Declan Lynch knows more about Keith Duffy than he does about Bob Dylan but in this case the music is much more important than the man

BOB Dylan was 60 on Thursday. Otherwise, I don't know a great deal about him. I don't know where he lives or what he does when he isn't working. Although I hear he plays the bit of golf.

I probably know more about Keith Duffy of Boyzone than I know about Bob Dylan.

I have been listening to the music of Dylan for most of my life. I know him well as an artiste, but I know Keith Duffy much better as a man.

Even for Dylan fetishists, there are large areas of the great man's life which remain unknown. We see no photographs of him in Hello! relaxing in his lovely home, remaining positive after the trauma of his divorce, throwing himself into his work for charidee.

And it is perhaps a tribute to Dylan that most of his fans couldn't care less about his lifestyle, as if he has trained them through his words and music to have a bit more cop on.

The extent to which people have derived their education and the general cut of their jib from the likes of Dylan is perhaps underestimated. And still it is hard to pin down his point of view on any of the defining events of his time. There is just this overall sense that he is totally opposed to all forms of horse-shit in any circumstances.

Everyone who knows his stuff knows exactly what he is on about most of the time, at some level beyond the literal or the mere issues of the day. And if you can't quite figure it out, you have to assume that he knows what he's doing.

Thus, he seemed to have taken a "turn" with his appearance a couple of years ago on the same stage as the Pope. This was one step beyond his earlier conversion to born-again Christianity, which in retrospect made some sense given his preacher-man leanings, and his awareness of the crucial tradition of gospel music.

But on stage with the Pope? Shurely shome mishtake? Yes, Dylan's point of view might be enigmatic, but if you could summarise his entire world-view in one succinct message it would read something like, "Don't appear on stage with the Pope."

And yet his mission at all times seems to have involved alienating as many of his fans as possible, while somehow bringing them back in the long run, because ... well, because he's great.

Greil Marcus said that the first time you hear Dylan's voice is a moment you never forget. It seems that this primal experience is the one to which we always return, that no amount of abuse from the man himself can usurp him in our affections. And he knows it. All the legends, the true stars, have this streak of cruelty. In Dylan's case, it was exposed early by the documentary film Don't Look Back, especially in his utter scorn for poor Donovan.

But it is not just an unthinking cruelty. It is based on the fact that the bad stuff, on the surface, doesn't sound too different from the great stuff. And without the odd sharp reminder, some confusion may arise as to which is which.

So he can get religion, he can even go whoring for the corporate dollar, and we still don't feel betrayed because of the first time we heard Blonde on Blonde, and how it astonished us.

The generations who have fallen for Dylan know that they were lucky to be young and to discover music that is so uncommonly fine.

Dylan was far better than he ever needed to be. And for this, he has largely been left alone to figure out how to be Bob Dylan in this world, and remain even vaguely sane. And in this, the sly old fox has done it again. He has confounded every notion of how a music legend should conduct himself by going out there and, of all things, playing music.

As if to undercut anyone else's idea of who he is, or what he is, he has declared himself to be a musician who tours around playing music, and so he is not regarded as a celebrity at all in the normal sense.

For followers of the champagne lifestyle, Dylan offers little apart from pictures of him strumming an electric guitar and whining into a microphone about what ails him, which by contrast with a nice shot of Celine Dion playing with a big shiny dog looks too much like hard work.

Dylan figured that the one place they could never find him, never really pin him down, was under the spotlight. So he can hardly be called a recluse, and still you can hardly say you know much about him, the way you know that Ronan Keating bought one of those houses attached to the K Club.

ON the subject of which, I never knew until recently that Bob Dylan plays golf. To a handicap of 17. And for all sorts of reasons, it's something I don't want to know.

They say he has also taken to cracking unbelievably corny jokes as part of his act, for no good reason that anyone can fathom other than the side-effects of some medication he's taking for that heart scare.

But when the force is with him, they say that he can still play like a demon. Because that is what he does.