Guardian Prize 27,064 by Brendan

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Sorry this is late, I wrote this up a week ago but forgot to put it live.  I can’t remember much about it now, except that I enjoyed solving and blogging.  Thanks Brendan.

This puzzle celebrates Bob Dylan’s recent award of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  See JimS @16 in the comments below for more…

completed grid
Across
9 CHEAP SHOT Abusive remark getting clubs plenty excited (5,4)
C (clubs) HEAPS (plenty) HOT (excited)
10 BREAD Money raised orally (5)
BREAD sounds like (orally) “bred” (raised)
11 DYLAN 24 across player, joining 2, 16, 22 down and 27 (5)
Bob Dylan (harmonica player) has recently joined the list of Nobel Laureates already including Saul Bellow, Gunter Grass, Anatole France and Thomas Mann
12 MINNESOTA Mention as altered state 11 was in initially (9)
anagram (altered) of MENTION AS – birthplace of Bob Dylan
13 INWARDS How too many people have died — sad words finally taken to heart (7)
IN WAR (how too many people have died) then final lettrs of saD wordS
14, 28 ROLLING STONE  Member of rock group, like one of which 11 performed (7,5)
double definition – the Bob Dylan song Like a Rolling Stone
17 EMITS Issues in changing times (5)
another anagram (changing) of TIMES
19 SHY Withdrawn from famous Swedish ceremony, ultimately (3)
last letters (ultimately) of famouS swedisH ceremonY
20 ARENA Backed a time and place for big event (5)
AN ERA (a time) reversed (backed)
21 SATANIC Awful act, a sin that’s diabolical (7)
anagram (awful) of ACT A SIN.  You could switch the roles of “awful” and “diabolical” here and it still works well.
22 FIESTAS Energy put into hit since holidays (7)
E (energy) in FIST (hit) then AS (since)
24 HARMONICA Saintly female on instrument, not piano — much smaller one (9)
MONICA (Monica of Hippo, saintly female) following (on) HARp (instrument) missing P (piano)
26 STRUM Play guitar in odd way? Just the opposite (5)
RUM (odd) and ST (street, way) with order reversed (just the opposite) – which makes the normal way to play the guitar.
28   See 14
29 TACTICIAN Diplomacy I preserve, hiding one master of war? (9)
TACT (diplomacy) I then CAN (preserve) containing (hiding) I (one)
Down
1 ACID A record I included in stuff for trip (4)
A CD (record) including I
2 BELLOW Shout in line put in further down (6)
L (line) put in BELOW (further down)
3 OPEN PRISON Work composed in person, wherein sentences aren’t rigidly controlled (4,6)
OP (work) then anagram (composed) of IN PERSON
4 THOMAS One writer after 11, another before 27 (6)
writers Dylan THOMAS and THOMAS Mann
5 STINGRAY Artist tucked into cheap fish (8)
RA (Royal Academician, artist) inside STINGY (cheap)
6 OBOE Band, live, including old instrument for blowing in the wind (4)
O (band, something round) then BE (live) including O (old) – instrument played in the wind section of the orchestra
7 MELODISE Writer is brought into rock band to make music (8)
ME (the writer) then IS inside LODE (rock band)
8 IDEA Mixed-up confusion of aide’s plan (4)
anagram (mixed-up confusion) of AIDE
13 ITEMS Times changing articles (5)
anagram (changing) of TIMES – several commenters point out that this is the second time TIMES has been used in an anagram: the times they are a-changin’.  Brilliant!
15 LEADERSHIP Management has numbers of Germans reportedly on board? (10)
LEADER sounds like (reportedly) “lieder” (numbers, songs in German) on SHIP (on board)
16 GRASS Collaborator with the law, possibly bent (5)
double definition – bent is a type of grass
18 INTERIOR Middle part of winter I originally selected (8)
found inside (selected from) of wINTER I ORiginally
19 SACRISTY Place for minister it’s scary to switch (8)
anagram (to switch) of IT’S SCARY
22 FRANCE State of departments dictator cut, note (6)
FRANCo (dictator, cut short) and E (note, of the scale)
23 TORRID High point of rock, clear and passionate (6)
TOR (high point of rock) RID (clear)
24 HOST Crowd entertainer (4)
double definition
25 OMEN Eg sound of a thunder heard in moment (4)
found in mOMENt
27 MANN Part of literary award, we hear, for novelist (4)
MANN sounds like (we hear) “Man”, part of The Man Booker Prize (literary award)

*anagram
definitions are underlined

I write these posts to help people get started with crosswords.  If there is something here you do not understand  feel free to ask questions; chances are there are others wondering the same thing.

34 comments on “Guardian Prize 27,064 by Brendan”

  1. Thanks for the blog, and to Brendan for the puzzle. There were an impressive number of Dylan references, although for a little while we thought it was a Stones theme (21a helped with this!).
    We put MELODISE in without being able to parse it – thought it was something to do with ELO, so thanks for the explanation.

  2. Never heard of LODE but that didnt stop me-Brendan’s puzzles are very artistic and entertaining. The fact that they are not too taxing gives him a wider audience

  3. Mr Beaver @ 1 – what you said, almost exactly, even down to the ELO reference in the unparsed MELODISE.

    This was another prize I went through very quickly by my standards until pausing on one last clue.. A series of lucky guesses got me off to a good start – ROLLING STONE just from the enumeration, giving DYLAN from the “like a” reference and then HARMONICA from DYLAN. It wasn’t until I got BELLOW on top of GRASS and MANN that I saw the Nobel prize link, and FRANCE took longer (neat definition, Brendan)
    And then the long pause at MELODISE, an ugly word which I throught of and rejected as unlikely until I finally checked in Chambers and found it did in fact exist. And with an IZE variant, which didn’t help as I couldn’t parse it. Luckily I wrote in ISE, thinking the IS might be part of the parsing.

    So thanks for the parsing, PeeDee, and thanks, Brendan, for the entertainment.

  4. Thanks PeeDee for the blog and Brendan for an enjoyable even if straightforward puzzle. Straightforward, that is, apart from 25 dn OMEN which I could not and still cannot parse. What is A thunder? And why “heard” in moment?

  5. This was a really good crossword – I’m glad I found the time to do it, and I appreciated the theme despite not knowing much about it. (14/28a ROLLING STONE was clearly related to it, but not knowing that connection didn’t hold me up.)

    Like Mr Beaver, I didn’t get the wordplay in 7d MELODISE at first (it was my LOI), but it became straightforward when I remembered ‘lode’.

    I particularly liked 4d THOMAS, 9a CHEAP SHOT and 24a HARMONICA, as well as discovering the themed answers.

    Thanks Brendan and PeeDee.

  6. Thanks PeeDee. Like last week many answers wrote themselves in but others took time. I spent just about as long trying to explain 7 and 25 d as I did for all the rest put together. I’m still not sure that BAND=LODE: or that STINGY=CHEAP for that matter. I now find that ‘sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’ is a lyric from Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’.

  7. Thank you Brendan and PeeDee.

    I found this puzzle very enjoyable, I think there may be several other songs dotted about, for instance at 6d Blowin’ in the Wind.

    2d, the definition should be State of departments.

  8. Cookie @7
    I saw the reference in 6d too – very neat. No others, though, apart from those already revealed.
    The State of departments is in 22d (not 2d).

  9. Thanks Brendan and PeeDee

    Straightforward except for the explanation of OMEN, where I needed some help (though I shouldn’t have!) Clever, though!

    [A mouse goes into a music store and asks for a mouse organ. The owner says
    “Funny, you’re the second mouse today who’s been in to ask for a mouse organ.”
    “Ah” said the mouse “that would be our Monica”
    Boom boom!]

  10. I echo Alan B @5: I’m not a big Dylan fan but enjoyed the theme once it became clear. Not that it particularly helped me – I had no idea where he was born, for example. Though, funnily enough, MINNESOTA was first one in. I got HARMONICA from the first and last letters – it’s one of very few clues in an otherwise superb grid that rankled with me. Purely on the grounds there are so many saintly females that, whilst it helped in parsing afterwards, it wouldn’t have helped me actually solve.

    I thought 11a, which is key to so much else, was a simply brilliant clue. Best of the bunch. Runners-up include ROLLING STONE which is really neat, OPEN PRISON and FRANCE.

    Re 15a: I might take issue with ‘Leadership’ equating to ‘Management’. There is an enormous body of academic and business literature that explores the differences between the two. But it’s probably acceptable in a crossword context.

  11. cholecyst @5 – “heard” is part of the definition, the hearing of thunder could be an an omen, definition by example.

    “A thunder” just means “one instance of thunder” rather than thunder in general. The odd phrasing of the definition is explained by BigglesA @6, a line extracted from a Dylan song. Well spotted there, it passed me by completely.

  12. Mark
    I had similar thoughts to yours about ‘leadership’ and ‘management’, both of which I know from business literature as well as general knowledge. ‘Leadership’ is the term that has the clearer and more limited meaning, whereas ‘management’ has come to have a wider range of meanings and can be quite vague. I maintain, though, that in some contexts the terms amount to the same thing, for example when referring to or describing the group that is in charge of, say, a football club or a school.
    When solving 15d I pondered this for a bit and thought the clue was fair.

  14. Many thanks Brendan and PeeDee. I particularly enjoyed this, being a bit of a Bob Dylan fan. The Dylan references I spotted (some of them already pointed out) were:

    11a & 12a – BD himself and his place of birth
    13a – “too many people have died” – words from “Blowin’ in the Wind”
    14a & 28a – “Like a Rolling Stone”
    17a & 13d – references to “The Times They Are A’Changin'” (ie 2 anagrams of “times”)
    19a – refers to Dylan’s non-attendance at the Nobel ceremony and his notorious shyness
    24a & 26a – HARMONICA and STRUM
    29a – refers to “Masters of War”
    6d – refers to both The Band (who frequently accompanied Dylan) as well as to “Blowin’ in the Wind”
    8d – “Mixed Up Confusion” (song)
    25d – words from “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall”, which was performed by Patti Smith at the Nobel ceremony

    There are also less direct possible Dylan references in the surfaces of 20a, 3d, 7d and 24d. Any more?

  15. Songs references include: from Blowin’ in the wind, “too many people have died” 13ac/ The times they are a-changin’ (17ac, 13d)/ Masters of war (29ac)/ Mixed-up confusion (8d). And 3dn is, loosely, a description of his style.
    Puzzle appeared on day of award ceremony in Stockholm, not attended by Dylan (19ac). On 11th we saw a Dylan tribute here in Calcutta, with two youngsters who sang several of his songs including “Hard Rain”.
    Not everyone approved: “an ill conceived nostalgia award wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies” (Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting)

  16. Most enjoyable puzzle, a great theme, Dylan’s award and Patti Smith’s performance at acceptance were two rare highlights in a from 2026(grim for me at least).

    I don’t see if anyone has Pointing out that items and emits clues are a nice reference th The Times They are A-Changin ?

    My aLOI would have been melodise if I had been able to enter it – not a nice word and pretty hard to parse, ESP given only vowel crossers.

    But overall a great crossword, thanks Setter and Blogger !

  17. I’m going to stick up for “melodise” as a word. I regard it as ok to use because (a) it’s in Chambers, and (b) its meaning is transparent, however much you dislike its construction. And my (old) Chambers defines “lode” as “rock band”.

  19. Alan B @12: the cynic in me would query the example of football club as exemplar of either management or leadership!!! The Glorious Game hasn’t exactly done itself proud over recent years. But that is a rugby man speaking…

  22. It is common for words to have specific meanings in a technical/academic context that are not followed in common usage: weight and mass, temperature and heat, flavour and taste, management and leadership…

  23. Hi Brian @18, good to see that we had a lot of the same thoughts.

    I also really liked 1d (ACID). I’m not sure if this was intended to be part of the theme – Dylan did of course partake of drugs in the 60s, and famously introduced the Beatles to cannabis, but as far as I know LSD was not one of his habits. However he and his songs were of course very much associated with the psychedelic culture of the time – have a look at the amazing Martin Sharp poster, Blowin’ in the Mind.

  24. Some of us had problems with an extra ‘D’ in 7d and someone told me, correctly, on the other thread that I had the wrong rock band. I had never heard of LODE. Working backwards, I guessed ELO (Electric Light Orchestra), hence the ‘D” discrepancy. I have been waiting for this publication of the answer to see where I had gone wrong. Thanks.

  25. A beautifully constructed puzzle: very enjoyable and not too difficult. SHY was my FOI and the surface obviously put me in mind of the Nobel Prize. It was getting HARMONICA, in combination with the lyrical references that gave me DYLAN and the rest followed. I, too, had to confirm MELODISE (and BENT as a type of grass) in the dictionary. I picked up most of the Dylan references, but didn’t recognise the Hard Rain lyric and hadn’t heard of Mixed-up Confusion — which I now learn was Dylan’s first single.

  26. Nice puzzle from the dependable BRENDAN. I didn’t puzzle out all the
    DYLAN references. Though it comes as no surprise that they’re there- and try
    saying that if you come from Liverpool. I do like the Bobster but I haven’t
    read, marked and learned his lyrics, good though some of them are.
    I didn’t care much for MELODISE (LOI). Rather an ugly word which struck a
    jarring note. But overall, a splendid puzzle.
    Thanks Brendan.

  27. Thanks to Brendan, PeeDee, and Dylan. Lots of fun. I got through quickly (for a prize puzzle) but took forever getting MELODISE, even when I discovered it was indeed in the dictionary (obviously I too missed “lode” = rock band), so that I had to wait until today to find out if that answer was correct.

  28. An excellent puzzle, with clever use of the theme throughout. I liked the Nobel prize link especially, even though it took me ages to work out.

    [I surprised myself by getting all of the thematic references quite quickly, as I gave up on Dylan as long ago as 1965. However, my husband remains a faithful follower to this day so I have to listen to his music all of the time, though very reluctantly – some of it must must have rubbed off on me!]

    Thank you very much (echoed by my husband!) to Brendan. Thanks too to PeeDee for the blog.

  29. An entertaining puzzle, as expected from Brendan. I think my favourite clue was the non-themed SATANIC, for its apposite surface, though STRUM came close. LOI was MELODISE, which I couldn’t parse. I missed the ME and IS, but seeing them probably wouldn’t have helped as I still didn’t understand the clue even after reading the parsing here until suddenly the “Oh, it’s a band of rock!” penny dropped. I didn’t pick up all the Dylan lyric references, so thanks to JimS and others for filling those gaps.

    Thanks, Brendan and PeeDee.

  30. I have been a big Dylan fan since the 60s, so loved this theme, plus the references to other winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I didn’t get all the parsimgs so really appreciate your blog, PeeDee.

    The feedback from solvers of this Prize puzzle made for particularly good reading. Enormous thanks to JimS@14 and Brian Greer@15 for unpacking all the references to “His Bobness” and his work. Experience tells me that lots of people just don’t get Dylan, thus the hoo-ha over the Nobel Prize. I am still proud to be an old hippie and to have been shaped by listening to Biob Dylan. I admire the fact that he is still writing and performing new stuff. Last year, I walked the landmark places that were the crucible for Dylan in Greenwich Village, and it was one of the best days of my life.

    The version of “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” performed by Patti Smith at the Nobel Prize Ceremony was remarkable and very moving, not least because of Patti’s stage fright.

    Thanks to Brendan for producing one of my favourite puzzles of 2016.

  32. Apologies PeeDee, I just looked through the blog more carefully (and on a screen bigger than my phone) and note you did indeed point out the ‘Times they are a changin’ ‘) subtle reference.
    jennyk @29 – ‘satanic’ isn’t thematic to Dylan – but there is a kind of tie-in with the Rolling Stones referenced in 14,28 since one of their most (in)famous albums is ‘Their Satanic Majesties Request’

  33. Just remembered I forgot to comment on this yesterday. Brendan’s puzzles are always works of art. This one was probably at the trickier end of his scale but still fairly straightforward for a prize (not that I expect prizes to be especially difficult). Must admit that I halfguessed DYLAN before confirming it with HARMONICA – thought my knowledge of the Nobel prizewinners might be exposed but they were all familiar names. No problems with MELODISE

    Thanks to Brendan and PeeDee

  34. eoineoin @32 – no apology necessary. I only added the bit about The Times They are a Changin’ after it was pointed out to me in the comments. Your phone was not playing tricks on you.

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