I can believe that his voice might be somewhat shot at the age of 64. But would it really kill him to open his lungs just once, and bring the house down with a proper Bob Dylan “aaahhh!!!”? If you tell me it would, you’re a liar I don’t believe you.. Back in the day, it was a bracing blast of dissonance, as much of a battle-call as The Jesus and Mary Chain’s feedback howl. Nowadays, doddering around onstage, he can actually carry a tune.Would that this were true of Dylan’s vocals.

He rattles off every line in a veryfastmonotonethatgoes upanoctaveattheEND. The drumbeat that signals “Like A Rolling Stone” still feels like a gunshot, and the crowd are having none of this eccentric scansion nonsense, singing the “proper” version regardless.As he and his band follow their Hendrix-influenced finale of “All Along The Watchtower” with a curtain call, it occurs to me that he hasn’t sung a verse all night. cut, “Get Together”, she romps through “Everybody”, a very old song which she sang back in ‘83, and she’s gone: all that fuss for five tracks.”I’m not in good shape,” she offers by way of apology, “I don’t like falling off horses.”s.price independent.co.uk. How does it feel? How does it feel? How does it feel to be not on your own with no direction home, but to be onstage in front of several kazillion Mancunians, some of whom are doubtless here because of the buzz around the recent Martin Scorsese documentary, some of whom are doubtless here just to say they’ve seen Baahb Dylan, the legend from the Rock’n'Roll Hall Of Fame, but all of whom have paid upwards of £30 to be here and are therefore deserving of a little respect… and to afford them next-to-none? I’m not saying this was a terrible show. It was, after all, Bob Dylan singing Bob Dylan songs, and that, like Marmite, has its own special love/hate appeal.

As he writes in Chronicles of his early days playing in Greenwich Village: “I’d either drive people away or they’d come in closer to see what it was all about There was no in-between. There were a lot of better singers and better musicians around these places, but there wasn’t anybody close in nature to what I was doing.” Which is true, but doesn’t make sense of the fact that now he’s surrounded himself with people who can play: a team of men in grey who can play anything from pedal steel to double bass, and turn “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way And I’ll Go Mine” into sleepy 12-bar blues, and “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues (Again)” into a ragtime jazz stroll.
It’s disappointing that Dylan’s learned to play the harmonica properly. It teaches you to never take no for an answer.”After one final Confessions… “Don’t throw clothes at me,” she quips when someone chucks a T-shirt:”I don’t put shit on.

I take shit off.” Thankfully, she’s all talk.”Hung Up” isn’t the only derivative track on Confessions…. “Future Lovers” (unplayed tonight) has an outrageous lift from “I Feel Love”, while “Let It Will Be” (sic) echoes “I Wanna Be Your Dog”. Singing it tonight, she struts out onto a catwalk made of upturned plasma screens – yes, Madonna has more money than God and, yes, thank you for all the free champagne – and writhes and screams on the floor, to acknowledge the debt to Iggy.”I Love New York” could offend the locals, with the line “Paris and London you can keep”, but she carefully explains herself beforehand: “I love London. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t live here…” (Er, doesn’t she live in Wiltshire?) “But New York is a state of mind It taught me how to survive. Tonight, sensibly, she’s in crushed-velvet jodhpurs, knee-length boots and tank-top. Then there are those who scream “Mum, put them away!”, who wonder whether her flicky Charlie’s Angels hair is grey beneath the dye, and who suffer unwelcome images of Mrs Merton doing aerobics.Even her old buddy Sacha Baron-Cohen – who once (as Ali G in her “Music” video) said “Me definitely would” – now (as Borat at the MTV Europe Awards) says: “It was very courageous of MTV to start the show with a genuine transvestite – he looked very convincing.”You think that’s harsh? Madonna – whose always-ambiguous contribution to feminism was to assert a woman’s right to assertively sell her own sexuality (as opposed to having it sold on her behalf by men) – surely knows better than anyone that if you live by the visual image, you die by it.

In the world at large, however, opinion is divided.When she bends over in the video to “Hung Up” (the “Gimme Gimme Gimme”-sampling hit which only makes you crave the Abba original), there are those who coo that she looks “amazing for her age” (47). But can we? Can we really forget the dreadful wannabe-aristo who proudly wears fur, claims that shooting pheasants helps her “meditate”, and appealed against the Countryside Rights of Way Act to prevent riff-raff from rambling on her land? Can we really forget the cringe-inducing performer who charged £150 to see her murder John Lennon’s (already horrid) “Imagine” in front of cheesy images of little Israeli boys playing football with little Palestinian boys? (Sorry Elton, but whether or not she sang or mimed was the least of her crimes.) Can we really forget the pseud who, circa 1990, began believing her own hype, and now evangelises for the stupid Kabbalah fad? (I own a book called the I Hate Madonna Handbook which disses her for exemplifying trashy Low Culture; if anything, the real reason to hate Madonna is that she isn’t trashy enough, languishing in a horrid middlebrow middle ground.) Can we erase all that from our minds and see her, once more, as the likeable, playful Madonna from the days of puppy fat, lacey ribbons and coloured bangles?When the back wall splits opens to reveal her striking a “Vogue” pose in leather jacket and shades inside a mirrored alcove and 1,500 people wet themselves, the answer would seem to be yes. Madonna herself is mercifully low in the mix, and she’s been persuaded to sing in a lower, less intrusive register (the nails-down-a-blackboard shrillness of “Ray Of Light” has gone).So, Madonna’s rolling back the years. feels like a record Donna Summer might have made for Casablanca in 1977, or Desireless for CBS France in 1987. Tonight, tucked away stage-left in a white tux, he “mixes” the musicians from a console, like a DJ.Pitched midway between Moroder disco and melancholic Europop, Confessions… Her new album, Confessions Of A Dancefloor, is her least appalling for a while, and this is largely because she’s returned to her gay disco roots (it’s telling that this time around she’s talking to Attitude magazine).After American Life bombed (by her standards), it seems that her musical director Stuart Price of superb synth-funksters Les Rythmes Digitales – whose fans will regret the fact that Price has been too busy with Madonna to make a new LRD record this millennium – has been let loose to fully unleash his electro-disco vision. (In reality, the floor was doubtless half-filled with bored girls in puffball skirts waiting for her to hurry up and finish so they could carry on dancing to Kajagoogoo, and quite right too.) Twenty-two years later, she’s back to do it again It’s a timely return to the scene, in many ways.