London, 1962, and one of the coldest winters on record. Only the residual heat from the power stations at Battersea and Bankside kept the Thames from freezing over. The year ended with the city covered in snow and on one particularly cold December day, a curly-haired young man, diminutive and scruffy, made his way up to the top of Vogue House in Mayfair and hammered on the door of Studio Three.
Bob Dylan, aged 21 from Duluth, Minnesota, had arrived. He was, to borrow his own phrase, a complete unknown and far from Greenwich Village where he was making his name on the basement bar folk circuit. In 1961 he had hitched his way from Wisconsin to make his debut at the Café Wha? on MacDougal Street, where a basket would be passed around for payment. This was his first trip overseas.
“Honestly, I had no idea who he was. None of us did. I was into free-form modern jazz, Thelonious Monk and Gerry Mulligan,” recalled Peter Rand, one of the roster of Vogue photographers, which included David Bailey and Helmut Newton. “I got him, I suppose, because no one else knew what to do with him and I was a safe pair of hands. It only lasted 45 minutes.”
As it turned out, he was in London not to sing – things were never that simple with Bob Dylan – but to act in a BBC Sunday night play, The Madhouse on Castle Street, a kitchen-sink drama, fashionably unglamorous and set in a boarding house. Dylan had a lead role, an enigmatic busker. Director Philip Saville had seen him in a New York club that autumn – on the recommendation of WH Auden – and was mesmerised.
One thing quickly became clear during rehearsals: Bob Dylan couldn’t act. His costar, David Warner, recalled Dylan “gave the impression of being hopelessly lost. No one had the slightest idea why he had been sent there. When he started singing, it all became clear.” Saville tweaked the script and Dylan closed it singing, on one of its earliest outings, the anthemic “Blowin’ in the Wind”. In 1968 the BBC wiped the tapes. And Vogue never ran its exclusive pictures.
Next month Timothée Chalamet, who can act and sing, takes on the role of the young Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which culminates in 1965 with the battle that raged between folkie purists and more broad-minded progressives. When Dylan ditched his acoustic guitar and went electric the sparks flew, a new spokesman for a new generation emerged and music would never be the same again.
A Complete Unknown will be in cinemas on 17 January 2025
