Cat Power announces her new live album, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert

Recorded on 5 November 2022 at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert sees the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall delivering a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time.

Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966 – but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabelled bootleg – the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing the ire of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock and roll.

“More than the work of any other songwriter, Dylan’s songs have spoken to me, and inspired me since I first began hearing them at 5 years old,” said Marshall. “When singing "She Belongs To Me in the past, sometimes I turned it into a first-person narrative – ’I am an artist, I don’t look back.’ I really identified with it like that,” said Marshall. “But for the show at Royal Albert Hall, I of course, sang it the way it was originally written - with the respect for the composition…and the great composer.”

In a nod to the most storied moment from the original concert, an audience member cries out “Judas!” just before “Ballad of a Thin Man” starts; Marshall then responds by serenely invoking the name of Jesus. “It was something impulsive. I wasn’t expecting the audience to recreate their part of the original show as well, but then I wanted to set the record straight – in a way, Dylan is a deity to all of us who write songs,” she adds.