Bob Dylan, Wembley Arena, London

Dylan's looking very dapper tonight, the colour-scheme of his black suit and white cowboy hat outfit echoed by the black-and-white Stratocaster slung casually from his shoulder. Yes, that's right: after four years spent behind an electric keyboard, Bob's finally back where most of his fans want him, toting a guitar stage-front. A pity, then, that this moment wasn't marked by a more auspicious set-opener than "Cat's in the Well", an unremarkable rocker from one of his least satisfying albums (the dreary Under the Red Sky).

Things improve with a choppy, funk-inflected arrangement of "It Ain't Me, Babe" and a rolling, swingy version of "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues". Dylan seems energised by the performance, his pipe-cleaner legs twisting imperceptibly atop his high-heeled Chelsea boots, as if inhabited by some tiny fragment of James Brown's cavalier showman spirit.

He doesn't continue for long with the guitar, but before he stalks back behind the keyboard, there's time for another run through "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)", its lyrics apparently comprised of devastating sound-bite slogans, each not so much sung as bitten off bitterly: "Money doesn't talk, it swears"; "Even the president of the United States sometimes has to stand naked"; and the line perhaps most pertinent to Dylan's own case, "He not busy being born is busy dying". For compared with the rote, note-perfect back-catalogue trawls that constitute the shows of Dylan's contemporaries, his own restless reinterpretations and rearrangements never allow even his most popular material to be corroded by familiarity.

That's fine for oldies like "Highway 61 Revisited", "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" and "Like a Rolling Stone". But this tour is the first since Modern Times brought Dylan the distinction of being the oldest living US chart-topper, and so much of tonight's show is taken up with material from that album, of which neither he nor his band have yet had time to grow tired. "When the Deal Goes Down" and "Spirit on the Water" is greeted with surprising warmth by an audience reared, one imagines, on much sterner, more astringent stuff. And judging by the howls of protest when Dylan gets to the lines "You think I'm over the hill / You think I'm past my prime", there'll be enough of a crowd to keep his Never-Ending Tour rolling for another few years yet.