Bob Dylan on his own websites claims the authorities did not censor his setlist for the recent China concerts.

This article titled “Bob Dylan posts web message about China shows” was written by Caspar Llewellyn Smith, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 13th May 2011 18.12 UTC Confounding seasoned Bob Dylan fans, the 69-year old song and dance man has posted a message on his official website addressing the controversy surrounding his concerts in China in April. Dylan has never previously communicated with his followers in this way, but he has now refuted the suggestion that he allowed the Chinese government to censor his setlist.   Several critics – if not all – questioned his motivation, including New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who wrote that Dylan “sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.”   In response to such accusations, Dylan wrote on bobdylan.com that the Chinese authorities had not refused him permission to play there, and while “according to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats”, there were not many empty seats and this was not true. “If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came,” he continued.   Dylan added: “The Chinese press did tout me as a 60s icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn’t have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last four or five records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.”   In respect to the idea that the Chinese government vetted the setlist, Dylan wrote: “We played all the songs that we intended to play”.   The singer turns 70 on 24 May, and with an oblique reference to the happy occasion, the sometime author and radio show host concluded this novel missive: “Everybody knows by now that there’s a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I’m encouraging anybody who’s ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.”

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Ten years ago, John Harris was within seconds of a meeting Bob Dylan – until Eric Clapton stole him away. Now he talks to those who have been granted an audience with rock’s greatest enigma.

This article titled “The day I (nearly) met Bob Dylan” was written by John Harris, for The Guardian on Saturday 14th May 2011 11.05 UTC Imagine this: since you were 11 years old, you have been convinced Bob Dylan is a genius. You own every album he has ever made, and your shelves are full of books whose titles attest to the great cloak of mystery that surrounds him: Behind the Shades, Wanted Man, Invisible Republic. You can quote his lyrics, and play dozens of his songs on the guitar. There are days when you find yourself revering him more than the Beatles, which is saying something. And then it happens: someone points you in the direction of a set of stairs and says it’s time for you to meet him, which produces an attack of nerves so strong that you fear you might pass out. As he winds down after playing in front of 10,000 people, what exactly are you going to say? “Hello Bob, you’re the reason I made a harmonica holder out of one of my mum’s coathangers in 1983 and tortured the neighbours with repeated renditions of Like a Rolling Stone, and I just wanted to say thanks”? No. “Hello Bob, I’ve always had trouble making narrative sense of your 1978 song Changing of the Guards, and wondered whether you could help?” Absolutely not. “Hello Bob, great show”? Please. Sadly, to kill this shaggy dog story before it runs away with us, when the dressing room door eventually swung open, Dylan wasn’t there: he’d been spirited away by Eric Clapton, someone reckoned. Which makes 11 May 2002 – the day I nearly met Bob Dylan – nothing to tell the grandchildren about, really. Thanks to favours pulled by a musician friend, I did, though, watch Dylan perform from the wings of the London Arena that night, and studied him as he left the stage. I noted that he was smaller than I imagined (5ft 7in, apparently), and that he walked with a strange gait, shuffling on his toes, almost like a boxer. He passed a foot or so in front of me: I nodded at him, and I think he nodded back. To me that was quite something, but that’s an indication of what hero-worship can do to you. On 24 May, Dylan will turn 70, an occasion that has already given rise to celebration concerts, cover stories, radio shows and more. Maya Angelou has dutifully praised him as “a great American artist”. To Bruce Springsteen, Dylan is “the father of my country”. There is much more of this stuff to come – a renewed outpouring of the kind of questions that tantalise me, and the millions of people who have been profoundly touched by his music. Most of them boil down to two conundrums: Who is Bob Dylan? And what does he want? Like most of the high-achieving musicians of his generation, Dylan will never quite escape the shadow of the 1960s, but he is one the few alumni of that decade whose new work still seems vital and interesting. His last album, 2009′s Together Through Life, had its moments, but if you really want to understand how great his recent-ish work has been, you should sample Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006): albums streaked with wit, existential insight and the rare sound of a rock musician building age and experience into every note they sing. Dylan’s voice is now shot to pieces compared to how it sounded 40-odd years ago, but I think that’s part of what makes his latterday stuff so good. Mick Jagger shakes his bum and attempts to convince his audience that time has stood still since the mid-70s; Dylan confronts us with not just his own mortality, but ours, too. As ever, he is surrounded by a cloud of ephemera and apocryphal chatter. No one really knows anything about his politics: he has expressed approving sentiments about Barack Obama, but recently caused howls of dismay when he played in China; yesterday, a very unexpected post appeared on bobdylan.com, in which he acknowledged that a collection of recent setlists had been given in advance to the authorities, claimed he hadn’t been censored (“we played all the songs that we intended to play”), and said nothing at all about whether he should have followed the advice of some outraged commentators and spoken at least a little truth to power while he was there. In 2000 I watched him in talkative mood at Wembley Arena, expressing his pleasure at being in the UK with reference to Britain’s efforts in the second world war. What he said probably had more to do with his Jewish upbringing than anything else, but they didn’t sound like the words of the liberal peacenik of common assumption: “We all know how Britain stood alone. That always meant a lot to the people I grew up with.” Dylan has starred in ads for the lingerie chain Victoria’s Secret and for the iPod. He is said to have been married at least three times, although only one of those unions has been public. An infinite number of questions buzz around the internet, none of which are ever anwered: having embraced born-again Christianity circa 1978, but then apparently rediscovered his Judaism, where is his spiritual head at? Does he really leave his tour bus parked in motorway service stations and go for spontaneous moonlit rambles across fields? And did he really once consider relocating to Crouch End? I can well remember the source of my idea of Dylan as a shadowy, unbelievably enigmatic presence: a BBC film titled Getting to Dylan, first screened in 1987, in which a team from the Omnibus programme followed him as he played the part of a faded rock star in a risible film called Hearts of Fire (also starring Rupert Everett). Weeks went by before he consented to be interviewed, but it eventually happened, in an on-set trailer near Toronto – and in 20 minutes, he allowed a rare glimpse of his essential condition. You can see the entire Getting to Dylan interview on YouTube (have a look for “BBC Dylan interview”): it remains an enduring portrait not just of who he was, but who he will probably always be, and what a strange and lonely business being Bob Dylan actually is. So I place a call to his interviewer, Christopher Sykes, now 65, who has the rare distinction of being one of the only film-makers who has trained a camera on Dylan and asked him questions. (Though he directed the acclaimed Dylan documentary No Direction Home, not even Martin Scorsese managed that.) “I really liked him,” Sykes tells me. “He was tremendously funny. Charming, I thought. And he is incredibly charismatic. You find yourself wondering: is this something about him, or is this something you bring to someone that famous? But sitting a few feet away from him is pretty scary. He’s got a way of looking at you that’s frightening. When he looks straight at you, you really do feel like he’s got some sort of x-ray vision; that he sees right through you.” It was partly the memory of that look that threw me when I thought I was about to meet him. “He looks like a … funny old Gypsy person,” Sykes continues. “You have this sense that he’s been around for an awfully long time. I remember thinking, ‘I bet if you look through medieval paintings, there’ll be a picture of him somewhere.’ It really does feel like he’s been around for ever.” Sykes is nonplussed by suggestions that Dylan did the interview in a state of narcotic refreshment (“He liked drinking Johnny Walker black label, and I think he smoked dope”), and recalls a recent occasion when he had dinner in Los Angeles with Dylan’s son, Jesse – who was reminded of the interview, and offered a very telling question: “Was he kind to you?” “Tender and really helpful,” is the verdict of the writer Adrian Deevoy, who was summoned to Philadelphia a few years later to interview Dylan for Q magazine. They ended up talking in the seaside town of Narragansett, Rhode Island – and Deevoy’s memories chime with one regular observation of Dylan’s lifestyle: that whereas some artists glide through a world of luxury, Dylan seems to live and work in a fascinatingly higgledy-piggledy way. “It sounds weird,” he tells me, “but we were all on a double bed in a very small motel room: Dylan, myself, his manager Jeff Rosen, a willowy Scandinavian woman, and a massive dog.” Mike Scott, the singer and chief creative mind in the Waterboys, became a smitten Dylan fan at much the same age that I did, watching his appearance in the film of George Harrison’s Concert For Bangladesh, and realising that “he was the great poet of the times”. In 1978, Scott and a friend went to see Dylan play at Earls Court, then followed his tour bus back to a hotel where they spied him sitting in the bar. “That was exciting,” he says. “‘Fucking hell! I’m going to meet Bob Dylan!’ We got half way across the bar, and these blurred, giant shapes suddenly appeared in front of us: bouncers, who escorted us off the premises.” Seven years later, when Dylan was in London recording with the ex-Eurythmic and rock Zelig Dave Stewart, Scott and two of his band got a call, and were summoned to a north London recording studio. “That felt like crossing the other half of the room,” he says: the collected musicians spent two hours jamming, while Dylan spurned singing in favour of playing “burbling, non-stop lead guitar”. Scott recalls being perplexed by his refusal to step up to the microphone, but feeling thrilled when Dylan told him he was a fan of the Waterboys’ big hit The Whole of the Moon. Some time later the phone rang again, and Scott found himself in a rented house in Holland Park. “We hung out with him for a couple of hours. He played us a record by the McPeak Family, folk musicians from Ulster, and he gave me a cassette of an American Indian poet called John Trudell.” And what was Dylan like? “Puckish. Humorous. In the studio, he’d been very quiet and closed in on himself. But now he was gregarious: exactly what I’d want Bob Dylan to be like. It was great.” Dylan told them tales about the presence of Vikings in his native Minnesota, introduced Scott to his kids, and shared a herbal moment with him. “I don’t know whether you can say this,” says Scott, “but I’ve smoked a joint that Bob Dylan rolled, and he’s smoked a joint that I rolled.” Self-evidently, I cannot compete with any of that, but still: during 30-odd years, Dylan has powerfully spoken to me about love, loss, life, death, sadness and contentment, and he still does. When I recently moved house, it rather pains me to admit that a freshly acquired set of his CDs, faithful to the original mono versions, came with me in the car, lest anything should happen to them. Thanks to a moment of carelessness in Mississippi, I am proud to say that I own a speeding ticket issued on Highway 61. The last book I finished was a collection of writing about Dylan by the American author and thinker Greil Marcus; I’m about to start an updated version of the aforementioned biography Behind the Shades, by Clinton Heylin – 902 pages, which seems to me a very satisfactory length indeed. I have seen Dylan play at least 15 times, and I’ll probably keep doing so until his so-called Never Ending Tour comes to a close. It can be a frustrating business – certainly, I wish he wouldn’t endlessly change the phrasing of just about everything he sings, sometimes in the manner of a wheezing pub crooner. But in between the moments you’re left guessing which song he’s actually playing, there are always enough flashes of greatness to justify the effort, and occasions when just about everything aligns correctly. In 1995, Dylan leapt on stage at the Brixton Academy without his guitar, sang while waggling his legs in the style of the young Elvis, and delivered a fantastically rambunctious show that had me laughing with pleasure. In 2001, I saw him at Stirling Castle: probably the single best concert I have seen him play, full of restraint and tenderness perfectly suited to a summer twilight. The essential thing, though, is this: whatever happens, you can surely take great delight in looking toward the stage and saying, “Look – it’s Bob Dylan.” And then there is the excellence of so many of the songs he has written as he tumbles towards old age – such as Ain’t Talkin’, the final song from Modern Times: “Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’/ Through this weary world of woe,” he sings. “Heart burnin’, still yearnin’/ No one on earth would ever know.” How beautifully put, and how very true.

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Has Bob Dylan actually stood for anything for the last 40 years or so?

This article titled “MoDo on Bob Dylan and protest” was written by Michael Tomasky, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 11th April 2011 16.43 UTC Maureen Dowd took a widely noted whack at Bob Dylan yesterday, for allegedly agreeing to submit his set list to censors in the People’s Republic of China before he played his first-ever gig there. She seemed upset that he didn’t play “Blowin’ in the Wind.” In return, she’s getting whacked herself left and right today. Jim Fallows had a go yesterday, noting that Dylan did in fact perform a few of his more subversive songs and that his contacts in China didn’t see the matter through Dowd’s lens at all. Here’s something from the Examiner: There is no evidence that Dylan was censored at all in China. Where is the investigative journalism ? Someone speculated in the press, and it is now reported as “fact”. Where is the original document or announcement? There is not even a clear consensus as to why last year’s concert didn’t take place. It certainly wasn’t canceled, since it was never confirmed. Dylan’s “censored” set list was actually pretty standard. Dozen’s of articles – published before Dowd’s – used “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times, They Are-Changin’” as examples of “censored” songs that Dylan did not perform, while Dowd suggested another “protest” song that Dylan “should” have sung. Here are the facts: *”Blowin’ In The Wind” was performed only ten times last year. *”Times” was performed only once in 2010 – at a special White House performance. *”Hurricane” has not been performed since 1976 (35 years ago!)! That’s amazing about “Hurricane.” I guess that would have been the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, is that right? In any case, a) Dylan hasn’t been a “protest figure” for about 40 years, even 45, really, and b) even if he did sing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and even putting the language barrier aside, no one could understand a single word the guy says these days, so what difference would it make? I think I’ve seen Dylan four times, maybe five. The first was 1978, the Street Legal tour, his “Vegas” era. But it was still a good show, and I remember “Tangled Up in Blue” as a highlight. But he has long had this penchant of course for rearranging his songs to such an extent that you had to listen for a minute or even two before you even knew what it was. When he toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, I went to see him at Madison Square Garden, with a good friend of mine (who might be reading this very post), and another buddy of his, a guy I didn’t know. As we were on the subway heading home, I said: “I really liked hearing ‘Masters of War.’” A confused and sad look crossed the face of the third guy, my friend’s friend: “He played ‘Masters of War’?” That was the thing. You couldn’t tell. I caught a snippet of lyric in about the third verse that I knew. So even if he’d played “Masters of War” in China, he’d likely have done it in such a way that people wouldn’t have heard its message anyhow. Which brings us to a central point about Dylan that I think Dowd missed. He’s intentionally enigmatic, and it’s precisely when someone wants him to do X that he will go out of his way to do Not X. Not that it even really matters that much anymore in his case, but just for the record. And, just for the record, my most beloved Dylan music is The Basement Tapes. Not a political word on it. Could listen to it forever.

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Podcast 40 is from part 2 of last Sunday’s afternoon session with more rehearsals of old songs as a trial for April 12th and a cover of Bob Dylan’s Hurricane – just because there’s time enough. Here’s the download and play link etc: Subscribe to the podcast RSS or get it from iTunes Download MP3 to save – 32.1 Mb in size, playtime 22 minutes 15 seconds :- 40 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 40.mp3 Andy Roberts Podcast #40 Shownotes Show Notes for Podcast 40

Hurricane – Bob Dylan Living Here – Andy Roberts Joan of Arc – Andy Roberts Mazet – Andy Roberts Cajun Cooking – Andy Roberts

Orbit Tower

Andy Roberts Podcast Episode #38 comes out a day late, sorry about that. Here’s the download and play link etc:
Subscribe to the podcast RSS or get it from iTunes Download MP3 to save – 40.00 Mb in size, playtime 30 minutes 0 seconds :- 38 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 38.mp3 Andy Roberts Podcast #38 Shownotes Show Notes for Podcast 38

The Streets of Paris – Andy Roberts Clean Living Blues – by Linda Hartley and Andy Roberts Winter in Andalusia – Andy Roberts (abridged version) Now that I’m Living Here – Andy Roberts Cajun Cooking Song – Andy Roberts Just Like A Woman – Bob Dylan Song

Here’s another version of podcast episode 31 re-recorded on Wednesday morning with most of of the same songs roughly, as the one which went out live on Tuesday evening. So if you were there, online watching the show and chatting with Linda in one of the realtime boxes then you should notice this isn’t exactly the same performance. The instrumental guitar pieces for example, as improvisations will be will be very different. I’m sure one or two sings are missing too, and one or two added. That’s all part of the process. And the new strings will be over twelve hours old now as well, instead of being only 12 minutes since restringing. I had even thought of doing the restring live on the podcast itself, as a piece of performance a-r-t but Linda said it wouldn’t make a very good audio podcast and I came around to that point of view eventually. Here’s the web player, download link, tracklist and show notes for Podcast Episode 31:

Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed using the url: http://andyroberts.me/?feed=podcast Subscribe in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-roberts/id378470885 You can also download the MP3 from this link 31 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 31.mp3 Podcast Episode 31 Show Notes Show notes and information for Andy Roberts Acoustic Guitar Podcast Episode 31: Episode 31 broadcast on February 1st, published on February 2nd 2011. 1) Mozambique Words and Music by Bob Dylan

2) Shifting Sands

Words and Music by Andy Roberts 2) Reason To Believe

Words and Music by Tim Hardin 2)Last Subway Home

Words and Music by Andy Roberts 2)The Wreckers Prayer

Words and Music by Andy Roberts 2)Nobody Knows You ( When you’re down and out)

Words and Music by Jimmy Cox

For this week’s podcast because there couldn’t be a live show, so  I’ve done something a bit different. Instead of recording the show and then maybe ending up with some songs for youTube, I’m making the podcast out of videos that I have already on there. It’s the best of my youTube channel from 2010, my pick of five from the most popular songs on there, strung together with a little bit of introduction. Links, play, download

Subscribe to the podcast RSS or get it from iTunes Download MP3 to save – 28.0 Mb in size, playtime 29 minutes 06 seconds :- 28 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 28.mp3 Episode 28 Shownotes

One More Cup Of Coffee – Bob Dylan Song live from Havering Folk Club( >25,500 views) Big Eyed Bean From Venus – Captain Beefheart tribute Grow Fins – Captain Beefheart again The Wreckers Prayer – Andy Roberts Song Live at Walthamstow Folk Club I Hate the White Man – Roy Harper‘s song

YouTube - andyrobertsmusic Channel Watch the original YouTube Tracks Here:

Andy Roberts Podcast #24 There’s a mixed bag of songs on Podcast #24, which was recorded last Tuesday, a week ahead of schedule and has a slightly edgy feel to it. “Not John” was appropriate for the following day being December 8th, exactly thirty years after John Lennon was shot dead. On the anniversary itself I played it again at Havering Folk Club followed by Working Class Hero and the video from that evening is embedded at the end here. Links, play, download

Subscribe to the podcast RSS or get it from iTunes Download MP3 to save – 28.6 Mb in size, playtime 29 minutes 42 seconds :- 24 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 24.mp3 Shownotes for podcast #24

Captain Coulston – traditional after Steeleye Span Just Like A Woman – Bob Dylan Wild World – Cat Stevens Not John – Loudon Wainwright Mondura Dam – Andy Roberts All Along The Watchtower – Dylan

Not John Lennon Loudon Wainwright’s “Not John” followed by “Working Class Hero” written by John Lennon performed at Havring Folk Club on December 8th 2010 by Andy Roberts.

Podcasting a day early with the Andy Roberts music podcast Episode 11 So this week’s podcast was recorded a day early, on the Monday instead of Tuesday, not that that will make much difference to podcast subscribers, who mostly seem to like to download the show about one week after it’s been published, but for those of you who might on occasion turn up for the live show at 7.00pm, I won’t be there at all some Tuesdays, and this was one of them. Knowing that I was effectively playing to an absent live audience had a curious effect on the performance, which I would describe as slightly more random in a creative sort of way, but Linda described as “less in the flow”. I was worried that it wouldn’t be good enough for me to want to put out at all, so I carried on after the half hour but in the end that just made it a bit more difficult to edit down to size, something I’d prefer not to do really. So the original full length video file saved over on Ustream is not worth keeping really, due to the failing daylight at this time of year on a cloudy September evening, and me not having bothered to find the lamp. I kind of like lurking in the dark though
Andy Roberts is being kept in the dark is the tracklist of links and show notes for Podcast Episode 11:

Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed using the url: http://andyroberts.me/?feed=podcast Subscribe in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-roberts/id378470885 You can also download the MP3 audio file which is 28.8Mb in size and 29 minutes 57 seconds in duration from this link 10 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 11.mp3 Podcast Episode 11 Show Notes Show notes and information for Podcast Episode 11 broadcast on September 13th, published on September 14th 2010. 1) Century A Millenium song written by Andy Roberts around 1980

“Century is my song for the Millennium, written in the early eighties looking forward to the year 2000. It’s called “Century” because the term Millennium wasn’t so much in use then, nobody much had started thinking about it yet, and I was still writing COBOL computer programs with 2 digit years” 2) I Am The Way Song by Loudon Wainwright after Woodie Guthrie’s “Standing Down in New York Town”. Just noticed I played this not long ago, in podcast 7 oh well. 3) You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere Bob Dylan Song from Greatest Hits Vol 2 4) Mondura Dam – Andy Roberts song I may have played this recently, not sure now, but anyway here it is again but this time on the 12 string guitar. Music and Lyrics by Andy Roberts.

5) Norwegian Wood – Beatles I kind of love/hate this song, so I’m trying to reinterpret it. The video below will be from a live performance at Havering Folk Club

6) Me and my Friend the Cat One of the early songs by Loudon Wainwright – performed on his birthday. Happy birthday Loudon. Next time I’ll remember the lyrics, OK.

Four Original Songs + 1 Bob Dylan in the Andy Roberts music podcast Episode 10 There’s a bit of an improvised introduction tune followed by four more original Andy Roberts music songs and a final Bob Dylan song in this weeks podcast, all played on the 12 string guitar. Two of the songs are  revivals from the Andy Roberts Tapes which was recorded in 1980, the other two are a bit newer, well Shifting Sands dates back to spring 2003 as far as I can remember and the Cajun cooking song was written on that Spain trip which immediately followed, so yes, two from the tapes and two from The Gernika album. Here are the links and shownotes for Podcast Episode 10:

Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed using the url: http://andyroberts.me/?feed=podcast Subscribe in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/andy-roberts/id378470885 You can also download the MP3 audio file which is 24.4Mb in size and 25 minutes long from this link 10 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 10.mp3 There’s also a stored video file from the live broadcast over at Ustream.tv where the podcasting event takes place on Tuesdays at 7.00pm UK time Video Podcast Episode No 10 Podcast Episode 10 Show Notes Show notes and information for Podcast Episode 10 broadcast on September 7th, published on September 7th 2010. Improvised Intro Ephemeral work with lyrics and music by And Roberts Joan of Ark Named after a specific Hotel in the Marais, Paris, Andy Roberts’ song Joan of Ark tends to get wheeled out every autumn due to the seasonal references. From The Andy Roberts Tapes Suitcase Another one from the tapes, and a kind of sequel to the above really. I’m not really completely comfortable with being the person who wrote this song, all that time ago, but the tune is catchy and the guitar runs were developed for the 12 string guitar, yes the same guitar. Shifting Sands I may have played this recently, not sure now, but anyway here it is again. Music and Lyrics by Andy Roberts. Cajun Music Cajun Food One of the Spanish songs, and still crying out for a fiddle and accordion but I do my best with the solo guitar.  From the album Gernika I Shall Be Released Music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, arrangement Andy Roberts

Back to Havering Folk Club I went along to Havering Folk Club last Wednesday after a week away on holiday and tried to do a vesrion of one of the new songs I haven’t finished yet. I know It didn’t work out very well, partly because I don’t have the lyrics memorised yet and I tried reading from a crib sheet on the music stand, which has never worked out for me in past and probably never will. I can sing and play at the same time, sometimes I can sing, play and read at the same time, but not it seems in front of an audience, standing up and without reading glasses. So I’ve uploaded the podcast versions of the unfinished songs to youTube instead. The one called “Untitled 1″ in the episode 3 shownotes is provisionally called “Trevellas” now, and unfinished 2 is called “Summerhouse” but I also have a plan for combining the two songs into one single work that would be longer and more complex. We’ll have to see.

Sitting On The Bank To recompose my composure, finding myself with a capo on fret 4 I decided on the spur of the moment to sing “Sitting on the Bank” which is a simple song I wrote when I was about 15 or 16 and thinking about leaving home soon. While uploading I noticed that the melody is developing slightly even now, I’m not sure it’s correct to call it a revival though, as it’s never really been out of the repertoire.

The Mighty Quinn After the break and with the list of floor singers completed there was a little time left and Pep kindly asked me to do another, so after 3 pints I decided to do a singalong that everybody knows though it turned out not everybody at Havering Folk Club knows that the Mighty Quinn was a Bob Dylan song. The Manfred Mann cover version was better known in the UK in 1960s and afterwards.

This week’s edition is the official opening night of the Andy Roberts Podcast – episode 1. Here’s the podcast player for listening online to the opening Episode 1:

. . Subscribe to the podcast RSS feed using the url

http://andyroberts.me/?feed=podcast Subscribe in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/andy-roberts/id378470885 You can also download the MP3 audio file which is around 24Mb in size and just under 26minutes in duration from this link 01 Andy Roberts Podcast Episode 1.mp3 If you must, the full video file of the broadcast is available over at Ustream.tv where the live podcasting event takes place on Tuesdays at 7.00pm UK time Episode No 1 Video Podcast Episode 1 Show Notes Show notes and information for Podcast Episode 1 broadcast and recorded on July 6th 2010. There were 4 songs recorded during this show, 3 using the vintage 12string acoustic guitar and one on the 6 string in dropped D tuning. Back In The Field Title: “Back In The Field” Music and Lyrics by Andy Roberts, first released on Album 1 Isis – Bob Dylan Title: Isis Music and Lyrics by Bob Dylan and Jaques Levy, interpreted by Andy Roberts I’ll See You Again – Roy Harper Title: “I’ll See You Again” Music and Lyrics by Roy Harper, interpretation by Andy Roberts Wonderwall – Oasis Title: “Wonderwall” Music and Lyrics by Oasis, interpreted by Andy Roberts Bonus Track Live A Day In The Life – Lennon / McCartney Live show only, Not recorded

Subscribe in iTunes to the podcast feed using the url

http://andyroberts.me/?feed=podcast Here’s the podcast player for listening online to my Andy Roberts podcast prototype number 2:

You can also download the MP3 audio file which is around 26Mb in size and just under 30 minutes in duration from this link AndyRobertsPodcastprototype2.mp3 The full video file of the show is available over at Ustream.tv where the live podcasting event takes place on Tuesdays at 7.00pm UK time Podcast Prototype No 2 Video Podcast Prototype 2 Show Notes Show notes and information for prototype 2 broadcast and recorded on June 15th 2010. There were five songs performed during this show, including one instrumental, all using the 12 string guitar. Waiting Title: “Waiting” Music and Lyrics by Andy Roberts, first released on The Andy Roberts Tapes

The Nutmeg Tree Title: “The Nutmeg Tree” Music and Lyrics by Andy Roberts, first released on Album 1

Mazet Title: “Mazet” Music and Lyrics by Andy Roberts, first released on The Andy Roberts Tapes

Instrumental Title: “Intrumental” Music by Andy Roberts, first released on The Andy Roberts Tapes

I Shall Be Released Title: “I Shall Be Released” Song and Lyrics by Bob Dylan 1967 Interpretation Andy Roberts