A Dylan cover a Day: No time to think

By Tony Attwood

I am going to break all the unwritten rules with this one. The fact is that I can’t imagine not having Belle Brigade’s “No time to think” in this series about Dylan’s covers even though a) I have raved about this performance many times before and b) I can’t find a single other cover version of the song that seems to me worth presenting.

Now that doesn’t mean, of course that there isn’t one: my searching system (I won’t dignify it with the word “research”) is meandering at best, so one hope I have is that you might know of another cover worthy of this wonderful song. In which case please write in with the details.

There are, incidentally, other songs with the same title but which don’t have any relation to Dylan’s composition – and that makes it even more frustrating. But most of all, if Belle Brigade can do it, surely so can others, by taking the essence of the song and travelling in a different direction.

Thus given that the one or two other versions of this song I have found are not, in my view, worthy of presentation, the article is going to be very short, which in turn means I can present a few other Belle Brigade pieces, just in case you are interested. There are after all 2,884 other articles on the site to read if you really want to move on – or of course you could write an article yourself and send it to tony@schools.co.uk for consideration.

But meanwhile here is another Belle Brigade song – and if you are a person like me who tends to make quite quick judgements about pieces of music, do stay with this for a little while. I think it is worth it. I just love the way they use simple phrases in unexpected places, such as “constant competition”, “going out on Fridays” … and that sudden chord change thereafter.

Indeed moving on throught their videos, I really do wonder why this duo stopped recording

Just think, if they had continued and offered us a few more re-working of Dylan songs we could have had a few new insights into the music we normally cover here.

Of course I wouldn’t want you to think everything this couple did was perfect – there are other videos from them I have found which I really don’t want to present, but those above will show, I think, just how much talent there is / was in this band.

If you have a recording of any other Dylan cover by them, do let me know. Or come to that another cover of “No Time to Think”. Why haven’t other musicians tried the song?

The Dylan Cover a Day series

A Dylan cover a Day: No time to think

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