IT’S been described as the most infamous audience heckle in rock music history. Will anyone be bold enough to utter it at the Edinburgh Playhouse on Sunday night?

Back In 1966 Bob Dylan was on a world tour, having alienated many of his core folk-music fans by abandoning his acoustic guitar and going electric instead.

Each night he followed a pattern, playing the first half as an solo acoustic set, which was warmly received, before introducing his band - The Hawks, later to be renamed The Band - for an electric second set. The concerts had become notorious for adverse reactions from folkies - jeering, slow handclapping, and walk-outs - though there were many fans present at each concert who simply loved what Dylan was doing. More than a few wrote letters to their local newspapers to lament the "childish mentality" of those who barracked Dylan.

The unrest reached a confrontational peak on the night of May 17 at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Just before the final electric song, a man sitting in the audience called out ‘Judas!’ to voice his sense of betrayal. It was a stinging insult, and it was received with laughter and applause.

Dylan took a different view. “I don't believe you”, he said. “You’re a liar”. Turning to the Hawks he instructed them to “Play f——- loud!” And what followed was a majestic - and exceedingly loud - Like a Rolling Stone.

That incendiary tour and that particular gig, which came just as Dylan released Blonde and Blonde, the third in a run of extraordinarily inventive albums that also included Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited - have become part of rock history and have been endlessly mythologised.

Not only have they been touched upon in dozens of books about Dylan, but in 2016 Clinton Heylin, a leading Dylan expert, wrote ‘Judas! From Forest Hills to the Free Trade Hall: A Historical View of the Big Boo’. In 1998 C.P. Lee, a musician and academic, who was actually at that Manchester concert, wrote ‘Like the Night (Revisited): Bob Dylan and the Road to the Manchester Free Trade Hall’. The radio presenter Andy Kershaw even made a documentary about the concert, and interviewed the man who had shouted 'Judas'.

As it turned out, Dylan's next gig after Manchester was two nights later, at the Renfield Street Odeon in Glasgow. This in turn was followed, on May 20, by a show at the ABC in Edinburgh. Fan disapproval was evident at both Scottish engagements.

Bob Dylan's life in songs as we remember 'Judas' heckle

For various reasons, initial bootlegs of the Manchester concert had been mis-identified as having been recorded at London’s Royal Albert Hall, nine days later. When in 1988 Dylan got around to releasing a double-CD recording of the Manchester gig, he noted the error by calling it Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ concert.

Which brings us to Sunday evening's Edinburgh International Festival show at the Edinburgh Playhouse, when the brilliant Cat Power, a lifelong fan of Dylan’s, will replicate the exact set-list from the Manchester concert, playing the acoustic songs in the first half and, with her band, going electric for the second. The show has had excellent reviews on its tour so far.

In November 2022 Cat saw caught Dylan in action at the Armadillo, in Glasgow. “I can tell you it was the most beautiful I have ever heard his voice”, she said in an interview with Variety magazine in February this year.

Three nights after that Glasgow concert, Cat and her band played the Dylan songs at the Royal Albert Hall.

Her Variety interviewer observed that while her band’s musical arrangements in the 1966 songs were faithful to the original arrangements, she seemed to find new melodies in them. How had that come about?

“Because I’ve been singing a lot of these songs since I was little — I’ve been singing harmonies with all the greats since I was, like, four years old”, Power replied. “So I’m still doing the same harmonies I used to do, but Bob’s not singing. That’s basically why the vocal melodies are different”.

She added: “I’d like to offer a gentle, graceful, respectful presentation of these songs — we don’t have to fight to sing them like he did, you know, with people booing him and s—-, even though we might be on the same page about what the lyrics make us feel and the personal anger we may have against society with these songs, but we feel empowered enough to have an open conversation about them. But that’s why it’s not, you know, all punk rock [arrangements], like ‘We gotta hammer them!’

“But I also wanted to offer grace and dignity to the songs, because Bob’s still on the planet with us”.

Her Royal Albert Hall gig has been immortalised on a CD, Cat Power Sings Dylan. Thus we get riveting versions of the acoustic songs -  She Belongs to Me, Fourth Time Around, Visions of Johanna, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, Desolation Row, Just Like a Woman, and Mr Tambourine Man - and the electric numbers: Tell Me, Momma; I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met); Baby, Let Me Follow You Down; Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues; Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat; One Too Many Mornings; Ballad of a Thin Man; and Like a Rolling Stone. Perhaps predictably, one of the bolder members of the audience called out ‘Judas!’ - but one song too early. Power’s resigned response is quite understandable.

As for Dylan, the ‘Judas’ cat-call still rankles. “Judas, the most hated name in human history!”, he told Rolling Stone magazine’s Mikal Gilmore in 2012. “If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him to be crucified”.

The late Ian Bell, in Once Upon a Time, the first volume of his Dylan autobiography, makes the shrewd point that Dylan was not alone among other key artists of the Sixties who could change direction. "This was a period, after all, in which the Beatles could spring practically any surprise on an audience and be guaranteed adoration. The Rolling Stones could desert their blues roots without a second thought, and proceed from strength to strength.

Of the cry of 'Judas!' Bell says: "That was the shout in the darkness. To this day, the insult seems infantile. There were plenty of other singers in the world ready to accept adoration, after all. Yet here was evidence, beyond doubt, of the great virtue and the abiding affliction of the 1960s: music true ly mattered".

Dylan himself, incidentally, is back on the road again, playing Edinburgh’s Usher Hall for two eagerly-awaited nights on November 5 and 6, as part of his ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ world tour that began in 2021.

Cat Power Sings Dylan ’66, Sunday, August 18, Edinburgh Playhouse, Edinburgh International Festival.