Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian Illustration: R Fresson/The Guardian Sun 23 May 2021 09.00 EDT Last modified on Sun 23 May 2021 09.44 EDT When I first properly listened to Bob Dylan, I was 10 years old. Each Saturday, Radio 1 aired a series titled 25 Years of Rock, based on news and music spanning the years 1955 to 1979. And that week, in among archive clips of Lyndon Johnson, Harold Wilson, the Vietnam war and whatever else had happened in 1965, there was the sudden whip-crack of a snare drum followed by six minutes of music unlike anything I had ever heard: a great cascading noise, led by a voice that, as the US composer Michael Pisaro later wrote, somehow managed to be simultaneously âcompassionate, tragic ⦠vengeful, gleeful, ironic, weary, spectral, [and] haranguingâ.