ABSTRACT
Bob Dylan arrived in London, and in Britain, for the first time a week before Christmas on December 18, 1962, during the bitterly cold British winter of 1962–1963. In Britain in December 1962, outside a small number of folk-music enthusiasts in London and elsewhere, Bob Dylan was indeed largely unknown. His musical career had been launched just over a year before his arrival in London by two related fortuitous developments. Soon after Dylan had first arrived in London it was obvious to Philip Saville that the young singer ‘loved London’ and was ‘very excited about the “new” England’ of the early 1960s, a period when young people’s ‘ideas were spilling out in design, graphics, architecture, clothes’. Bob Dylan consequently visited the Troubadour soon after arriving in London, and Anthea Joseph was taking money on the door that evening. Suze Rotolo was to be an influential figure in Dylan’s early cultural and political education.
