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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week, we are celebrating the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan.

I'm very privileged to be joined by Andrew Motion, the former poet Lorish and long-standing Dylan fan,

and by the man often described as the king of the Dylanologists, Clinton Halen,

whose new book is the first in a two-part projected biography of his Bobness, which is called

the double life of Bob Dylan a restless hungry feeling. Welcome both. At the risk of starting

with a question that's a bit too general, what's so great about Bob Dylan? You go first, Andrew.

Really? Thank you very much.

Well, there is no single answer to that, Sam.

I mean by that, not only that he's a very multifaceted kind of genius,

but also that everybody, I shouldn't speak for Clinton in this,

but it seems to me that almost everybody who has this

sort of affection for Dylan feels it in a peculiarly intimate way, so they can only answer it

for themselves rather than, as you say, in the more general terms. For me, it comes really under

those two headings, I suppose. One is thinking about what he's managed to do as an artist,

which is to crystallise and at the same time resurrect an entire tradition of American

and actually international, but originally American folk music

in order to connect it with other kinds of music and make it universal.

And to combine that resurrection and the extraordinary elaboration

of those traditions through his own strictly musical genius with writing words to go with it that

are really, in my opinion, unparalleled in their interest, complexity, entertainment value,

...