At 'Magnus Bain's Beach' (Burnside) from 'Shetland' . In Northmavine, Shetland

Wee wander this afternoon 'atween weathers' to get some pictures for the next edition of Shetland Life Magazine. This is the beach (and house) where large chunks of the most recent episode of 'Shetland' were shot. The (derelict) house has been sold and general feeling (rumour) is that it will be demolished and a new one built in its place. It has one of the most stunning positions of any house in Shetland. Or Scotland. Or Europe.

Publishing is dead. Long live the new publishing! A response to Robert McCrum

I read this unintentionally funny, lazy Observer piece about the incredible suffering being endured by today’s cash-strapped, loft-converting authors (having to ‘commission a builder’, which is what you do in London, apparently, rather than ‘head to B&Q’) with increasing frustration and rage.

Why? first, it made it into the columns of the Observer, despite its lack of insight, research, knowledge or perspective. Presumably because Robert McCrum is an associate editor and thus Beyond Criticism. Second, it reflects a London-centric, blinkered, middle class sense of entitlement. Third, it reminded me how I felt when the British Phonographic Institute began its moronic legal actions against poor wee pop music downloaders, back in the day: it illustrated how fear and misunderstanding of technological change can lead the privileged beneficiaries of redundant systems into the errors that shape their inevitable doom. Dinosaurs? Waddle this way.

Publishing is about five years behind the record industry in its reaction to digital technology, and even now, there are those involved in music who think their salvation lies in ‘the comeback of vinyl’ or that the best idea is to get a deal with a major label which will sell CDs and make everyone shedloads of money.

But the record industry is essentially a twitching corpse with a ghastly smile on its stiffening face. ‘Copyright’ as it has for years been understood regarding music is terminally ill. New models of working have been evolving, artists understand that they must retain control of themselves and their art, and that indeed, no-one is offering to buy their souls anymore. If you’re a full-time musician, unless you’re cruising on old contracts, prepared to hack it with the corporate song machines or very, very lucky, you’re a ‘portfolio freelance’, making a living from performance, record and merchandise sales at gigs, selling special, luxurious souvenir editions of your work to fans, teaching, workshopping, consulting, hustling for synch and advertising (selling your music for evil corporate purposes) , pitching for grants and community project funding,and probably seeking any other work on the side that fits with your priorities. Or living off your partner.

Most of all, you’re doing it yourself. You’ve honed your social media skills, you update your own website or blog daily, and you give your music away, most of it, in Mp3 quality, harvesting those who become committed fans as a result and encouraging them to support you by owning those fancy limited edition CDs or collectible cassettes with real fox fur slip cases.

Sorry, authors. That’s the future for you. Just as creative musicians have learned that, if they want to live by their art, they have to let the old maintenance models die, so must you. Publishers don’t want you anymore. Publish yourself. It’s straightforward. It’s cheap. It can even be free.

Oh, but wait a minute. You’re saying you don’t want to do that as (a) it’s too time consuming and your muse will be pissed off? (b) No-one will organise launches or buy you lunch? (c) deep in your heart of hearts, you know your publisher’s been subsidising you and the truth is, you don’t have an audience big enough to support you in the style to which you’ve become accustomed?

Listen, people who make music do it for the love of making music. They will do it for nothing. And as far as I’m concerned, writers write for the love of it too. They seek to communicate, to connect. And you don’t need a publisher to do that. And time? As my student son commented, scornfully: what are evenings and weekends for? And you delicate flowers with your tender, fragile creativity and your need to rent an office where you can swoon over a MacBook Pro running Scrivener, without distractions: sorry, the fantasy is over. There’s the kitchen table, there’s the Tesco Toshiba, there’s next door’s wifi. Get going.

I write as someone who has had six ‘proper’ books published by Mainstream, latterly owned by Random House, now essentially out of business. It was fun. It was even, for a short while decades ago, quite lucrative, though never enough to live on. But I never stopped crofting, reporting for newspapers and magazines, writing columns, doing workshops, whisky tasting, gigs, copywriting or broadcasting. I’ve had two books put out by a small local publisher (owned by my local, and successful, newspaper, for whom I edit a monthly print/digital magazine). I have published other people, locally in print and using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform. I have the digital rights to my own out-of-print Mainstream books and have begun the process of moving them onto Kindle. I have published (using Blurb - not recommended) a travel book and (using Amazon's Createspace - recommended) ‘the world’s first interactive whisky thriller’. I’m in the process of setting up a small digital-and-print publishing operation which will, I hope, help other authors to begin the process of connecting with a readership.

Perhaps they’ll make some money. But they won’t be sitting in their luxury converted attics, the ones with the carefully-matched Timorous Beasties wallpaper and the designer pram in the designer hall, sipping buck’s fizz while dreaming of lunch at the Ubiquitous Chip. They’ll be the ones running their own websites, working social media with verve and style, making videos and mounting guerilla-lit tours of the remote English wastelands.

And they’ll be doing that because they can write. Because they want to write. Because they’ve got something to say.

Learning To Hate The Beatles...I still stand by the sentiment!

From the long-lost album A Complete And Utter History Of Rock'n'Roll by The Tom Morton Two (me and the much better known James Morton, when he was just 14...)

First song from childrens' show 'Really Disgusting Songs Your Parents Don't Want You To Sing'

Years ago, when caravan and camping holidays and long, long motorway drives were compulsory in the Morton family, disgusting and horrible in-car songs provided some distraction. Who can forget 'Diarrhoea (I Feel It Near)' or 'I Need To Go To The Toilet', 'Knutsford City Limits', 'Whulks' 'I Am A Horse' and many more?

I've long thought about a children's show which would include messy, horrible songs, many about poo. Parents would hate it, probably. I suspect the bairns would love it.

Anyway, here's a first example of a singalong, jaunty little number about dog excrement. It's educational. And based on actual events. Yes, we do have a dog whose name is Lulu.

Commerce, cars and music. When Neil went electric & Dylan danced on Detroit's grave.

My recent mild and considered piece about corporate cash and the music industry (see below) was provoked by the activities of an almost unknown Scottish singer songwriter and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

This week, Bob Dylan's Superbowl ad for Chrysler may lead some to say, well, if it's OK for Bob, it must be fine for Poor Wee Rachel. Which would be a response as facile, blinkered and ethically bankrupt as some of the sickening self-interest which stemmed from the Scottish music scene as a response last week. The week in which RBS, not coincidentally, announced a profits warning due to the massive legal bill it faces in the wake of its various financial scandals.

Bob, of course, doesn't care. He has taken the money and run with the directorial requirements on previous occasions - Pepsi (with Will.i.am, effortlessly conjoining protest, two kinds of pop and the X Factor), Cadillac and Victoria's Secret. The Pepsi ad involved granting permission for the use of a song and some old footage. He appears in all three others, somewhat enigmatically and arguably jokingly in the case of the , ah, underwear commercial. The Superbowl Chrysler film is different. It's rampantly xenophobic and invokes Detroit as a symbol of America's greatness, at a time when that bankrupt city's administration  is selling off everything it can just to keep the barest minimum of services available, essentially due to the auto industry's ruthless withdrawal. Even its art, Bob.

For long-term Dylan watchers, this kind of nationalistic right wing breast-beating is nothing new, and there's no point in trying to defend it as some kind of knowing, withering sarcasm. He's meant it when he embraced  Messianic Judaism/fundamentalist Christianity/warmongering American expansionsim/fellow-travelling Communism lite. What was in common with all these ideological stances was a ruthless self-promotion and sense of what, in the end, was good for Bob. Money doesn't talk, it screams. Very loudly in Dylan's ear. But Bob's beyond. Bob's bigger than all of that. At least, that's what he tells himself.

None of which means he's not the most brilliant rock'n'roll entity who has ever walked the earth.  I'll take John Buchan over any Scottish writer before or since, and I don't have to be an antisemitic, colonialist arch-Tory to do so. You can discern the ability and appreciate the art without becoming an ally of the stupidity and moral torpor.

Though, of course, others have chosen a different path.

Neil Young, for example, whose  This Note's for You still holds up as a ferocious statement of no-sell-out intent. He loves trains, real and model (and indeed rescued the company Lionel Trains from bankruptcy). And cars. He loves American cars, and unlike Dylan, he sees both the symbolic importance of Detroit in American culture and the threat to the environment posed by the petrochemical industry. When it comes to putting your money where your mouth is, no-one trumps Neil. He is funding and promoting the LincVolt, a fuel-efficient, hybrid car like no other: It's a 1959 Lincoln Continental, one of those barge like, multi-finned icons of Americana. But powered by an environmentally-friendly motor. Neil understands symbols. But he also understands political and environmental realities. And wants to change them.

And he understands Dylan, perhaps, better than anyone. He owes him, after all, such a debt, and unlike anyone else I can think of, he states that explicitly in the song Twisted Road ('First time I heard Like a Rolling Stone/I felt that magic and I took it home/Gave it a twist and I made it mine/But nothing was as good as the very first time').

He also knows full well the single-minded commitment necessary to achieve anything in the music business. But he recognises too, the damage that can ensue and the tragedy of those left behind. The cost. This heartrending story goes back to his earliest days in Winnipeg and perhaps, in Young's quotes, reveals more about what is involved in taking your art from the parochial to the universal than anything else I've read.

He (Bill Edmondson of The Squires) didn't share my determination to keep on going at any cost. He wanted to stay back where he knew things were OK rather than try for more. He was a wonderful person who loved to sing and play. He could have done what I did, but he didn't.

'At any cost'. Young was and is prepared to pay the price. Dylan, it seems, wants others to cover rather more than his expenses. Arguably, it's Young who sees the bigger picture, and Dylan whose utter self-obsession, not for the first time, leaves for many observers and fans his art trapped in the context of a shabby and ungenerous life.

A twisted road, indeed.