Bob Dylan - the singer-songwriter who inspired the Bard of Ely

Early Bob Dylan songs like Blowin' In The Wind and Times They Are A-changin' had a rawness to them that punched through the popular music that was getting played. The Beatles came to fame singing "She Loves You" but Dylan was asking "How many times must the canon-ball fly before they are forever banned?" It was an entirely different type of song-writing and lyric.

Of course I understood that Dylan had started by copying his hero, Woody Guthrie, but it was as if he took on the mantle of his dying idol and somehow went much further with his compositions. Guthrie was suffering from Huntingdon's Disease and the young Dylan went to visit his hero in hospital before he died.

Bob Dylan once admitted: "I said to myself I was going to be Guthrie's greatest disciple." And this is what he did!

It never mattered to me at all when Dylan went electric but many of the folkies who considered him firmly in the folk tradition couldn't cope with him playing rock music. He was the same singer-songwriter with the same brilliant lyrics.

Some people don't like Bob Dylan's voice but that has never mattered to me at all either. I can hear what he sings and that is what does matter. It's his words that count.

So it was throughout his very long career that it never mattered to me what Bob Dylan was doing. I suppose I was a devoted fan. I faithfully used to get all his albums and I found plenty I loved in them all, including Dylan's Christian period.

Street-Legal that was just before Slow Train Coming and Saved, I have said for me personally was his finest album ever. I was going through a relationship breakdown and traumatic conditions in my life and the desperation in some of Dylan's lyrics and voice hit home to me hard on that record.

Stand-out songs for me from Street-Legal are Changing of the Guards, True Love Tends to Forget and Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat).

Dylan has said in more recent times that he doesn't know where those early songs came from. Neil Young has commented on this in an interview he gave - about how this sort of writing is a gift you cannot own and how it comes and can go and can come back again.

Shot of Love and Infidels were two Bob Dylan albums that were released in the '80s with songs that stand out for me being Every Grain of Sand, Jokerman, Union Sundown and License to Kill.