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The first official release of this much-bootlegged rarity from Dylan’s back pages crackles with musical and biographical invention.

Early in 1962, the still-obscure 20-year-old played and chatted on Cynthia Gooding’s New York radio show, testing his own dustbowl ballads and finger-picking folk-blues laments alongside tunes by Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and others.

His voice is not quite yet the scornful sandpaper rasp that will define him, but there are clear hints of the greatness to come, especially in the withering anti-racist tirade The Death of Emmet Till and the sublime semi-yodelling refrain of Roll On, John. The studio banter is also a delight, as Dylan was already constructing the slippery personal mythology that later became an all-concealing mask, brazenly fabricating a colourful itinerant childhood spent in travelling carnivals and circus freakshows.

His sign-off line is richly ironic, giggling as he tells Gooding “I’m never gonna be rich and famous.” Arf!

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.