Take five of Britain’s leading folk rock performers and not only give them a project but name them after a project, and you end up with the perfect recipe for an evening’s superb music.
The Dylan Project gave more than two hours of great music on Saturday, from the works of one of the 20th century’s leading songwriters, a man so inspired by the works of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas that he changed his name from Zimmerman.
The musicians – lead singer and guitarist Steve Gibbons, Fairport Convention members Dave Pegg on bass and Gerry Conway on drums, P. J. Wright on electric lead guitar and Phil Bond on Hammond organ and assorted keyboards – took their sellout audience at Lowdham Village Hall on a journey covering just about all the great man’s works.
The songs included classics such as Subterranean Homesick Blues, Highway 61 and I Shall Be Released, alongside some of Dylan’s less well-known works, such as To Be Alone With You and It’s Not Dark Yet.
The lineup neatly side-stepped the notorious “Judas” moment at the Manchester Free Trade Hall by including both electric and electric-acoustic guitars, and gave the performance a great roundness of sound, making it a sort of musical equivalent of a Jack Kerouac novel.
The band had that unmistakable folky sound, with guitars that sparkle and shine to the extent of sounding almost, but not quite, too sharp. In the finale, Dave Pegg managed to turn a gentle reggae beat into a hornpipe, but if special mention should go to anyone then it must be to Leicester’s own P. J. Wright, who gave a rich and varied guitar show of a kind not often heard outside of a major stadium.
- Frank Chester
This review appeared in the Newark Advertiser.
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