If Barb Jungr lost the ability to sing she could make a living as a stand-up. There are few comics who could get Captain Kirk’s version of Tambourine Man, Victoria Beckham and garden centres into a yarn about Dylan - let alone a highly acclaimed interpreter of his songs.
Jungr was almost two people. Rochdale lass, glad to be back from the States - “Where I can only do an hour because people have no attention span” - glad to be home among friends who sang happy birthday to her and heckled her about bus passes. And then, as soon as she started singing, internationally acclaimed cabaret star, described by Time Out New York, as “one of the very best nightclub singers in the world”. Jungr puts her own unique stamp on Dylan’s work, deconstructing classics such as It Ain’t Me Babe or The Times They Are a Changin’ and breathing a new, more nuanced, often jazz-tinged life into them.
Accompanied by the excellent Jenny Carr on keyboards, her beautiful renditions of classics such as Sara, or her powerful and moving encore of With God On Our Side, gave feelings to Dylan’s poetry that his scratchy, nasal style could never convey.
Much of the material was from her second album of Dylan’s songs, Man In The Long Black Coat. “Is the song about death?” she asked. “Or just a man in a long black coat? I know one thing for sure, Brighton’s full of them.”
It was that ability to also demystify the great man, in a no-nonsense Northern style, to reveal him as a flawed human like the rest of us, that gave added depth to her versions of some of his finest work.
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