Live review #13: Like the Night (Rebound)

Dylan's 'Judas' earns multimedia resurrection

Like the Night (Rebound), Burgess Foundation, Manchester, May 17th, 2026

By Simon Warner

ON TUESDAY, May 17th, 1966, Bob Dylan played possibly the second most significant concert of his career, ten months on from that Newport Folk Festival moment that would mark a headline-grabbing shift from acoustic troubadour to Fender-wielding marauder, closing the door on potent yet polite protest and entering a new age of amplification and then some.

Yet, in many ways, the disputes over the meanings of Newport were filled with ambiguous interpretation. The gig that followed the subsequent spring at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall left an imprint, an echo, more focussed and lasting, a tattoo on the mind, as the fanatical loyalty to an earlier Dylan left some followers turning to heated religious language to express their frustration at the man’s artistic turn.

From the sold-out hall (though some ticket holders had already departed the building by then), as Dylan and band tuned up during the rowdily-received electric set of the evening’s second half, came the distinct cry of ‘Judas’, perhaps the greatest insult in the Judeo-Christian lexicon, the name of the apostle who had betrayed Jesus Christ prior to his crucifixion.

Not that the story was as straightforward as that. For decades that followed, and through the bootleg recordings that emerged from that extraordinary occasion, there was a copper-bottomed assumption that this accusatory slur had been made at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Only in the 1990s, when official live releases of the mid-60s period were released to the public, did the sonic archaeologists discover that it had been Manchester, not the capital, playing host to this most jarring of jibes.

Pictured above: Bob Dylan and band, Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 1966. Image: Mark Makin

Yesterday, in the city dubbed Cottonopolis after its nineteehth century industrial boom and barely 600 yards from the venue where ‘Judas’ originally resonated, a healthy crowd convened to commemorate the 60th anniversary, to the very day, of that crucial episode in Dylan’s multi-faceted biography.

Staged at the Burgess Foundation, named in honour of Anthony Burgess, a famed literary son of the city, the event had an important hook: the re-issue of a volume on the Dylan concert by CP Lee, the late Mancunian writer, academic and musician, an individual who attended the Free Trade Hall bash as a mid-teenager and initially published his first-hand and defining account of the drama, Like the Night, in 1996.

Christopher Paul Lee was a familiar figure about town for many years. He also had impressive credentials when it came to his Beat interests. He MC’d my own Ginsberg event Still Howling in 2015 and then provided the music-centred keynote at the European Beat Studies Network conference in the city the following year. He also had a Lord Buckley tribute act which he toured. His bands, rockers Greasy Bear then satirists Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias, were active performers over various eras.

But the Lee book launch, with his widow Pam present, was only part of this timely celebration. Ian Daley, who leads independent publishing house Route, the hand behind the Lee re-release, had also conceived a visual and aural re-staging of the legendary performance through a painstakingly-forged multimedia presentation.

Pictured above: CP Lee, writer, musician, academic, 1950-2020

Using a recorded soundtrack and syncing it to black-and-white stills and sections of coloured video, interspersed with quotations from the Lee text, the audience were immersed in an evocative re-creation of that highly-charged night: Dylan intense but mute – not a word proffered– during his opening acoustic foray, then utterly committed to his task, backed by his five-man band the Hawks and formidable amp stacks, after the interval, despite the luke warm, slow hand-clapping restiveness of those in the stalls and circle, with the lightning strike of ‘Judas’ imminent.

In the darkened space of the Burgess, an intimate, enclosed affair, I felt more than a shiver of the power, the resistance, coursing through the head, the body, the eyes, of the principal player, whether guitar-jousting with the spiky blues lines of Robbie Roberston or energised by the organ fills of Garth Hudson when he took the piano. For those of us who have revelled in the new rock for the last six decades, this was the simmering eruption of a cultural revolution, skilfully resurrected here through film and words and photos.

Plus the photographs have their own chequered background. Mark Makin, 17 at the time, and friend Paul Kelly were in the fourth row with cameras in hand, frenetically snapping Dylan, fortuitously illuminated by a spot, thereby capturing a sequence of historic images that would later appear in CP Lee’s book – and not without some controversy it should be said.

Makin himself was present at the Burgess and, before the multimedia package rolled on screen, told the rapt listeners that he and school chum had only captured their unique and remarkable record because official tour photographer Barry Feinstein had not turned up for the Free Trade Hall date. He had business in London and flagged up to Dylan’s management that nothing of consequence would arise in that northern outpost so he wouldn’t be showing up!

Editor’s note: CP Lee’s Like the Night (Rebound): Bob Dylan and the Road to Manchester Free Trade Hall is published by Route. The late Andy Kershaw’s radio documentary on the epic search for the person who actually shouted ‘Judas’ can be accessed here.