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Bob Dylan’s special relationship with Ireland began in 1984

Even before he takes to the stage in Belfast next Wednesday, the question being asked is: will the 84-year-old ever be back?

Bob Dylan at Slane Castle in 1984, with former president Michael D Higgins in the crowd. Photographs: Peter Thursfield/ Terry Thorp/Getty Images

Mon Nov 17 2025 - 06:00 • 7 MIN READ

In May of 1966, Bob Dylan stands on an Irish stage for the first time, giving the audience songs they may not want to hear.

There will be slow derisory handclapping and increasing catcalls – although the booing and walkouts and first shouts of “Judas!” are still a few days away.

The opening half, played solo and acoustic, is reasonably well received, even if gone are the soft ballads and protest songs, Dylan’s lyrics now the pure streams of consciousness of his Desolation Row and Visions Of Johanna.

At age 24, dressed in a mod-cut suit and pointed boots, the ghost of electricity howling in the bones of his face, something is happening here.

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The Adelphi Cinema on Abbey Street has already hosted The Beatles and The Rolling Stones in previous years, but it’s not ready to hear this.

Not at this high volume. When Dylan returns for the second half with his five-piece backing band known as The Hawks, a black Fender Telecaster strapped over his shoulder, all hell breaks loose.

“The Night Of The Big Letdown” ran the headline in the Evening Herald, which concluded that Dylan’s show was “brutal”. He moves on to the ABC Theatre in Belfast the following night, and by the time he reaches the Manchester Free Trade Hall a week later most of the audience has heard enough.

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“Judas!” shouts one member, just as Dylan is tuning up his Telecaster for a closing number.

“I don’t believe you,” Dylan replies. “You’re a liar ...”

Bob Dylan pictured performing at BBC TV Centre, in 1965. Photograph: Val Wilmer/ Redferns

With that Dylan turns to his band and snarls, “PLAY F***ING LOUD”, and they break into Like A Rolling Stone.

Two months later, back in the US and wired-to-the-bone fragile from burning the candle at both ends and holding a blow torch to the middle, Dylan crashes his Triumph motorcycle near his home in Woodstock. He doesn’t resume touring for another eight years.

His 1966 tour is now considered a seminal moment in music history, Dylan’s Manchester show, mistakenly labelled The Royal Albert, becoming the single most-desired bootleg in rock’n’roll.

Almost 60 years since the Adelphi, after playing another 32 Irish dates in 16 different venues – from Dublin to Cork, Belfast to Galway, Limerick to Kilkenny, Slane to Tramore (plus one cancellation in Millstreet) – the 84-year-old Dylan returns to Ireland for five phone-free shows this month. Two in Belfast, two in Killarney, and one in Dublin.

And just like in 1966, he’ll be giving the audience songs they may not want to hear. It won’t matter. All five shows promptly sold out.

It’s the most shows Dylan will have performed in the one visit, previously playing only one or two Irish dates on the same tour. Even before he takes to the stage in Belfast next Wednesday, the question being asked is: will he ever be back?

'Bob Dylan didn’t really go to see anyone. He was pretty enigmatic.' Photograph: Fred Tanneau/AFP/Getty

His 33 previous live performances here have peaked and troughed between the sensational and the shambolic, depending on the audience point of view.

Ironically, the only time Dylan gives the Irish audience all the songs they want to hear is on his second visit here, to Slane Castle in 1984. And there is still a riot.

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Slane comes at the end of his 1984 European outdoor tour, and for some reason is scheduled for the Sunday evening, July 8th. Some of the estimated 48,000 audience arrives the evening before, and when gardaí try to break up a row in a local pub, the row rolls on to the streets, wrecking the place. The mood is further darkened when a Dublin teenager drowns while trying to swim across the Boyne on the morning of the gig.

Despite the chaos, Dylan comes out wearing dark eyeliner and a leopard print shirt and delivers a three-hour tour de force, joined on stage by Van Morrison and a young Bono. So begins a special relationship with Ireland.

The Slane gig is promoted by Armagh-born impresario Jim Aiken, who’d made his name on the showband circuit, along with Bill Graham, the giant American concert promoter, and Aiken Promotions – now headed up by Jim’s son Peter – have been behind most of Dylan’s Irish shows since.

It’s the first time he’ll play Belfast’s Waterfront Hall, an intimate 2,200-seater, and his first time he’ll play the Gleneagle Arena in Killarney. If that seems a strange choice of venue, Dylan has been to Killarney before, in 2003, staying in the Killarney Park Hotel on the night he was meant to play at the Green Glens Arena in Millstreet in Co Cork.

I want to send shout out to Shane MacGowan, one of our favourite artists
— Bob Dylan, 2022

Only Dylan’s voice is properly gone, not helped by his rousing performance at The O2 in Dublin the night before, and on doctor’s advice he cancels, citing laryngitis. It’s one of the very rare cancellations throughout out his entire career.

It’s 30 years since Dylan ended his 1995 European spring tour at The Point Depot in Dublin, and my first experience of seeing him perform live.

In the couple of years since borrowing Highway 61 Revisited from my younger brother – then his copy of Robert Shelton’s biography, No Direction Home – Dylan had become an obsession. In the 30 or so times seeing him on stage since, there is still nothing to surpass that revelatory moment of live introduction.

Because Dylan invariably begins or ends his European tours in Ireland, he’s likely to be hanging here around for a couple of days too. Which also affords me the chance to deftly inquire about where he is staying in Dublin in 1995 (Stephen’s Hall Hotel on Leeson Street), before gently approaching him for an autograph the morning after.

Some of my Dylan highlights in the last 30 years include the Botanic Gardens in Belfast in 1998, when six songs in, he delivers a brilliant cover of The Newry Highwayman. Then Vicar Street in Dublin in September 2000, a warm-up for The Point the following night, when his encore starts with Things Have Changed, which has just won him an Oscar.

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Also at The O2 in Dublin in 2011, when he finishes his regular set with Ballad of a Thin Man, turning up the delay on his microphone.

Bob Dylan performs live in Rotterdam, Holland during his Still On The Road tour. Photograph: Gijsbert Hanekroot/ Redferns

Or more recently, armed with his Nobel Prize for Literature from 2016, he shifts between moods and plays the crooner at the 3Arena in May 2017, still perfectly capable of surprise.

“A lot of people can’t stand touring, but to me it’s like breathing, I do it because I’m driven to do it,” Dylan told Rolling Stone magazine in 2012, when asked why he still tours incessantly. “I’ve always loved to travel and play my songs, meet new people and see different places ... Touring to me has never been any kind of hardship. It’s a privilege.”

In his now 68 years of performing live (he first played Hibbing High School in Minnesota in 1957), Dylan has rarely been the same live act twice. Although on this latest leg of his Rough and Rowdy Ways world Wide Tour/2021-2024 (readily extended in Dylan fashion into 2025) the set list is carved into stone, the audience engagement more minimal than it’s ever been.

He’s already over halfway through his 26-date, nine-country European tour, and the 17-song set list hasn’t changed.

It includes nine songs from Rough and Rowdy Ways, released in June 2020, his 39th studio album and first original work since Tempest in 2012, and unquestionably among his wordiest and worthiest, with enough repeated turns of phrase to do the great philosophers proud.

He’s still well able to shake-up his set list when he wants – his US dates this summer with Willie Nelson on the The Outlaw Music Festival provides ample evidence of that, as does his rousing cover of Bo Diddley’s I Can Tell at Farm Aid in September.

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Some younger audience members may well be drawn in this time around in part perhaps by the Timothée Chalamet portrayal in the Dylan film biopic A Complete Unknown, from earlier this year. These Irish shows however will be a quiet study of the 84-year-old Dylan, playing his own songs exactly the way he wants them to be heard.

Not that Dylan isn’t acutely aware of where he is playing.

“I want to send shout out to Shane MacGowan, one of our favourite artists,” Dylan says towards the end of his last show here, in November 2022. “Fairytale of New York is one of our favourite songs, sing it every Christmas.”

Dylan finishes every set now with Every Grain of Sand, and if his harmonica playing on that number doesn’t still get you after all these years then nothing ever will.

Bob Dylan plays the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on November 19^th/20^th, the INEC Gleneagle Arena in Killarney on November 23^rd/24^th, and the 3Arena in Dublin on November 25^th. All shows are sold out. Dylan superfan Ian O’Riordan was named Sportswriter of the year at the Irish Journalism Awards last week