I decide to walk from the hotel to the trendy bar even though Pierce offers to send a car. I say that I want a breath of fresh air. I actually want a pint, or two, before I show up at this bar called Che and have to play my guitar in front of all the press and hangers-on that the label have invited. Pierce has licked the arse of some radio producers and pluggers to get them to turn up, promised them great things by way of protest and social critique, and he’s told me that Measures Taken will largely sink or swim on the basis of tonight.
No pressure, then.
With my first pint, in Marylebone, I sit and brood on the name-change. It’s been a month since my identity was altered, Price coming into the studio with Bower, from the label, and beckoning me out of the recording booth. Bower is in charge of the Agitate imprint, which my album will be released on, though he looks more like a Kazakh weightlifter than a music executive. While Pierce stood in the background, listening in, Bower placed a hand on my arm and said, ‘We need to talk.’
‘You breaking up with me?’
I said it with a smile, but then I had this wee clench of panic in my chest because maybe, just maybe, it was going to be that conversation. Days before the CD was pressed, with the cover art finalised – the lettering near enough a copy of The Specials and the picture of me holding up my guitar in the style of Woody Guthrie – just months before the release, and they were going to pull me to the side and say, It’s all been a terrible mistake, son.
‘Nothing like that.’ Bower tried a grin, but it turned out crooked.
‘Well?’
‘It’s just that the marketing department thought…’ Bower cleared his throat ‘…well, we all thought that your name was Robert Dylan, with a “y”. But, on examining the contracts and what-have-you, we’ve discovered that it’s actually with an “i”.’
‘That was no secret,’ I said, breaking into a smile. ‘And, like you say, it was on all the contracts; you must have noticed it before now, surely?’
‘As you know, a lot of that was handled by our parent company, through the A&R department and the lawyers.’
I shrugged. It wasn’t a problem, so far as I was concerned.
‘That’s what comes of leaving the paperwork to the bloody secretaries, I suppose,’ Bower continued. ‘Anyway, we feel that one change from Bob Dylan is good marketing, but that two loses the connection, you know?’
‘Sorry, I’m not sure I do.’
‘Let me explain…’ Pierce stepped forward and passed a hand over his forehead, taking away the sheen of sweat. ‘They feel that Bob to Rab is good. It gives the impression that you’re Scottish. But to have Dylan, with a “y”, changing to Dillon, with an “i”, as well, makes it difficult to maintain the link.’
‘But hang on…’ The answer I wanted to give was full of swear-words, so I had to take a moment to filter them out. ‘I am Scottish. I don’t have a link to Dylan. My name is Rab Dillon, with a fucking “i”.’ One sneaked past the censors.
‘And they’re sympathetic to that,’ Price said. ‘But from a marketing point of view – ’
‘Show him the CD,’ Bower said, in this growling voice that made me wonder if he meant to say ‘gun’ and got the two mixed up.
Price half turned, turned back, all the while nodding and flustered. It took him two attempts to wrestle the CD – it was a CD, not a gun – from his suit jacket and there was this tearing sound as he got it free. He handed it over to me. It was familiar, in that the photo was me standing in my Guthrie pose staring off beyond the camera, but there was a massive typo there in The Specials lettering: ‘Rab Dylan: Measures Taken.
‘We’ve made the decision, son,’ Bower said, stretching forward to offer a handshake. ‘Because you need any leg-up you can get. In this business, the first album can be released and forgotten about on the same day. At least, this way, people will take notice.’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘This is the name the label is behind; this is the name the label wants.’
‘D-Y-L-A-N.’ I sounded it out.
‘It sounds the same, let’s face it,’ he said. ‘It’s cosmetic detail.’
I looked at his hand. It was a fleshy hand, with some dry skin over the knuckles. I reached out and shook it.
‘Excellent,’ Pierce said, trying a chuckle. ‘It’s almost biblical, isn’t it? A “y” for an “i”.’
And now, in that pub in Marylebone a month later, I imagine what the reaction to my name-change will be from the folk back up in Glasgow. My mum, my friends… Maddie. They’ll think it’s a mistake. They’ll presume that the CDs will all be taken and melted down, that some typesetter somewhere will lose their job and that new CDs will come out pristine and new and correct. But they won’t. For the rest of my days, there will be a CD of my music out there that doesn’t quite bear my name.
Leaving the bottom inch of beer in the glass, I rise from my bar stool, lift my guitar, and make my way out into the streets of London. It’s just gone five-thirty and the city-slickers are streaming out from their offices and marching towards the Tube/train/bus. The streets outside the pubs are scattered with the quick-one-after-work crowd, and the restaurants are waving people inside for the pre-theatre menu. In this mix of natives and tourists I don’t want to take out my A–Z; I don’t want to show myself up and admit that I’m lost. In spite of the well-creased spine, the map feels like a failure. I try the GPS on my phone, but it buffers and then shows me a map of the West End of Glasgow – from the last time I used the bloody thing. So I settle for walking on another couple of streets, ducking into the quietest bar I can find, a wine bar down a side-street, and sitting myself down to plan my route in peace and quiet.
‘What can I get you, sir?’
It’s bloody table-service. Nothing worse than table-service – you can’t see the beer taps to make your selection and you can’t drink at your own pace; got to time it to coincide with the to-ing and fro-ing of the bar folk.
‘Beer,’ I say, looking up at the young waiter with the pencil-thin moustache and glasses.
‘Any particular one?’
‘Whatever you’ve got on draught.’
‘We only serve bottled beer.’
‘Whatever you have in bottles, then.’
‘We have Peroni Nastro Azzurro, Sagres, Blue Moon – ’
‘Peroni is fine, cheers.’
‘Very good.’
‘Exceedingly good.’
He ignores my final comment and makes his way off to the bar, and I take comfort in the fact that it’s harder to surreptitiously spit into a bottle than a pint glass. I sit and leaf my way through the A–Z, working out the way from Marylebone down to the Soho bar. I imprint the directions on my brain, wanting to avoid the shame of taking the blue, red and white book out again in the street and having to stand spinning, in the centre of a crowd, like a fucking tourist looking for Trafalgar Square.
I’m still not fully settled in London. Maybe because I’ve been so busy with recording. It’s the kind of city you need a base in, some soil for your roots, but I never seem to be in the same place for more than a few hours at a time. Too fucking expensive to stand still – the hotel seems to charge per cubic centimetre of air breathed, the cafés pass on the cost of flying the coffee beans over from Kenya, and the bars bill you for their alcohol licence if you stay for more than a swift pint.
Pierce is suggesting that I go back to Glasgow for Christmas next month, to save some money. Recharge, he said; maybe stay on for the Celtic Connections festival in the New Year. As a punter rather than a performer. I’m not keen, though. I’d rather spend the time exploring the capital, enjoying my freedom from the recording booth. Because, come springtime, I won’t be able to walk these streets for fear of being mobbed.
When the beer comes I swallow it down in a couple of glugs, leaving more than two inches at the bottom in case there is waiter-backwash in there. Then I leave a fiver on the table, thinking first that it might be too much of a tip, and then that it might actually be less than the list price in a place like that. Never mind, it’s more than enough for a single bottle of beer. Besides, I’m cutting it fine if I want to get there in time for the sound-check.
Che is a bar that lives up to its name. The iconic print of Guevara is up everywhere, not just with the usual red background but with all manner of reliefs behind, like the Warhol pop art of Marilyn Monroe. It strikes me as odd, to be honest, that this icon of revolution is plastered over the walls in more colours than the Dulux range, but I smile and nod at Price when he says, ‘Isn’t this the perfect place, hombre? The Price is always right.’ Above the bar, the word ‘Revolución’ is stencilled in blue and white, but the taps are all the regular beers that you would get in any high street pub, and the spirits are the same ones I drank when I was seventeen. When I go to take a leak, the picture above the Gents sign is Che with a cigar and I wonder what the image for the Ladies is, but I decide not to go looking for it in case it’s just the same image with blonde Marilyn hair Photoshopped on.
‘So,’ Pierce says, when I return. The table he sets my beer down on is (or was) a hubcap. Revolution in Soho extends to – maybe ends with – hubcaps being turned into tables. ‘We’ll start at around half-seven. Just two or three songs. Give them a flavour.’
‘A flavour of revolution,’ I say, with more than a flavour of sarcasm.
‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘Exactly.’
After tuning up the old-fashioned way, with my tuning fork, and going through the sound-check, I sit at my hubcap and drink until I feel detached. Not until I’m drunk, but until the nerves are gone and replaced by this vacant disconnection from my surroundings, from the people that are beginning to cluster around hubcaps in slim-fitting suits and streamlined skirts. Two kisses, one on each cheek, and a smile. I’ve never understood that; never felt comfortable going from cheek to cheek when the equivalent in Glasgow would be a nod or, at the very most, a handshake. Pierce brings people across to kiss and be kissed, but I say very little and they soon go drifting off to other hubcaps.
Over the past couple of months, while I was recording, I’ve grown used to spending the days playing my music and the nights slowly and steadily drinking in the corner of pubs where everyone else seems to know one another. Those worlds colliding should be my Big Bang moment, but it feels like an anticlimax, to be honest.
When the time comes, I step up to the stage – not really a stage, more a corner of the floor with a Cuban flag as a backdrop – and make sure I’m tuned up. The venue is small, it should hold no fear for me, but I know that the people around the hubcaps have turned up just to hear me; they are no casual crowd, they’re professionals and they can make or break me.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ I say, into the microphone, ‘my name is Rab Dylan.’
I resist the urge to spell it out for them and settle for an opening chord instead. The song is called ‘Hiatus’ and it’s about a student taking time off from his degree to go and join the Occupy camp at St Paul’s Cathedral. I have no experience of university and only my time with Flick to draw on for the Occupy part, but I’m proud of the song. It talks about ‘the trade in ivory towers’ and ‘letters after your name, so that you can shift the blame’. It is explicit, it is confrontational, it is activism in song form. But, as I stand there, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a little… just a touch… thin.
I think of that first day visiting the camp. Pierce gave me a notebook to take with me and, as I went from group to group, I should have been scribbling away. There were people talking about corporate tax avoidance, about scrapping the Trident nuclear defence system, about introducing a financial transaction tax on the banks. Why do we need austerity, they said, when we can raise the funds this way instead? And I knew those were the arguments I should have noted; that those were the debates Maddie would have plunged into head-first. But, until I met Flick, I’d struggled to even dip my toe in the water. Standing on the edge of the groups, I felt like a kid on the first day at a new school listening to the other kids gossiping about teachers that I didn’t know.
In the end, the only thing I wrote down that day was a detailed plan for a waste disposal system. An older gent in socks and sandals shouted it out to me, along with, ‘You’ve got a pen and paper – write it down, for Christ’s-sake.’ It had separate columns for compostables, recyclables and reusables – but it didn’t help in the least when I sat down to write the song.
It’s not just the lyrics, though. My mind flashes back to another day in the studio, a month or so ago, when Pierce came up and tapped on the glass of the isolation booth. He mouthed at me and I shook my head, indicating that I couldn’t hear by pointing at the headphones on my ears. The sound engineer pressed a button and the music in the cans stopped.
‘What about some brass?’ Pierce called.
‘Brass?’
‘Trumpets, horns, the likes of that.’
I shake my head, speak into the microphone. ‘Guitar and harmonica is fine.’
‘I don’t know…’ He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘I’ve been listening to a lot of Miles Davis.’
‘Right. And if you’d been listening to Rolf Harris would we be putting a fucking didgeridoo over the top of it?’
‘It’s missing something, is all I’m saying… it needs more depth…’
I stepped up to the glass, misting it as I gave him my answer. He couldn’t hear because I wasn’t speaking into the mic, but he caught the mouthing.
On the stage at Che, though, I think he might just be right – the Price is always right. In the silent bar, with only sips and cleared throats for company, the acoustic guitar sounds tinny and faraway. I launch into the harmonica solo at the end, but I’ve never quite got used to the rack that loops around my neck, so a couple of the notes slide off into approximations of themselves. It’s not a disaster, but the applause at the end is polite rather than rapturous. Maybe that’s just the crowd, though; maybe that’s just the occasion.
I play another – about the London riots – and a final love song that almost didn’t make it on to the album. A break-up song. If I’d had another week, another day in the studio it probably wouldn’t have been on there, but I was running late as it was and Pierce had given me this soppy smile and called it ‘touching’ so I’d shrugged my shoulders and given it the nod. It’s about Maddie, that one, although it doesn’t mention her by name. It’s about her decision, in those final days of the relationship. I called it ‘3.17am’ because that’s the precise time she called to tell me.
After the three songs, as I make my way back to my hubcap, it’s the final song that seems to have made an impression. Two girls approach me – they come as a pair. One says, ‘I loved the emotion in that last song.’ And the other says, ‘Was it written for your wife? For your girlfriend?’ I smile, and I shake my head and I let them feel the callus on the tip of my guitar-plucking finger as I lean over the bar to buy them a drink. They might have been paid by Pierce to be there – might be part of the service, one of the perks – but, in that moment, I don’t care. As long as they don’t ask me questions about my lyrics, as Flick would, or prompt me to analyse my performance, like Maddie. It’s all simple, straightforward. I get them both a cocktail, I get myself a double whisky, I put the whole lot on my credit card, and then I walk them, one on each arm, over to the hubcap in the corner.