan arrives in town, but if you know your alchemy, you can make gunpowder from that stuff – or, at least, so boasts the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”, a song that, over these two nights, becomes one of the sparking stars of this particular version of this never-endingly mutating tour.

It has been three years since Dylan last brought his Rough And Rowdy Ways to Glasgow, and if all you were to do was glance at the seemingly static statistics, you could be forgiven for thinking very little has changed since then. As in 2022, Dylan is currently playing a set of 17 songs (numerologists will tell you it’s a good one), of which 14 remain the same, nine of them drawn from the 2021 album the tour is named after. Indeed, since I last caught up with proceedings, one year ago in Edinburgh, only a single song has been swapped out – in 2024, things opened with “All Along The Watchtower”, now it’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”. The other 16 are still being played in exactly the same order.

Very different and so very alive

Add to this that three-quarters of the superb four-man band backing Dylan have been fixed in place since this tour began and it looks on paper as if this show should have become long set in stone. So why is it that the three incarnations of Rough And Rowdy Ways I’ve seen feel so very different and so very alive? Well, as the tour posters keep on telling us, like the vital clue hidden in plain sight all along, Things aren’t what they were.

Some of these changes are easier to identify than others. For one thing, there’s the physical presentation of the performance. Dylan isn’t someone you immediately associate with stage sets, but when the tour first arrived after the haze of Covid and lockdown, stark and subtle tricks of lighting – not much lighting at all, that is, and a floor that glowed hard white beneath the players’ feet, sending their tall shadows lurching and cavorting up a high backdrop of stately curtains that sometimes blazed fiery orange and red – lent the nights a feverish, Lynchian drama. An otherworldly experience.

A shadow king hovering over the night

By 2024, things had shifted to something simpler and more old-timey – a band playing to an audience, more or less. But now things are even plainer and more intimate yet. As John Robinson recently noted from Brighton, in Uncut’s review of the first night of these UK shows, the vibe is now that of a jam session, or garage rehearsal. With the lights down very low on stage, and the group assembled close around Dylan’s baby grand piano, it’s as if you’re looking into some private backroom after hours, watching a band who have gathered there to shake off the day by playing for each other, and seeing where it goes this time.

It’s a feeling underlined on the second song of the first night, when Dylan picks up a guitar by his piano stool and turns his back to the audience, facing the rest of the band as he toys around with some thick, rusty, increasingly plaintive notes on the lead into “It Ain’t Me Babe”. (Keep watching and there are still some subtle staging tricks, though: several times, the lights throw Dylan’s silhouette up against the curtained backdrop, a shadow king hovering over the night.)

Ghostly qualities quite unlike any other shows Dylan has played

The other obvious difference in the evolution of the show lies in the personnel. Although most of these musicians have been in place for four years now – guitarists Bob Britt and Doug Lancio and the great Tony Garnier, bass-playing Sancho Panza on Dylan’s Quixotic quest for the past 36 years – the drummers providing the heartbeat have changed regularly. In 2022, Charley Drayton’s fields of spectral, near-liquid percussion lent ghostly qualities quite unlike any other shows Dylan has played. Last year, Dylan’s veteran ally Jim Keltner returned to take up the sticks once more, providing a more solid, grounded whomp, and a lot of history.

Now the drum stool is occupied by Anton Fig, another player with a long track record with Dylan, whose playing occupies territory somewhere between the previous two. When Dylan played “Desolation Row” last year, for example, Keltner’s rolling forward charge recalled the gallop of Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue.” Now, while the arrangement is much the same, Fig’s pounding fast-and-faster beat pushes forward while building up a thrilling thrum closer to the ambience of Dylan’s own “Series Of Dreams”.

Charlie Chaplin does Eric Morecambe

Really, though, the changes that keep this show a living, breathing, sometimes messy, sometimes breath-taking thing are less tangible. Watching Dylan limit himself to this same set of songs and this basic set up of musicians is akin to watching a master magician limit himself to a deck of 52 playing cards and working in perilous close-up: he takes the same stuff and he keeps making it behave in different ways, keeps making into something new.

Or, sometimes, makes it into something old again. Back in 2022, it was notable how a song like “False Prophet” had already started shifting shape away from the version recorded for the Rough And Rowdy Ways album; the big surprise now is that it has returned to something very close to the LP, save for a new, swirling and hammering, stop-start bridge-crescendo that is particularly hair-raising on Glasgow’s first night.

So much of it is to do with the ragged moment, and Dylan’s presence in it, his focus on it. So, on the first night in Glasgow, Dylan arrives onstage with his group while the introductory Debussy music is still playing and leads things off on piano; on the second, the band are out on stage and already playing long before Dylan comes rushing out from the wings like a slapstick latecomer to his own performance, Charlie Chaplin does Eric Morecambe. On Night One, he picks up guitar for a second time to dig deeper and deeper into a very long, chewy introduction to “To Be Alone With You”, while on Night Two he sticks to piano and gets straight down to it.

You instantly sense something is afoot

At various times on both nights, his we’re-doing-this-right-now interaction with the band is clear to see, Dylan semaphoring toward Fig with his fist from the piano, conducting the beat, moulding the songs there on the fly. At several points on Night One – for my money, the night the focus was at its sharpest; some have speculated that Dylan shows that fall on a Sunday always have something else about them – the band move in, huddling closer and closer to each other, everyone watching everyone else. It happens on “Watching The River Flow” and a fantastic “Crossing The Rubicon”, boasting Dylan’s most emphatic piano playing.

The epitome of this across these two nights, though, is his Frankenstein thing, “My Own Version Of You”. As the song begins on Sunday night, you can instantly sense something is afoot. The watchfulness onstage increases by several degrees as Dylan begins building the song around an odd, insistent rise-fall figure hammered out higgledy-piggledy on the bass keys of his piano.

It’s a mad, marching little toytown tune, like something spindly you might hear in a 1940s cartoon about a gang of toddlers playing Apache versus Cavalrymen. It’s new to us, and seemingly entirely new to the band, caught on the hop. But as Dylan begins fitting his mad narrative in between the notes, Fig begins responding and the group begin reacting.

It might all collapse at any second

It’s akin to watching an acrobatic troupe attempt to walk a tightrope at the same time as they’re actually still erecting the wire – it might all collapse at any second, but Dylan, actually making himself laugh at one point as he keeps barking out the lines, continues to push it, further on round the bend. On Night Two, this same crazed, fresh-born arrangement returns, but, with the band ready for it, it’s growing, taking fuller, stranger shape, sprouting feathers and scales, all spark and ricochet.

It’s a thrill to watch this kind of risky improvisation happening, but elsewhere much of the power of these shows lies, of course, in all the history Dylan drags around with him, however hard he tries to escape it. A new song, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”, is still the centrepoint of the evening (not quite as trancey as it was in 2022, it remains a strange, inchoate zone, Dylan’s long, near-spoken vocal now ushered in by half-heard sound effects that could be water running, or something burning, with hints of birdsong in the distance).

Things flash, time stops

But the emotional heart of the night surely lies in the very spare reading “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”. Mostly just Dylan and his piano alone, augmented by very spare, rising guitar lines and touches of bowed bass, it manages to be playful, regretful and sympathetic all at once. It’s very much as if that kid wrote it back in 1965 just for this man to sing today. When he brings his harmonica to his lips to close it out, things flash, time stops.

He does it again with the harp solo that ends “Every Grain Of Sand”, and ends both nights, and ends every night at the moment. As the crowd stands to applaud, Dylan stands at the rear of the stage, pauses in the moment, raises his arms to us and then disappears, moving on.

The Rough And Rowdy Ways tour was initially billed to last 2021 – 2024, but, as is his way, Dylan has already taken to Twitter to announce that it will run on into 2026. Before that, though, he heads off to the island of Ireland to bring this year’s incarnation to a close. It’s a place where things can happen, and they probably will. Catch him while you can. But you’ll never catch him.

Bob Dylan and his band setlist for SEC Armadillo, Glasgow, November 16 & 17, 2025:

I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
It Ain’t Me, Babe
I Contain Multitudes
False Prophet
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Black Rider
My Own Version Of You
To Be Alone With You
Crossing The Rubicon
Desolation Row
Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
Watching The River Flow
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself To You
Mother Of Muses
Goodbye Jimmy Reid
Every Grain Of Sand