As announced on Caught by the River on the 23rd of April, Bill Drummond began his nine year tour of The Atlantic Archipelago on the 28th of April 2018. This was in Falmouth, Cornwall.

Over the following eight years of this tour, Drummond will be screening the film IMAGINE WAKING UP TOMORROW AND ALL MUSIC HAS DISAPPEARED at a further eight locations. Each of these locations are where a different language was spoken by the local folk 200 years ago.

What was not mentioned was Bill Drummond’s sometime alter ego and arch nemesis Tenzing Scott Brown, will also be writing a play in parallel with the tour. The title of the play is ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN – Volume Two. He will be writing the play at a pace of one act a year. The subject matter of the play may involve the songs sung in those languages, the passing of time and Bob Dylan’s relationship with Bill Drummond.

The first of these acts is published here on Caught by the River.

Bill Drummond sitting in Bodega Fifty waiting for Bob Dylan to turn up. Photograph taken by Tracey Moberly.

Another Side of Bob Dylan – Volume Two is a play in ten acts, to be written over a period of ten years.

The characters in this play are: Cindy, Bill Drummond and Bob Dylan.

Cindy is a woman of a certain age.

She is figment of Bill Drummond’s imagination.

She is a device.

Bill Drummond is a man in his mid sixties. He is a figment in the imagination of Tenzing Scott Brown.

Tenzing Scott Brown is the play writing alter ego and sometime arch nemesis of Bill Drummond.

Bob Dylan is a singer songwriter. He is both a real man and a longstanding figment of Bill Drummond’s imagination.

The setting for Act One is a small café in the London borough of Hackney.

Drummond visits the café most mornings.

Cindy pops in from time to time.

Bob Dylan is yet to visit.

The café is called Bodega Fifty.

Act One:

Drummond is sitting at his usual table in Bodega Fifty.
His Black n’ Red notebook is not open on the table.
He is not making notes.
In walks Cindy.

Cindy:
Not writing one of your plays today.

Drummond:
No, I’m waiting.

Cindy:
For what?

Drummond:
Bob Dylan.

Cindy:
Is that some sort of rhyming slang for villain or something?

Drummond:
No, just me saying what it is I am doing.

Cindy:
Well I don’t think Bob Dylan is about to walk into the Bodega Fifty on a Monday morning in late February 2018.

Drummond:
I suspect you are correct, but that, none-the-less, is what I am doing.

Cindy:
And how long have you been waiting like this?

Drummond:
On and off for the past thirty-five years.

Cindy:
I am going to ignore this conversation and go and get myself a coffee. When I return, we will pretend it never happened.

Cindy goes up to the counter to get herself her single shot skinny latte.

Drummond stares out of the window to see if Bob Dylan is heading down the road towards the Bodega Fifty.

Cindy returns to the table and sits down.

Cindy takes her first sip of her latte.

Cindy considers the world and then resumes her conversation with Drummond as if the subject of Bob Dylan has not been mentioned.

Cindy:
Not writing one of your plays today?

Drummond:
No, I’m waiting.

Cindy:
For what?

Drummond:
Bob Dylan.

Cindy:
Look, can we just skip this bit and…

Drummond:
Okay I will explain.
You know I used to manage this band called Echo & The Bunnymen back in the late 70s and early 80s.

Cindy:
Is this going to be one of your long ‘back in the day’ stories?

Drummond:
Not too long even though the waiting bit has been thirty-five years and counting.

Cindy:
As long as you are prepared to buy my follow up latte.

Drummond:
Actually, I am going to go even further back than that, make it almost fifty years.

In the Spring of 1969, John Lennon started to wear a white suit.
He looked shit in it.

Then in July, as in July 1969 I went to London to watch The Rolling Stones play in Hyde Park and they not only sounded shit as in boring, but Mick Jagger was also wearing a sort of white suit.
He looked even worse than Lennon did.

A few weeks later, I went to see this Bob Dylan play at the Isle of Wight Festival and it was not that he sounded shit, in fact he sounded a lot better than I was expecting, but he looked shit, and the reason why he looked shit was because of the white suit he was wearing.

I fuckin’ hated these white suits all my generation’s heroes had started wearing.

I began to suspect something.

So I dumped them all.

Ignored what they did and got on with my own life. A life that did not include wearing white suits – well not until much later, and even then that was as a piss take.

It has taken me almost fifty years to come up with my theory…

Cindy:
Do we have to have another one of your theories this early in the week?

Drummond:
And the theory being, these were all men who subconsciously or not, knew their decade was coming to an end. A decade where each, in their own way, had been voices for a generation – my generation.

And on the subject of My Generation, I am going to ignore mentioning the white boiler suit that Pete Townsend wore at the same Isle of Wight Festival.

Their wearing of white suits was an act of desperation, attempting to keep the crowd’s, as in my generation’s, focus on them, even as that focus was fast slipping away. Not one of them would ever do anything to match what they had already done and not one of them had reached the age of thirty yet.

I should add here sometime around ’77, I got totally into Dylan. Or that mid sixties just gone electric period. Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde, that stuff. Not that I told anyone.

Cindy:
What has any of this got to do with you claiming you’re sitting here waiting for Bob Dylan to turn up?

Drummond:
Anyway, back to 1983.

Cindy:
We were never there in the first place.

Drummond:
Well that is when I started my waiting for Bob Dylan.

Cindy:
Just get to whatever point it is you’re trying to get to.

Drummond:
I was over in Los Angeles having meetings with Warner Brothers about the next Bunnymen album and for some reason a meeting had been set up for me with someone called Elliot Roberts.

This Elliot Roberts was a big deal. He managed Neil Young and Joni Mitchell and all sorts. I got to his offices, but it was not this Elliot Roberts to begin with, but some young bloke about my age.

Cindy:
And your age being?

Drummond:
Twenty-nine.

Cindy:
The right age to be wearing a white suit then.

Drummond:
I had no need to be wearing a white suit then. I was yet to shoot my load. My white suit wearing was to come later – like I said earlier.

Cindy:
Dylan? Had you begun your waiting yet?

Drummond:
No. Anyway this bloke about my age, whose name I can’t remember, is a hustler. A man out to make his mark. He’s an assistant to Elliot Roberts. He has an agenda. The band U2 have just had their first top ten hit in the UK. The Bunnymen are working on their fourth album, this was going to be their breakthrough in the States. It looked like there is going to be this whole wave of guitar bands from over here going to make it over there.

Cindy:
Bob Dylan?

Drummond:
I’m getting there.

Cindy:
Time for you to get me my follow up latte.

Drummond takes a break from his theorizing and reminiscing to get up and get Cindy her coffee.

Cindy checks her Tinder and sends a text message.

Drummond:
So anyway, this bloke wants to do a deal with me. I just remembered, his name is Jeff Kramer. He wants to manage The Bunnymen with Elliot Roberts for USA. They will give me a split on the management percentage for America. He reckons that it will need a set up like theirs, as in someone with the weight of Elliot Roberts to really get Warner Brothers arse in gear. And then all of the FM radio stations across the US will fall in line. He says that if I am taking my job as The Bunnymen’s manager seriously, I will do a deal with them. He is also a man who can tell stories, telling me about Neil Young taking the piss out of Rod Stewart wanting to record one of his songs and Neil Young not letting it happen.

Cindy:
Bob Dylan?

Drummond:
I’m getting there. He invites Elliot Roberts into the room to shake my hand and all that stuff. It is Elliot Roberts that then lets me know, they also now managed Bob Dylan. It is with that information I make my move.

I tell them, I would cut them a deal, if they do the same with me for Bob Dylan in the UK.

They fall silent.

I fill the silence with my pitch.

I tell them, that Dylan, was way off course, that he had been fucking up with his records for over ten years, that even Blood On The Tracks sounds shit and that was supposed to be his back to form album.

I tell them I know how to make Dylan sound good, I tell them it wasn’t just the sound of the records, it was the way that Dylan dresses and is photographed. And his haircut… everything Dylan was doing was wrong. I don’t mention the Christian bit but…

Cindy:
Why?

Drummond:
Well this was a Jewish world I was in. Dylan was Jewish, they were Jewish and I wasn’t. It was not my job to tell them that Dylan should quit the whole Christian bit and get back to being Jewish even if it were him being a secular and outsider Jew.

Cindy:
And?

Drummond:
And then I tell them, that Dylan should do his next album with The Bunnymen as the back up band. He should be seen wearing a check shirt and Levi 501s, shrink to fit, red tab, button flies jeans on the cover of this album, and then do a tour of the States. The Bunnymen will open for him doing their stuff, and then Dylan comes on stage after the break with The Bunnymen as his backing band and they will do his stuff.

Drummond:
They just sit there in silence and stare at me. Then this Jeff Kramer says to me, ‘You don’t understand Bill. You can’t tell Bob Dylan what to do. No one can. Bob does what he wants to do. The most we can do, is try to convince the record company and the agents and the promoters that whatever Bob is doing is the right thing to do, or something like that.

Cindy:
So is that the end of your story?

Drummond:
Well not quite. I tell them, that is the deal. They tell me fine, they will get back to me after they had given it some thought. So I told them they should get Dylan to contact me and I would go through things with him directly. They smile, we shake hands and…

Cindy:
And?

Drummond:
I am waiting to hear from Dylan.

When I didn’t hear from Dylan in the next few months I quit managing The Bunnymen to get on with other stuff.

Their next album came out – Ocean Rain – it was the best thing they had ever done. Maybe their high water mark. None of them had reached thirty yet.
And without there being the album I imagined with Dylan, there was nothing more that I could do.

But I kept waiting for Dylan to turn up.

Cindy:
So when did you stop?

Drummond:
Stop what?

Cindy:
The waiting.

Drummond:
Never did. That is what I am doing this morning when you came in, like I said. Not a week, okay maybe a month, goes by without me sitting in a café somewhere thinking that any moment, Bob Dylan is going to walk in, sit down at my table and go ‘So Bill, if you still want to be my manager, what is it you think I should be doing.’ And then I tell him.

Cindy:
Tell him what?

Drummond:
I will remind him of when I saw him play at the Isle of Wight back in the summer of ’69 and how he did a version of Wild Mountain Thyme.

I will skip the bit about the shit white suit.

Instead I will remind him that Wild Mountain Thyme is a Scottish folk song.

I will tell him, this is the song I want the congregation to sing at my funeral.

But the main thing I will tell him is, that it was him singing this Scottish song that gave me an idea for a Dylan album that should be done.

Cindy:
But you keep trying to tell me, that the world does not need any more albums by anybody, let alone Bob Dylan. That he was over and done with as an artist before he reached 30.

Drummond:
Yeah, I know. But I also know that those are just my prejudices. My idea for him is he should quit his Great American Song Book shit that he has been doing, and hit the road with me, and that we should – over a period of time  – go to all the places in the British Isles where nine different languages were spoken 200 years ago, and find a song from each of those places, and then he should record them and I will produce it.

Cindy:
In what languages are these?

Drummond:
You know. You’ve heard me go on about this before.

Cindy:
Yeah, but for the sake of whoever might read, whatever you have written based on our imaginary conversation today.

Drummond:
Okay, two hundred years ago the following nine distinct languages were spoken in different parts of these islands:
Cornish;
English;
Roma as in the Gipsy language;
Welsh;
Manx in the Isle of Man;
Irish;
Lallans as in Scots;
Gaelic as in what they speak in the Highlands and Hebrides,
and
Norn.

Cindy:
Norn?

Drummond:
Yeah, the ancient Nordic language that was spoken in the Shetlands. Pretty close to Faroese and Icelandic.

Cindy:
But I thought it was to these nine parts of these islands where those languages were spoken, you were going to be screening that film about The17 and you were going to give some sort of a talk and maybe record a local person sing an unaccompanied song in their own historic language.

Drummond:
Yeah, but all that is just a front for me wanting to do this album with Bob Dylan.

Cindy:
And you have been waiting for him to turn up for thirty-five years? What makes you think he is going to turn up in the next two months before you head down to Cornwall at the end of April?

Drummond:
Pretty unlikely I know.
But you never know.
But if he doesn’t I have a back up plan.

Cindy:
And?

Drummond:
Either you have to become Bob Dylan for a week in every year for the next nine years or…

Cindy:
Me become Dylan? How does that work out?

Drummond:
Or a middle aged, over weight Nigerian is going to walk into a café that I am sitting in just at the right time and then HE becomes Bob Dylan.

Or maybe a female Japanese student over here doing Europe before the rest of her life unfolds.

Or…

Anyway, the point is, whoever it is that takes on the role of Bob Dylan, can just be a figment of my imagination.

And over those nine years, or at least for a couple of days in each of those nine years, this imagined version of Bob Dylan and I head to Cornwall or the Isle of Man, we screen the film about The17, I give a talk, I then track down some local folk song and record it the next morning. I write up the conversation that I will be having with this Bob Dylan, and that will be the basis of a play.

Cindy:
A play?

Drummond:
Yeah, you know, like this is pretending to be a play. And with all the other stuff I have been writing over the past couple of years.

Cindy:
And what happened to Echo & The Bunnymen and these management people in Los Angeles? Did they end up managing them?

Drummond:
No they went and managed The Alarm instead.

Cindy:
So I take it this ‘Alarm’ became massive. Stadium post punk or something?

Drummond:
No, the lead singer left, cause he thought he could become a superstar on his own. Then it all went nowhere, like it usually does.

Bob Dylan kept releasing boring albums and going on his never ending tour and… and I got to wear my version of my white suit on Top Of The Pops while Jimmy and I were being The Timelords.

Cindy:
And is that it?

Drummond:
Well until Bob Dylan walks through the door and goes ‘Hey Bill, I been looking for you. When do we start?’

The End

Post Script:

As Cindy gets up to leave the Bodega Fifty and get on with her real life, she turns to Drummond and says:

Cindy:
Wasn’t there some film with Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan? Isn’t this all a bit like that?

Drummond:
I don’t know. I haven’t seen it. Maybe I should watch it tonight, before Dylan walks through the door this time tomorrow morning.