
A Complete Unknown: Bob Dylan, John Lennon and an infamous taxi ride along the Thames
As Timothée Chalamet hits the silver screen in a new Bob Dylan biopic, we delve into what really happened between two of the most famous faces in music in the back of a London taxi
Bob Dylan is feeling sick. He’s not sure if he can carry on. Yet the camera continues to focus on the singer, shades clamped to his face, hair a filigree of dried-out curls.
It’s a pellucid afternoon in late May and, sitting on the back passenger seat of a limousine, the vehicle continues to hurtle down the banks of the River Thames before turning into Hyde Park. “Oh, god, I don’t wanna get sick in here,” Dylan moans. “What if I vomit into the camera?”
Dylan is a long way from New York, the location for an upcoming biopic of the musician, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothée Chalamet. Yet London was a city that not only embraced Dylan with more fervour than anywhere outside America, it was also the location for one of the most bizarre, surreal and uncomfortable meetings between himself and the one other songwriter of the 20th century whose fame and repute is comparable.
Dylan’s fellow backseat traveller that afternoon in 1966, also clad in black and with tinted orange sunglasses hiding his grimaces, is far from sympathetic to his maladies. “Pull yourself together,” snarls John Lennon. “It’s only a film boy.” Lennon’s words falling on deaf ears, the camera keeps running as Dylan puts both hands over his eyes, rears forward and begins to cough.
The entire 20-minute exchange between a notably unwell Dylan and a supremely aloof Lennon was filmed by DA Pennebaker. Intended to be part of a documentary on Dylan’s UK tour, which would be called Eat the Document, the film was shelved for years and remains hard to find even now. Except, that is, for the footage of the taxi journey —which is now available for anyone to view on YouTube.
How Dylan got to be in state of such acute sickness in the late spring of ‘66 only became apparent later. The taxi ride was the latest nadir to what was, until that year, a mostly convivial relationship Dylan had enjoyed with London.
He had first come to the UK four years previously, fresh from wowing the New York folk scene, to appear as an actor in a BBC production of a play called Madhouse on Castle Street. Patrick Humphries, one of the most noted biographers of Bob Dylan, explains how this unusual piece of early exposure came to be:
‘It was a BBC producer called Philip Saville who, by chance, stumbled upon the young Bob Dylan in a Greenwich Village folk club.
'On that brief exposure, Saville was convinced that Dylan was perfect for the role of Bobby The Hobo in a Sunday night television play by Evan Jones. London was a black-and-white city when Bob Dylan arrived on 18 December 1962. The Rolling Stones had yet to make a record; you could still drive down Carnaby Street and the pubs closed between 3 and 5.30 every afternoon. But the abiding memory for many is that, for the first time in years, the capital lay swathed under a pall of snow.’

Stating that he hoped, on his first visit, to meet Charles Dickens, Dylan’s relationship with the UK was a cordial one, with British fans becoming ever more enraptured with this enigmatic individual. As Dylan’s fame in Britain grew over the next two years, among his most fervent new fans were The Beatles.
It was George Harrison who first embraced Dylan’s music, turning the other three Fabs onto 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album. John Lennon, in particular, was fascinated by Dylan’s artistic freedom to delve into politics, nuclear war and civil rights in his lyrics, arenas that he felt entirely unable to breach in early to mid-period Beatles songs.
But, by 1966 and that infamous limo ride, Dylan and the Beatles were both admiring and simultaneously wary of each other. Their totemic levels of musical artistry reached their pinnacles in that year, with the release of Blonde on Blonde and Revolver, both albums displaying dazzlingly original propulsions forward into what a three- or four-minute song could achieve.
Splintering the previous limitations of pop and rock music with tracks such as Tomorrow Never Knows and Visions of Johanna, these two albums were just weeks away from being released when Lennon and Dylan met. Yet the Herculean drug intake that both, but particularly Dylan, were ingesting at the time made for a backseat conversation that was rambling, incoherent and, at times, abrasive.
As driver Tom Keylock (who usually worked as a fixer and chauffeur for the Rolling Stones) wrenched the limo down the Thames and across Hyde Park, Dylan complained to Lennon that he yearned for New York.
“I wanna go home, see a baseball game, watch all night TV. I come from a land of paradise man,” he intoned queasily. “Sounds great,” deadpanned Lennon, looking at Dylan with something approaching contempt.

Dylan’s valetudinarian persona was perhaps understandable. The ecstatic reaction he’d received from UK audiences on previous visits had soured on his present tour as traditional folk fans berated Dylan for using an electric guitar and, in their eyes and ears, ‘betraying’ his folk roots. At a gig in Manchester, ten days prior to the limo ride, a fan had been captured on tape screaming ‘Judas’ Dylan ploughed into an incendiary version of Like a Rolling Stone. Dylan had turned on the malcontent audience member, retorting, “I don’t believe you. You’re a liar.”
After spending the night at Lennon’s home in Weybridge, Surrey, Dylan and Lennon made their way into London the following afternoon under the gaze of DA Pennebaker’s camera. Commenting on the situation in a 1999 interview (Pennebaker died in 2019), he recalled:
“It was not exactly a conversation by any means. Dylan was so beside himself and in such a terrible state that after a while I don’t think he knew what he was saying… They had a funny relationship to begin with. In this particular scene, it was as if they were trying to invent something for me that would be amusing in some way, but at the same time they were doing it for each other.”
As the duo stumbled through gnomic conversational splutters about Johnny Cash, the Mammas and Papas, and why the British won the Second World War (it was down to the River Thames according to Dylan), things became increasingly strained, as Patrick Humphries elaborates:
“I came away from the Lennon/Dylan clip thinking that John was in awe of Bob. John envied his freedom and his, ‘couldn’t give a ****’ attitude with the press. Dylan is so patently out of it though that it does become embarrassing.”
As the footage shudders to a close, what happened next was later recalled by Lennon in a Rolling Stone interview. Staggering into his hotel, both Lennon and Dylan are reputed to have thrown up into plant pots in the lobby before Dylan’s crew managed to haul him up the stairs to his suite to recover.
“In the film, I’m just blabbing off and commenting all the time, like you do when you’re very high or stoned," Lennon told Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner. “I had been up all night. We were being smart alecks. It’s terrible.”
A year after that limo ride, Dylan was involved in a mysterious motorcycle crash which put him out of action, while psychedelia swirled around the UK and US music scenes. He wouldn’t return to London for another 12 years. Lennon would only live in the UK for another five, moving to New York with Yoko Ono in August 1971, never to return to his home country.
More than half a century on, it seems Lennon is still on Dylan’s mind. In 2012 he wrote a track called Roll On, John for his Tempest album thought to be inspired by a minibus tour Dylan took of Liverpool in 2009. Dylan’s relationship with London has also reverted to something approaching its initial pastoral elan. Now 83 years old, he will play three nights at the Royal Albert Hall this November.
He may never have met Charles Dickens but, as Patrick Humphries concludes, there’s little doubt that London has had a positive effect on Dylan’s life and music, despite some, no doubt, now very hazy memories of a car journey with a Beatle.
“I have always sensed Dylan likes the UK,” says Humphries. “He bought a property in Scotland, which was only recently sold, and at one gig paid tribute to Churchill and the Battle of Britain pilots. He certainly soaked up the folk tradition here.”
Dylan himself is famously reticent about giving interviews, but his ardour for England and its influence upon his music is apparent from a typically cryptic quote, made in 1966. “Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes about from legends, bibles, plagues and it revolves around vegetables and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels – they’re not going to die.”
A Complete Unknown is released in UK cinemas on 17 January 2025. Patrick Humphries’ With the Beatles is published by Great Northern Books, visit gnbook.co.uk.