When Bob Dylan‘s Rough and Rowdy Ways tour hit Waterfront Hall in Belfast, Ireland, on Thursday evening, there were probably quite a few hardcore Van Morrison fans in the crowd. There’s always been a large crossover between their two audiences: Belfast is Morrison’s hometown, and this very theater was the site of his 80th birthday celebration back in September.
But it’s likely that no more than a handful recognized the Van Morrison cover that Dylan broke out at the very end of the night. That’s because it wasn’t an obvious hit like “Moondance” or “And It Stoned Me.” It wasn’t a cut from Astral Weeks, Tupelo Honey, Saint Dominic’s Preview, Veedon Fleece, or any of his classic albums of the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn’t even released in the 20th century or the first decade of the 2000s.
Dylan played “Going Down to Bangor” from Morrison’s 2016 LP Keep Me Singing. This wasn’t a single; it hasn’t been featured in any recent movie or TV show, and Morrison himself has only done it 14 times. Phones are strictly forbidden at Dylan’s theater shows, but a fan still managed to capture a very clean audio recording of the stunning moment.
This is hardly the first time that Dylan has covered Morrison. Over the years, he’s performed “One Irish Rover,” “Carrying a Torch,” “Real Real Gone,” “And It Stoned Me,” “Crazy Love,” “Into The Mystic,” “Moondance,” and “Tupelo Honey.” They’ve even played together a handful of times, most notably in 1998 when they did a series of shows as co-headliners.
Morrison, meanwhile, has been covering Dylan since 1966, when his band Them scored a minor hit with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” In the years that followed, he’s also done “Just Like a Woman,” “I Shall Be Released,” “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” “Idiot Wind,” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
It’s impossible to say why Dylan picked “Going Back to Bangor,” but he does have a recent history of selecting non-obvious songs by iconic songwriters. Over the summer, he played Bo Diddley’s 1962 single “I Can’t Tell” to largely blank faces at amphitheaters all across America on the Outlaw tour. And in 2023, he tackled Bob Weir’s 2016 tune “Only a River.”
Dylan’s 2025 tour concludes with a pair of shows in Killarney, Ireland, and a single gig in Dublin. If he’s sticking with hometown heroes, we’d love to hear him cover U2 in Dublin. And if he wants to stick with their recent work, we recommend “Love Is All We Have Left,” “The Little Things That Give You Away,” or “Every Breaking Wave.” If he wants to go back a little further, “Moment of Surrender” would be sublime.
Dylan hasn’t announced any 2026 dates yet, but he took the unprecedented step of telling his fans to expect more shows next year with a recent post on X. “To all fans and followers of Rough and Rowdy Ways Show,” he wrote. “We will see you early Spring 2026, will let you know where and when later.”
