Screams for Dylan’s songs of love and heartbreak — review

Any muddled Bobcats present at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London to see Dylan were in for a surprise. The preponderance of teenage girls was the first sign that something might be amiss. Then there was the large lit-up heart sign at the back of the stage, glowing white, red and, when things got sad, blue.

Finally there was the identity of Dylan herself: aka Natasha Woods, a 23-year-old from Suffolk currently making a name for herself in the sharp-elbowed hustle of UK pop. “I really hope no one came here expecting a Bob Dylan gig,” she announced from the stage. Cue quizzical looks from the teenagers. Who?

The new Dylan has a growing fan base with the kind of devotees who queue outside a venue for hours in order to get to the front. Last year she signed a major label deal, supported fellow Suffolkian Ed Sheeran at Wembley Stadium and released a debut mixtape that charted in the UK top 20. She gave a double fist pump as she told us about a BBC Radio 1 DJ’s support for her latest single. For all the novelty of TikTok and so on, the music-biz treadmill of constant gigging, broadcast patronage and new releases isn’t so different from the 1960s. The screaming sounds the same too.

Dylan takes her stage name from what she would have been called had she been a boy. Her father — present in the audience and serenaded with a “Happy Birthday” — plied his offspring’s impressionable ears with AC/DC and Aerosmith when she was small. This dadrock gift was catalysed into songcraft by her discovery of Taylor Swift when she was 15. The result, on the first of two nights at the Empire, was a singer in hard-rock garb with an electric guitar performing Swift-style songs about love’s entanglements. She was accompanied by two other musicians, Rosie Botterill on lead guitar and drummer Connor Hopkins. The live music was supplemented by pre-recorded backing tracks.

“Nineteen” was preceded by Dylan hushing the venue so a couple at the foot of the stage could conduct a successful marriage proposal. (“Oh my God!” a voice cried in high excitement behind me, “I’ve never seen a proposal before!”) None of the songs’ scenarios ended that way. Instead, they dramatised earlier stages of romance, a youthful procession of infatuations and heartbreak.

The heart-shaped light went blue for “Home Is Where the Heart Is”, a lament about the loneliness of life on the pop treadmill. But mostly it flashed red or white as Dylan sang surging pop-rock anthems with confiding verses and singalong choruses. She was an engaging performer, one moment projecting the un-Dylanesque but very Swiftian quality of likeability, the next throwing flamboyant guitar-heroine poses. A brief setlist of barely an hour dashed by, a stepping stone towards the next and no doubt bigger stage of a burgeoning career.

★★★☆☆

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