Release date: October 1975. Label: Columbia. Producer: Bob Dylan

Poet, protest singer, folk-rocker, psychedelic troubadour, evangelist, song & dance man, spokesman for an entire generation: there are a million Bob Dylans in the Naked City but perhaps only one truly naked Bob Dylan – and he’s to be found on Blood On The Tracks.

Dylan’s most unconvincing protest is that this 1975 album was not autobiographical. For sure, he may have fictionalised some of the facts, but the listener wouldn’t even need to be aware that the record followed the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes, to appreciate that the blood on these tracks comes straight from the heart. The truth is in here. These songs of love and loss and anger and despair don’t lie: this, indisputably, is the bard stripped bare.