Bob Dylan closes the show in Belfast with a wildly obscure Van Morrison cover

When Bob Dylan‘S Rough and noisy manners tour at Waterfront Hall in Belfast, Ireland, Thursday night there were probably quite a few hardcore Van Morrison fans in the crowd. There has always been a big crossover between their two audiences: Belfast is Morrison’s birthplace, and this theater was the venue for his 80th birthday in September.

But probably only a handful recognized the Van Morrison cover that Dylan broke out at the 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 Astral weeks, Tupelo honey, A taste of Saint Dominic, Veedon fleeceor one of his classic albums from the sixties and seventies. 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 has not been featured in any recent film or TV show, and Morrison himself has only done it fourteen times. Phones are strictly prohibited at Dylan’s theater shows, but one fan still managed to capture a very clear audio recording of the stunning moment.

This is certainly not the first time that Dylan has covered Morrison. Over the years he has 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 few 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 had a minor hit with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” In the years that followed, he also performed ‘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 chose “Going Back to Bangor,” but he does have a recent history of selecting non-obvious songs from iconic songwriters. Over the summer, he performed Bo Diddley’s 1962 single “I Can’t Tell” to largely blank faces in amphitheaters across America on the Outlaw tour. And in 2023, he tackled Bob Weir’s 2016 song “Only a River.”

Dylan’s 2025 tour concludes with a pair of shows in Killarney, Ireland, and a single performance in Dublin. If he stays true to his 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 wanted to go back a little further, ‘Moment of Surrender’ would be sublime.

Dylan hasn’t announced any dates until 2026 yet, but he took the unprecedented step of telling fans to expect more shows next year with a recent post on X. “To all the fans and followers of Rough and Rowdy Ways Show,” he wrote. “We will see you in early spring 2026 and let you know later where and when.”