I should sleep. I have my first interview early tomorrow morning. The last thing I need to do is stay up late online. So I am going to try and keep this brief.

The weekend’s music has, well it’s been varied. In just over a 24 hour period, I’ve seen, amongst others James Brown, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Christy Moore and Bob Dylan. That’s pretty damn varied.

I was looking forward to Dylan more than anything else and if I had to have picked, I would have traded everyone else for him. When you go into something like that, you can’t help but be disappointed. Dylan himself was fine, took a couple of songs to get going but he was fine. Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones had guested with the Charlatans earlier in the day. He came out with Dylan too and played the first couple of songs. Seemed to leaving after the third or but we could hear the mike picking up Dylan telling him he couldn’t leave. So he played through the full set. And the set was the disappointment. I was hoping for and indeed expecting it to be one big singalong. It’s Bob Dylan for fuck sake, 40 years of tunes to play out of. It’s a festival so I was hoping for a few of the greatest hits. No such luck. I didn’t seem to be alone in not being overly familiar with the entire set. The only time the crowd was able to sing along was for the single encore Like a Rolling Stone. Colour me disappointed.

I just did a news google for the Fleadh to see if there was anything on the web about it yet. There isn’t. There is a Telegraph article about Dylan being set to play there and the last couple of lines sum everything up perfectly. I wish I could write like this. I really do.

“I have witnessed it time and again. People go to a show as individuals and emerge as a kind of community, pouring out into the night, still singing the last refrain. I think we go to such events to sing our songs. And if Dylan turns up to sing them with us, so much the better.”

We didn’t get to sing our songs and I missed it throughout and I miss it now.

I feel a little cheated and a little disapointed. I only have a right to the latter I guess, some of the disappointment spreads to myself for being a Dylan greatest hits man. I have Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks of course(!) but that’s barely the tip of the iceberg. The encore was fantastic, the crowd were so into it and I think there was a huge feeling of relief all around. We got a biggie, we got something we knew and far more importantly, we had one of our songs to sing.

Tomorrow, I will sit at my desk and I don’t doubt I’ll spend much of my day with Bob Dylan. For the sake of my friends and colleagues, I won’t sing, at least I won’t sing out loud.