After the Stonewall event yesterday I stayed on in Bath to see CN Lester in concert at the Forum. Technically this wasn’t a CN gig. They were just a part of an event celebrating the work of Bob Dylan, but seeing as I love Dylan too this wasn’t too much of a hardship.

The evening was a mixture of chat and music. It was hosted by Danny Kelly (former editor of the NME) and featured rock journalists, David Hepworth and Dorian Lynskey, both of whom have written extensively about Dylan. Most of their discussion was about Dylan the man, not Dylan the musician or political activist. Dylan certainly is a fascinating figure, being so reclusive that even musicians who have worked with him can’t always claim to have met him.

Kelly had three stories that illustrate this. Firstly, during the Travelling Wilbury’s project, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty were often left waiting for Dylan to turn up so that they could record. Lou Adler, whose kids were friendly with Dylan’s kids, never once met him despite frequent visits to Dylan’s home delivering and collecting children. Raquel Welch reported having dinner with Dylan in Los Angles. She’d dressed up to the nines because hey, date with Bob Dylan, but he wore a hoodie drawn so tight over his face that there was barely room to get the food into his mouth.

Much of this is doubtless because when you are Bob Dylan you have little choice but to protect yourself from the public. I know a few famous writers and understand a bit about fame, but people such as Neil Gaiman and George Martin have only a fraction of the public profile that Dylan has. Back when I was a kid people tended to see Dylan as a messiah.

We did eventually get on to Dylan’s art in the inevitable discussion about the Nobel Prize. Lynskey noted that while Leonard Cohen was a poet first and musician second, agonizing over every line that he wrote, Dylan is a songwriter who chooses words as much for the sound they make as for the literary beauty of his lines.

Of course there was also music. That side of the show was managed by Justin Adams who is rock guitarist. If I tell you that one of his current jobs is playing lead guitar for Robert Plant’s band you shouldn’t need telling just how good he is. He was joined by Sid Griffin, a bluegrass player who was able to throw some light on Dylan’s influences and was very amusing. Also taking part was a young vocalist called Hajar Woodland. She’s got a great voice, though her Dylan covers were very standard.

CN got to play two songs. They were “Just Like A Woman” and “One More Cup of Coffee”. If you are familiar with CN’s music you’ll know that these will have featured amazing vocals and a haunting piano accompaniment. Pleasingly CN also got to talk a bit about why they were there. Growing up with parents who share a love for Shakespeare and Dylan is a splendid sort of formative experience to have. Kelly did manage to use the right pronouns, though he seemed rather uncomfortable with it. I suspect that there were a few false steps backstage.

The headline musical act was Barb Jungr who is apparently famous for doing Dylan covers. Her style is more suited to show tunes than to rock or Angry Singer Songwriter. I loved her as a person. She has great stage presence, told good funny stories, and as a bonus burned with contempt for Trump. Sadly her covers didn’t work for me.

Firstly it seemed to me that the accompanying piano didn’t sound right. It worked perfectly for CN, whose piano sound is deep and sonorous, but not for the lighter, frothier arrangements that Barb had. I have no idea how to express that in musical terms. Obviously with a bunch of different musicians involved, and a one-off show with little time to rehearse, getting things like this right is difficult.

Second, Dylan songs are very much about the rhythm of the words. If you mess with that then the words lose their power. Its like reading a poem and breathing in all the wrong places. Related to that, the words have to be the focus. You can get as fancy as you like in the instrumental breaks, but not with the words, otherwise it becomes all about you and not all about the lyrics. Barb has a great voice, and clearly loved Dylan’s lyrics, but for me her interpretations rather pulled the teeth of the words.

I’ve been chatting to CN about the Dylan covers. Apparently there are no recordings of them. Having heard how good those two were, I’d like to see an entire album of CN Lester Dylan covers. I have ideas. Doubtless that will remain in my imagination. However, the new album, Come Home, will be available later this week. It includes a cover of Bowie’s “Heroes”, which I am very much looking forward to hearing.

All in all it was an enjoyable evening, but there were a couple of sour notes. Firstly CN’s new book, Trans Like Me, was supposed to be available at the gig. Kelly encouraged people to buy it, but it wasn’t there. Whether this was the fault of the publisher, the shippers, or Waterstones, isn’t clear, but I know I wasn’t the only person disappointed not to be able to buy a copy.

Also CN was mysteriously absent from the finale in which all of the other musicians got together to play a few well-loved Dylan songs. Where trans folks are involved you tend to fear the worst, and I was very worried for a while. Thankfully I was able to tweet CN and discovered that they had to rush back to London. Kelly really should have mentioned why CN was absent.

Still, I had a good time. I would have had a better time if I’d had a few younger people there with me. The band tried hard to get the audience to sing along and dance for the finale, but frankly many of the audience looked like they wouldn’t have done so even if they had been 16 rather than 60+. Bath: it is what it is.

There hasn’t been much bloggage, or even social media activity, from me over the holiday period. That’s partly because I have assumed that you lot have better things to do with your time than read about my holiday cooking (which went very well, thank you). However, I have been busy, and mostly not working.

Back in July Sky Arts made television history by being the first TV station to broadcast the whole of Wagner’s Ring Cycle live from the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. There was no way I was going to have the time to watch it live, but I did record the whole thing with the vague intention of watching it over the holidays instead of my usual Lord of the Rings marathon.

Of course one of the things that differentiates Wagner’s epic from Peter Jackson’s is that Jackson is a model of conciseness and brevity in comparison. Der Ring des Nibelungen comprises over 15 hours of opera in four main parts. With the addition of introductory material from host, Stephen Fry, and various Wagner experts the Sky production is over 18 hours long. No way am I that level of couch potato.

Thus far I have worked my way through Das Rheingold and Die Walküre. Those are the two shorter operas. Like Jackson, Wagner got more and more bloated as he went on. Hopefully I will get to the end, because as far as I can see Götterdämmerung is philosophically the most interesting of the four.

My main impression thus far is that the dialog is dreadful, but that’s understandable because it all had to be sung, and what I am seeing is translated from German. Nevertheless the experience is tending to reinforce my deep rooted prejudice that novels are far superior to all other art forms because of the space they allow to develop character.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that the Ring Cycle is a fascinating and incredibly complex work. It is not the sort of thing you can easily comprehend on a single sit through. One of the most obvious examples of this is that at the end of Act 1 of Die Walküre, when Siegmund and Sieglinde disappear off stage to consummate their love, Wagner introduces the leitmotif that he will later use for their son, Siegfried. Once you know this it becomes clear that Wagner is indicating that this is the moment that Siegfried is conceived, but he won’t appear as a character until the next opera in the cycle so you don’t know what that music means when you first hear it.

Incidentally, one thing I do wish Sky had done, but doubtless didn’t have the budget for, is give us an introduction to the various leitmotifs that Wagner uses so that we can listen out for them. But at least they did explain the concept, and explain it brilliantly by using the example of John Williams’ work on Star Wars. Darth Vader’s leitmotif isn’t just used when he comes on screen, it is also used to indicate that his men are up to something in an otherwise unrelated scene.

What Fry and his experts do well is address the primary controversies surrounding the Ring Cycle. First there is Wagner’s person journey from anarchist revolutionary to a vile, old anti-Semite. Then there is Hitler’s co-option of the Ring Cycle as a propaganda tool. Wagner himself seems to have been an awful person, but I also concur with Fry’s assessment that he would have hated Hitler because he hated anyone with that degree of political power. Many present day wannabe demagogues tend to cling to Wagner, presumably because they associate his work with Nazism (hello several senior Tories), but it was interesting to discover that most of the Nazi leaders were bored stupid by opera and resented being dragged along to watch it by their boss. Nigel Farage is, of course, far too boorish to be interested in opera, though by this point Fry was reduced to dropping hints rather than naming names.

The other thing I have found absolutely fascinating about the Ring is the Festspielhaus itself. It is apparently the largest free-standing wooden building in the world. Partly it is wooden for acoustic reasons, but Wagner apparently planned to burn it down after the first few performances so that what was experienced there could never be repeated (and probably, from his point of view, to prevent his perfect creation being debased after his death).

The acoustic design of the building is at least as great a work of genius as the music itself. The orchestra is hidden away in a pit underneath the stage so as to not distract from the visual spectacle. Sound from the orchestra is funneled up onto the stage, and thence reflects back onto the audience, mixing with the singers voices on the way. This is quite different from a traditional opera house where the sound from orchestra and voices both project outwards and mix in the auditorium. A consequence of this is that the singers need to be a fraction of a second behind the orchestra for the whole thing to work. Apparently the acoustic benefits are enormous, though no opera house built since has chosen to copy the design. That might be an issue of expense, of the skill required of the singers, or of the aversion of celebrity conductors to being hidden away where no one but the orchestra can see them.

Finally I am, of course, noting the similarities between Wagner’s story and Tolkien’s. There are many themes in common: the greedy dwarves, the ring, the dragon, the broken sword. One significant difference is that Wagner’s story is full of female characters. That is doubtless in part due to the requirement to balance voice registers, but it is nonetheless welcome. Wotan is the character who ties the story together, but Brünnhilde, even though she doesn’t appear until the second act of her titular opera, is the hero of the tale.