Extract from How To Be An Artist

2000

I found the cassette under my seat among the old chip wrappers and used notebooks. Its cover had long since been discarded and its label obliterated by the ink of a black felt-tip pen. Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits. I wished I didn’t need to, I wished I could throw it out of the window along with my suitcase full of cassettes by Elvis and George Jones and Al Green and Hamilton Bohannon and Miles Davis and Muddy Waters and Fairport Convention and Iggy Pop and Kraftwerk and Chic and Petshop Boys and Public Enemy and Bert Jansch and Best of UK Garage 1998.

But no, there it was in my hand and I shoved it in, turned up the volume to distort and got going before anyone could stop me. And bang, straight into It’s All Over Now Baby Blue somewhere near the end of side one and I was feeling better than any man ought to feel. I’ve never been arsed about lyrics of songs. Never read a lyric sheet in my life. As for Bob Dylan’s words, I couldn’t quote you more than two consecutive lines and I don’t give a fuck what they meant when he wrote them. But I sangalongaBob at the top of my voice, every sneering, leering, nasal line.

Look, I do wish it wasn’t like this, that I wasn’t from the arse-end of a generation who venerated this toss-pot. I wish my little secret was a cassette of music by somebody the world had not heard of instead of the ultimate icon of every ageing Guardian-reading, faded liberal. At least I’ve not gone to see him live since the 1969 Isle of Wight Pop Festival.

The odd lines of his lyrics that I do recall take on different meanings every time I hear them. So on that June day Baby Blue was obviously Yves Klein. If you have a smattering of knowledge of twentieth-century art, you might not recall his scattering of gold on the Seine but you will know that Klein was the King of Blue. ‘Blue has no dimension, it is beyond dimensions whereas other colours are not …’ Of course he was right, but as of today it’s all over now Baby Blue. There was not one square inch of blue in that Flow Country sky. The whole lot was grey. Now there was an idea I should start marketing, a range of paints all of which are shades of grey, ‘Drummond’s International Grey’. One-litre cans to 100-hundred litre drums. ‘Sorry sir, only matt, no gloss. The boss says that gloss reflects, thus ruining the purity of the greyness.’

Just north of Dalhalvaig I pulled up and stuck a placard on the railing surrounding a granite war memorial. Back in the Land Rover I turned the cassette over and got going again, ‘Gimpo’s in the basement mixing up the medicine …’ And why was ‘the pump don’t work ’cause the vandal’s took the handle’ my all-time favourite Dylan line? Maybe it was a sign that I should start stealing petrol pump handles. As the Land Rover tore past Achiemore I was screaming.

‘I’ve got everything I need.

I’m a liar

and you can’t play.

I can fade the nighttime

and paint the daytime grey.’

The road came to a shuddering end. If I turned left, it would take me across the bridge into Melvich. If I turned right along the A836, I was only seven miles from my final destination of Dounreay nuclear power station.