By my mid-teens my musical interests were moving away from the singles chart and I was looking for something more substantial. Bob Dylan provided an answer.

My friend Paul introduced me to Dylan, whom I knew mainly by reputation as the bloke who had sung It’s A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall before it appeared on Bryan Ferry’s first solo album.

I had never listened to a Dylan album myself. Then, in early 1975, Blood On The Tracks came out. Infected by my friend’s enthusiasm, I began to listen to Dylan properly. Before long I was fully immersed.

I never became one of those hardcore Dylan fans who study his lyrics, and I may not even have heard his whole repertoire to this day. But I’ve heard most of it over the years, and I’ve seen him live four or five times – once in Japan. I’ve even read his book, Chronicles.

Anyway, Blood On The Tracks was the first Dylan album I got to know, and it’s still my favourite.

And although I like all the tracks, looking them up now – especially Tangled Up In Blue, Idiot Wind, Shelter From The Storm and Simple Twist Of Fate – my favourite has always been the nine-minute epic Lily, Rosemary and the Jack Of Hearts.

It’s a miniature Western, set in the cabaret of a frontier town, where a domestic drama plays out amid the gamblers and good-time girls while a bank robbery takes place next door.

The characters are familiar stereotypes – an outlaw called the Jack Of Hearts, Big Jim the owner of the town’s diamond mine, his long-suffering wife Rosemary and his lover Lily, and the Hanging Judge, who is always drunk.

There’s a shooting and a stabbing and a hanging and and we never do find out what happened to the Jack of Hearts after his gang crack the safe and flee the town. It gallops along at a relentless pace and I could listen to it over and over again, all nine minutes of it.

The songs I like best by Dylan tend to be the long ones. My other big favourite is the 16-minute Highlands, from his 1997 album Time Out Of Mind, and I love the the 17-minute Murder Most Foul, about the Kennedy assassination, from last year’s majestic Rough And Rowdy Ways.