DYLAN: Don’t look back … or his paths to glory?

Some bash Bob’s 80s gospel period as God-awful but a recent retrospective shows it was a spirited time of passion and drama…

At the age of nearly 80 His Royal Bobness of Dylan is still creating controversy as his latest album Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 13, 1979-1981, is released

Almost 40 years down the line since his gospel period – which lasted just two years and consisted of three official albums – people still say that he lost the plot and certainly after world tours and concerts where Dylan preached and hectored audiences and listeners alike his career nose-dived.

He was derided, laughed at and written off.

Yet, he is now accepted as the funkiest pensioner in the world – a former chain-smoking, hard drinking real-life rock ‘n’ roll survivor.
Trouble No More, an eight-CD set, is full of revelations – six masterful versions of Slow Train, plus 14 unreleased songs, such as Making a Liar Out of Me. There is also a one-hour film with  footage from 1980.