Why This ‘Clumsy’ British Water Cannon Was The Most Hated Vehicle On Belfast Streets –  Hw

Belfast, August 1969. A slab-sided armored truck lurches down the Falls Road, its engine straining against weight it was never designed to carry. Paint from milk bottles hurled by rioters streaks its flanks in bizarre rainbow patterns. Behind bulletproof glass, soldiers peer out at a city burning around them.

The vehicle they are riding in had been declared obsolete 5 years earlier because it was compact and visually less inflammatory than tanks or larger armored personnel carriers. The Pig was politically and practically preferable for city streets, which is why stored and surplus examples were hauled back into service. They called it the Pig, and over the next 25 years, it would become one of the most hated vehicles in Northern Ireland, a rolling symbol of occupation that crashed through barricades, sprayed protesters with purple dyed water, and

earned a reputation as clumsy, inadequate, and utterly indispensable. One variant in particular, the Squirt Pig water cannon, would come to embody everything wrong with Britain’s improvised response to a conflict nobody had planned for. This is the story of how a cheap 1950s stopgap became the workhorse of Britain’s longest military deployment, and why the communities who watched it rumble through their streets never forgot what it represented.

The Humber Pig exists because of a gap in British military planning. After World War II, the army scrapped its universal carrier fleet without ordering replacements. When the Malayan emergency revealed the urgent need for an enclosed armored personnel carrier, two solutions emerged. The first was the Alvis Saracen, a purpose-built six-wheeled APC with a turret-mounted machine gun and proper armor.

The second was the Humber Pig, a cheaper alternative meant to hold the line until enough Saracens arrived. The formal designation tells you everything about how seriously the army took it: Truck 1 ton armored 4 x 4 Humber. Not an armored fighting vehicle, not an infantry carrier, a truck with armor bolted on. The chassis came from the FV1600 series 1 ton truck manufactured by the Rootes Group between 1952 and 1955.

Armored bodies were fabricated by Joseph Sankey and Sons and the Royal Ordnance factories, then bolted onto a platform never designed to bear their weight. The base Mark 1 Pig weighed 10,500 lb unladen, powered by a Rolls-Royce B60 inline six-cylinder petrol engine producing 120 brake horsepower. It had a top speed of 40 mph and a range of 260 mi.

The crew comprised a driver and commander up front with room for six to eight troops in the rear. Though soldiers claimed up to 20 could be squeezed in for short periods if nobody cared about comfort. The armor was the real problem, just 6 to 7 mm of welded steel, adequate against shell fragments and pistol rounds, but vulnerable to standard rifle fire.

The vehicle wallowed on suspension designed for an unarmored truck. It braked poorly. It overheated constantly. Spare parts dried up as the manufacturer moved onto other contracts. Soldiers called it a pig to drive, which is probably where the nickname came from. Though some attributed it to the bonnet’s snout-like profile. By the mid-1960s, the surviving fleet was being mothballed, sold to foreign armies, or simply scrapped.

One soldier who served with the Royal Engineers recalled that nobody mourned the pig’s departure. It had done its job, barely, and everyone assumed they had seen the last of it. Then, Northern Ireland exploded. The eruption of communal violence in August 1969 forced a rapid reassessment of everything. Operation Banner, which would become the longest continuous deployment in British military history, began on the 14th of August.

The army needed armored vehicles for urban operations immediately, but deploying tracked armored fighting vehicles or even the larger Saracen raised acute political sensitivities. Nobody wanted photographs of British tanks on the streets of a United Kingdom city. The pig’s compact dimensions made it uniquely suited to Belfast’s narrow terrace streets.

Its modest appearance was far less inflammatory than heavier alternatives. The Ministry of Defense pulled roughly 500 pigs back into service. Some purchased back from foreign buyers who had acquired them as surplus. Several hundred were committed to Northern Ireland. What followed was a remarkable program of field expedient modification.

Soldiers and engineers bolted on extra armor, wire screens, machine gun turrets, foam generators, and water cannon to a chassis that had never been designed for any of it. The result was an entire taxonomy of variants, all with unofficial soldier coined nicknames that captured both their appearance and their function. The Mark II upgrade, carried out from September 1972 to July 1973, was the most significant.

Additional internal and external armor plates and bulletproof glazing aimed to improve small arms protection, though the underlying truck chassis and layout still left vulnerabilities to high-velocity rifle fire. Heavy-duty bull bars, officially called barricade removers, were bolted to the front. Weight ballooned to 14,300 lb unladen, nearly 7 and 1/2 tons when loaded, on the same overstressed chassis that had struggled with 5 tons.

The Flying Pig was a Mark II fitted with large folding wire mesh and metal riot screens on both sides and the roof. When deployed, these screens extended outward like wings, creating a protective barrier behind which troops could shelter during riots. When folded flat, they gave the vehicle a distinctive silhouette. The Holy Pig was fitted with a rooftop observation hatch surrounded by a transparent Perspex screen, allowing a commander to stand up and survey a riot while remaining protected.

Soldiers named it after its resemblance to the Popemobile. The Kremlin Pig was encased in wire mesh or slat armor as a standoff screen against RPG-7 rockets. The name referenced the Soviet origin of the rocket-propelled grenades being supplied to the IRA. And then there was the Squirt Pig, the water cannon variant that would prove both essential and utterly inadequate.

The water cannon story in Northern Ireland is one of persistent inadequacy. According to a critical 1972 Ministry of Defense document by Brigadier Sir Ian Jardine on internal security equipment development, the Royal Ulster Constabulary had operated some old and rudimentary water cannon before the troubles escalated. After the Hunt Committee recommended reforming the RUC, these were set aside.

When violence surged in 1970, Headquarters Northern Ireland declared an urgent requirement for water cannon. Two Mercedes water cannon were purchased from Germany in July 1970. They proved unsatisfactory and required modification. As an interim measure, four existing RUC cannon were borrowed and improved, and the Military Vehicles and Engineering Establishment designed a purpose-built vehicle to be manufactured by Pyrene, a fire extinguisher company, on a Foden 10-ton lorry chassis.

The resulting vehicle was a 26-ton behemoth with a six-wheeled configuration, a separate Coventry Climax engine to drive the water pump, a protective steel body, underside armor, and mesh window guards. Purple dye was incorporated into the water to mark rioters for later arrest. Yet, by summer 1971, the security situation had escalated so far that water cannon was seldom used.

The Jardine report delivers a devastating verdict. At extreme range, they gave little more than a gentle and enjoyable spray. Indeed, children appeared on television dancing under it while hurling insults at the troops. The Squirt Pig was produced in parallel. According to records from the National Army Museum, which holds a surviving example, only 32 Squirt Pigs were ever manufactured.

The water cannon nozzle was mounted beside the driver in the front cab, with water tanks installed in the rear passenger compartment, eliminating troop carrying capacity vehicle that had been designed as a personnel carrier could now carry only water. The most dramatic documented use of water cannon during the troubles came on Bloody Sunday, the 30th of January 1972 in Derry.

Accounts of the day record water cannon being used on William Street before one para launched its fatal arrest operation. According to one contemporary report, a water cannon crew was forced to withdraw after a CS gas canister compromised their position. The water cannon had reduced rioter numbers, but could not control the situation.

What followed was the killing of 13 civilians with a 14th dying later of wounds. The British Army’s first documented use of water cannon in Belfast was the 1st of August 1970 during rioting in the New Lodge area. The following day, water cannon were used to extinguish fires set by rioters, including the burning of the old Lyceum cinema.

By 1971, the RUC’s experimental custom water cannon had been abandoned as inadequate to deal with escalating violence. Purpose-built water cannon would not return to Northern Ireland until the Drumbeg stand-off in the late 1990s when the RUC borrowed two vehicles from Belgium. For Catholic and nationalist communities, the Pig was not merely a vehicle, but a symbol of militarized occupation.

The Mark II’s aggressive appearance with its bull bars, armored shutters, and wire screens made it what one military historian called one of the most aggressive-looking military vehicles ever manufactured. The Imperial War Museum’s assessment is blunt. For soldiers, it was highly protective, but to civilians, it would have seemed an oppressive and frightening tool.

The Falls Curfew of the 3rd to 5th of July 1970 is widely regarded as a turning point. A column of armored vehicles, including Pigs, entered the Lower Falls to conduct weapon searches. The operation escalated into gun battles, a 34-hour curfew on 3,000 homes, and a deployment of 3,000 troops with armored vehicles and helicopters.

Four civilians were killed, over 78 wounded, and 337 arrested. The event is widely regarded as the moment the Catholic community turned definitively against the British Army. During Operation Motorman on the 31st of July 1972, the largest British military operation since Suez, Pigs served as the primary troop carriers flooding into Derry and Belfast no-go areas after Centurion tanks with bulldozer blades cleared barricades.

Nationalists had erected barriers, including a truck chassis set in 8 tons of concrete. 16 of 29 barriers in Free Derry had been previously impossible even to the pig. Rioters developed sophisticated counter tactics against the pig and its variants. Petrol bombs were the most common weapon, cheap to manufacture from household materials, and effective against the vehicle’s vulnerable engine compartment.

One AU C Humber caught fire and stalled during the August 1969 Belfast violence after being struck by multiple bombs. The flames engulfed the front of the vehicle before the crew could escape. The IRA’s acquisition of RPG-7 rockets from Soviet and Libyan sources forced the development of the Kremlin Pig stand-off armor. The wire mesh screens were designed to detonate the shaped charge warhead before it could reach the main hull, dissipating its penetrating jet.

Improvised explosive devices buried in roadways prompted the addition of under-vehicle sweep screens, flexible barriers between the front wheels designed to push aside or detonate command wire detonated bombs before they could reach the passenger compartment. Children threw firecrackers to disorient crews and mask the sound of genuine gunfire.

Adults used mirrors and powerful searchlights to blind vehicle drivers at night. Corrugated iron sheets became improvised shields against the water cannon spray. Housewives banged bin lids on the pavement to warn of approaching patrols, the distinctive clanging audible for streets in every direction. After riots, pigs often returned to base spattered with paint thrown in milk bottles, the glass shattering on impact and leaving streaks of color across the olive drab hulls.

Since repainting before the next patrol was considered pointless, vehicles accumulated bizarre multicolored coats over weeks of deployment. Troops called these Picasso Pigs. The paint served no military purpose for the rioters, but it marked the vehicles as targets and reminded everyone watching that these machines had been through the worst the streets could throw at them.

The Pig was not the only armored vehicle on Northern Ireland streets. The Alvis Saracen, a purpose-built 6×6 APC weighing 10 tons with a turret-mounted machine gun and 8 to 16 mm of armor, was the heavier and more capable alternative. Saracens, nicknamed Sixes, became the visual poster vehicle of the Troubles, but the Saracen was larger and less maneuverable in tight urban spaces.

The Pig’s smaller footprint gave it a practical advantage in the warren-like streets of West Belfast and the Bogside. The Shorland armored car, designed by Short Brothers in Belfast specifically for the RUC from 1961, was a Land Rover based vehicle with a turret. Its infamy after the killing of 9-year-old Patrick Rooney in Divis Flats in August 1969 led to its turrets being removed from RUC service and re-purposed onto turret Pigs instead.

The Pig was chosen and retained for four converging reasons: political optics, because it was too small to constitute sending in the tanks; urban maneuverability, because it could navigate streets the Saracen could not; adaptability, because it proved relatively easy to modify with multiple field expedient variants; and cost, because 500 could be reconstituted from storage and surplus far more cheaply than procuring new vehicles.

The comparison with international peers is unflattering. By the 1970s, West German police operated purpose-built Wasserwerfer water cannon on Mercedes and MAN chassis with 9,000 L tanks and effective ranges exceeding 50 m. These were vehicles designed from the ground up for riot control with powerful pumps, armored cabs, and multiple nozzles that could be directed independently.

The Squirt Pig, with its improvised system crammed into a 4-ton truck originally designed to carry infantry, was never in the same category. It was a stopgap solution to problem the British Army had not anticipated. Built on a chassis that was obsolete before the Troubles even began, the Pig was gradually withdrawn from Northern Ireland during the early 1990s, replaced by the AT105 Saxon APC, itself a Bedford truck-based design that carried forward many Pig concepts, including extending riot shields and bull bars. Photographs show operational

use continuing into the early 1990s before the type was finally retired. Surviving Pigs are scattered across British museums and private collections. The Imperial War Museum in London holds a Mark II that served with one para during the period of Bloody Sunday. Though curators note they cannot confirm whether this specific vehicle was present on the day.

The National Army Museum preserves the only publicly accessible Squirt Pig water cannon variant with service records showing it was manufactured in 1953, deployed to Northern Ireland from February 1972 to May 1974 with 5th Light Regiment, 2nd Light Infantry, 25th Light Regiment, and 17th Squadron, then transferred to the Metropolitan Police in 1981.

The Tank Museum at Bovington holds a Humber Hornet missile launcher variant. Other examples survive at the National Cold War Exhibition at RAF Cosford, the Airborne Assault Museum at Duxford, and the Aldershot Military Museum, which maintains an actively restored running example. The sole surviving Foden Pyrene water cannon was sold at auction in February 2021 for just 3,100 pounds.

After years of outdoor storage following the closure of the Museum of Army Transport, privately owned Pigs appear regularly at military vehicle shows and steam fairs across Britain. A 2024 listing offered a 1955 Mark II radio truck for just under 13,000 pounds. Active enthusiast communities maintain restoration knowledge for a vehicle that otherwise would have vanished entirely.

The Humber Pig story is ultimately one of improvisation, born of political constraint and institutional unpreparedness. A vehicle considered too obsolete for conventional military service in the 1960s became indispensable in a conflict nobody had planned for, serving from 1969 through to the early 1990s.

That is a quarter century second career, far longer than its original service life in a theater of operations its designers never imagined. Its water cannon variant, though produced in small numbers and abandoned as operationally inadequate within two years, represents an early chapter in a continuing debate over less lethal crowd control methods.

PSNI water cannon were last deployed during loyalist riots in April 2021, more than 50 years after the Squirt Pig first rolled onto the streets of Belfast. The Pig left what one historian called a vivid trace in the collective memory, especially in Ireland, a stubby, slab-sided, paint-spattered reminder that the British state’s response to the Troubles was often as improvised and unsatisfactory as the vehicle itself.

Desmond Hamill titled his landmark 1985 history of the British Army in Northern Ireland simply Pig in the Middle, a phrase that captured both the vehicle and the institution’s unenviable position, caught between two warring communities, trusted by neither. It was cheap, it was clumsy, it was obsolete on arrival, and yet for a quarter century through riots and gun battles and bomb attacks, it became the most enduring face of militarized occupation on Belfast streets.

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QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.