The cult of Bob Dylan stands at its highest point for years, bolstered by the singer’s highly regarded US radio show and superb memoir, Chronicles. Martin Scorsese’s laudatory documentary last year, No Direction Home, also reminded us what an electrifying performer he used to be, even before he went electric.

With a new album due in August, the 65-year-old elder statesman is an enduring presence. Generations of performers, from Bruce Springsteen to Nick Cave to the White Stripes, still borrow heavily from his visceral rawness and florid poetry. Which makes it all the more frustrating that Dylan himself can barely muster much of either these days.

Garbed in his trademark black cowboy suit, Dylan began his two-date UK tour in Cardiff with an uninvolving, lacklustre set. Perched behind his electric piano, he barely spoke, rarely stood up and did not touch a guitar all night. Indeed, he seemed virtually absent for much of the show, leaving the heavy lifting to his polished country-rock band.

Admittedly, there were plenty of Dylan classics in his Cardiff set. But, sadly, many were mauled beyond recognition, with all-time anthems including She Belongs to Me and Positively 4th Street reduced to toothless cabaret pastiches.

More bizarre still was the shrill yodel that has replaced the singer’s Old Testament rasp in recent years, rounding off almost every line on the same gargling high note. Midway through the show, he began to sound like Crazy Frog’s granddad.

Tracks from the singer’s two most recent albums, both highly acclaimed Grammy winners, fared little better. The mournful, reggae-tinged ballad Love Sick, and the gnarly blues- rocker Cold Irons Bound, both taken from the 1997 album Time Out of Mind, sounded engaging enough in a Dylan-lite way. But Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum (from Love and Theft, 2001) was just awful, an interminable rockabilly ramble better suited to an end-of-the-pier oldies band than a revolutionary rock icon.

Alas, there were many such moments of generic jukebox Americana in Cardiff. Where Dylan once reshaped folk, blues and rock in his own image, he now seems content to coast along within this music’s most lazy, conservative traditions. When he finally rewarded the faithful with a lovely, largely acoustic Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and a mighty Like a Rolling Stone, the explosion of audience relief was palpable.

But these teasing glimpses of greatness only reinforced the sense of a remote, complacent old master stubbornly hoarding his vast archive of hidden treasures.

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