One shot: Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust

Just home from seeing Joan Baez at the Royal Festival Hall. We sauntered up a bit late so missed the beginning but what we saw was mostly pretty stunning. Catch The Wind gave me chills, Joe Hill was powerful, There But For Fortune was perfect. Not so good was an overlong ballad I didn't know, House of the Rising Sun, Swing Low Sweet Chariot and trotting out Imagine (and bizarrely telling us the lyrics so we could sing along... I mean who doesn't know the words to Imagine!?).

I'm sure she introduced Seven Curses by saying she hadn't played it for 30 years - YouTube suggests otherwise.

Another highlight was Diamonds and Rust, which was a treat because those early early 70s albums were often so much more interesting than the folk ballad 60s LPs (I wrote about my favourite last week).

Here's Joan's original, written in 1974 about her relationship with Bobby Dylan ten years previously.

(play on YouTube)

I just discovered that Judas Priest covered it (I can't believe that I never knew this - although I was never that big a fan of Judas Priest) and my first search of YouTube found a thoroughly dreadful recent live version but they originally recorded it in 1976/7 and the version released on their album Sin After Sin is actually pretty good.

(play on YouTube)

... and here's a live version from 1983 with Priest in all their hilariously camp, studded glory

(play on YouTube)