We could have warned them, of course, but many people in this good-humoured capacity crowd had doubtlessly come to the Cat capital of the world to hear His Royal Bobness sleepwalk his way through faithful cover versions of his current chart-friendly Essential collection.

You could almost feel their incomprehension during the opening few songs, as they tried to reconcile their memory of recordings heard a thousand times with a dodgy sound and Bob’s croak spectacularly failing the Benylin commercial voice-over audition.

Those more familiar with Dylan’s modus operandi know that he has latterly treated the recorded versions of his songs as mere rough demos and starting points from which he walks a tightrope of adventurous reinvention from which he sometimes topples off. The Kilkenny version of ‘Desolation Row’, for instance, with its rushed, compressed lines, sometimes took the concept of artistic reinterpretation to wilfully pointless extremes.