Cat Power captures much of Bob Dylan’s original magic in her cover of Ballad Of A Thin Man from her song-for-song note-for-note recreation of his 1966 concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

The last time I saw Bob Dylan live, with Neil Young at Hyde Park in 2019, this old chestnut was the song with which he opened his set – though his characteristically “unusual” rearrangement meant it took a while for everyone to notice.

Cat Power returns it to its original form in this version from her new album, a song-for-song note-for-note recreation of Dylan’s 1966 concert at the Royal Albert Hall. That’s the one where he shocked his folk fans by “going electric” halfway through.

Dylan was already electric when I first discovered him in the mid-Seventies with Blood On The Tracks, but Ballad Of A Thin Man, a bitter diatribe against a nosy journalist that’s dripping with sarcasm, came out ten years earlier on Highway 61 Revisited.

Having made my acquaintance with Bob via that mid-Seventies trilogy of Planet Waves, Blood On The Tracks and Desire, it would be several more years before I belatedly discovered his mid-Sixties trilogy of Blonde On Blonde, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited.

When I heard about Cat Power’s tribute to that famous concert, I initially thought it sounded like a peculiarly pointless sort of hommage, but listening to it changed my mind completely.

Honestly, I could have picked any track from it. I was going to choose Tell Me Momma, a sprightly jangle that’s the first electric number in the set, because I’ve never heard it before. Apparently Dylan never recorded it either, and never played it live again.

But I just love Ballad Of A Thin Man, with those melodic piano chords, and that rumbling organ, and the spite in the vocal delivery, which Chan Marshall captures perfectly in her faithful interpretation.