Bob Dylan’s very weird adventure in Camden: ‘Blood in My Eyes’
There are great musical cities all over the world. Berlin, New York, and of course, London. But within those stand pockets of culture, bursting at the seams of the neighbourhoods they inhabit. Perhaps the most historic of them all was one made famous by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s.
The words “folk revival” always subconsciously roll off the tongue whenever Greenwich Village is mentioned. That small Manhattan neighbourhood, centred around the cobbled streets of the city’s lower West Side, was home to a definitive moment in music history. A moment probably defined best by a young Bob Dylan, who arrived with a notebook full of poems and an old acoustic guitar hanging off his back.
Those few years in the early 1960s forever made Greenwich Village one of music’s most important geographical locations. It is that sense of concentrated genius that makes New York, much like London, a never-ending landscape of interest. Because both cities are more than just their centralised areas, they are neighbourhoods that foster the next great generation of artistic icons.
So what craggy suburb in London boasts the sort of history that rivals the reputation of Greenwich Village? Well for better or worse, it would be hard to look past Camden. To those music fans in the know, it shares a similar quality to Greenwich Village, whereby it’s hard to utter its name without conjuring up a catalogue of musical imagery. In Camden’s case, it’s the monochromatic and sleazy landscape of millennial indie.
“Indie sleaze” or “landfill indie”, whatever you prefer, shone brightest in those early days of the millennium and shouted loudest in Camden. The Libertines, The Vaccines, and of course, Amy Winehouse, all rose to prominence while playing in bars in NW1 and have since left a legacy that will be remembered for decades to come.
But Pete Doherty wasn’t the first to bashfully stumble around Camden Lock, wearing a trilby. Ten years earlier, Bob Dylan had arrived at the neighbourhood, quietly creating hysteria one signature at a time. In an interview with Far Out, Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart told the story of when Dylan decided to randomly film a music video in North London, without any worry about the stir he would cause.
Steward said, “Dylan rang me late one night in London. He’d arrived in London, it was about midnight, and we chatted and he said, ‘Hey, let’s, let’s, let’s make a film tomorrow. Let’s do it in Camden Lock’. And I was half asleep. I was trying to say, well, Camden Lock, is open on the weekend, and he says, ‘No man, it’s gonna be great. We’ll go’.”
Perhaps undeterred by the craze his own stardom would cause, the pair continued on, trying to find that essence of what once was in Greenwich Village.
Stewart added, “So I said, ‘Okay, stick this top hat on and we’ll just go down Camden Town and we’ll film you walking through the street with his top hat and see what the reactions of people are'”.
He highlighted how they just decided to go in sans protection, walking around like the regular folk, noting, “Now, he didn’t have any bodyguard or any security or anything, and obviously I was pretty well known, and obviously Dylan was, but I think people thought they’d seen a ghost, and that was a great reaction on film. So it was eventually made into this video called ‘Blood in my Eyes’.”
Watch the full video of Dylan’s day out in Camden below.
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