Joan Baez has said this will be her final tour, so this was less concert than communion, a congregation coming to terms with its collective past. The audience was greying, supportive and eager to join in with It’s All Over Now Baby Blue, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down and The Boxer, the song with which she concluded her 100-minute set.
Whether this extended tour will be her last is another matter – the programme contains a flyer advertising dates in London next year: there could be quite a few final bows. Baez, now 77, has been performing for 60 years and isn’t going quietly.
Baez is 77 and her voice, as she freely admits, is not what it was. That outrageously pure soprano is long gone, replaced by a lower, less reliable instrument, skilfully deployed on her recent album Whistle Down the Wind, a self-conscious statement of survival, her first disc for 10 years and, she says, possibly her last.
Her set was a clever combination of songs from the new disc and classics – Phil Ochs’ glorious There But for Fortune, Bob Dylan’s Farewell Angelina, a powerful rendition of Woody Guthrie’s Deportee (as relevant now as it was 70 years ago, she pointed out), a less successful version of Joe Hill with a curious rolling piano accompaniment by multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell. There was also a slow, more-wistful-than-angry Diamonds & Rust, her great lament for/demolition of her former lover Dylan. It was a tribute to the new songs, including the angry eco-protest Another World and the heartfelt The President Sang Amazing Grace, a modern civil rights song echoing the struggles of the 1960s - recited rather than sung - , that they didn’t pale in that exalted company.
Her protege, Grace Stumberg, accompanied her on Diamonds & Rust, and the power and flexibility of the younger woman’s voice sometimes emphasised the decline of Baez’s own. But that was the point really: none of us are what we were, but we are still standing, still fighting, still singing. “Ten years ago / I bought you some cufflinks / You brought me something / We both know what memories can bring / They bring diamonds and rust,” she sang back in the 1970s. At the Albert Hall, that famous doomed relationship forever receding, “10 years” became “50 years”. It’s been a long, sometimes painful journey, but Baez was here, beautiful and assured to proclaim victory.
