Hey, Mr Tambourine Man

If you've been paying attention at the back you will have noticed that Alicia is a major league Bob Dylan fan. As part of her birthday treats, I agreed to take her to an event organised as part of the 'Off the Shelf' Sheffield book festival called 'Subterranean Homesick Yorkshire Blues', billed as a tribute to Bob Dylan in music, poetry and comedy.

I had forebodings when I saw the crowd of earnest looking folk queuing to get into the back room at the Lescar - an absurdly high proportion of them had beards, ponytails or both, and if the temperature outside hadn't been dropping towards zero I'm sure they would have been wearing sandals as well. Heck, the chap sat next to me was reading a copy of the Guardian whilst drinking his pint of real ale from a tankard. I think we've established the sort of audience we are talking about here.

So, I bought a pint of Timothy Tayloy's Landlord bitter and settled back for the show.

Well, to be positive, the musical bits were quite good, but unfortunately they were few and far between. The rest of the pieces were random bits of poetry and prose, with a tangential connection at best to Mr Zimmerman. The comedy was restricted to one sketch about obsessively collecting bootleg recordings and a couple of weak parodies ("A hard disk is gonna crash and stall" - ho, ho).

Still, at least Alicia enjoyed it, particularly the Bob-O-Meter which was a board at the side of the room with different cd covers stuck on it, so that audience members could arrange them in order of merit, in a similar fashion to the Top Gear cool wall.

I have to say, it wasn't really my cup of tea ...