There are many far better qualified than I am to write tributes to the one they called Jackie Leven, but my own testament is no less sincere.
The few times we met he was always gracious and garrulous in conversation, as generous with his ears as he was with his tales, however tall they may have been. He could spin a yarn that would propel any story I had cared to write, links to some of which I have gathered on this page, but was also genuinely interested in opinions ventured and knowledge gained.
I remember well the time he was persuaded to play a tiny gig in the skittle alley of my village pub deep in the heart of Dorset, a stone’s throw from the farmland on which he once lived. There weren’t many people there, no more than 30, but Jackie was undaunted and produced a performance that ran the gamut of emotion from heartache to ball-ache, unbridled joy to euphoric intervention. Along the way he regaled us with terrible tales of life on the street as readily as a sugar spun yarn about the time Bob Dylan gobbed in his pint of Guinness or the Great Dane from the pub up the road that had stood, paws on wall, beside him to piss in the urinal. Then robbed Jackie’s half-eaten pork pie.
It was a rich, rare recital filled with singing lovers, fighting men, thinkers, drinkers and tinkers. It was a Jackie Leven show.
Fare thee well Jackie, where ever you may be. And don’t forget to put us on the guest list.
• Jackie’s friend Phil Oates wrote to me:
I remember the gig in Bere Regis that you write about in the blog. I had driven Jackie there from Botley, we’d gone a round about route so he could point out the Doll by Doll farmhouse. There were a lot of things that made that day memorable, much of which was a result of the prodigious amount of alcohol he put away that evening, before, during and after the show. On the drive back he held forth on a wide variety of topics, including the demonic possession of a mutual friend, and an amazing impersonation of David Thomas impersonating a beetle complaining about Nick Cave’s domestic arrangements. At the gig itself I remember a holidaymaker sitting on the same table asking, “this Jackie, is she any good?” They were converted by the end.
• In another life I interviewed Jackie in May 2006 for the Bournemouth Echo:
THERE’S something about Jackie Leven. He’s got class. His musical career spans four decades during which he has routinely sought and found beauty in the ugliest places – and celebrated it.
His love of humanity, even at its most grim, shines through his recorded past. He’s as happy playing to tiny audiences in pub back rooms as he is on stage at international festivals. He even has a niche on that bastion of the Establishment, BBC Radio 4 (with author Ian Rankin), but equally comfortable exploring the fleshpots of cities across Europe.
He has more spiritual homes (Fife, Dorset, Oban) than John Prescott has physical ones and is particularly pleased to be leaving his latest one, in Hampshire, to return to Bournemouth on Saturday, May 20 to play the reinvigorated Club Hobo at Centre Stage.
“As a one-time resident of Westbourne, Parkstone and Corfe Mullen I have a genuine affection for the area and often gaze to the west, yearning for those times,” he gushes.
A recent correspondent to Uncut magazine suggested Jackie should be honoured with a Lifetime Achievement award at the Brits. It seems unlikely given that he’s not the greatest earner for the music industry, but you never know.
“Possibly a lifetime lack of achievement award would be more appropriate! The last Q Awards ceremony I went to was appalling – loads of acts pretending they didn’t care about the award, or pretending to be out of it, except George Michael who was beyond pretentious.
“I win awards in Europe so have attended those bashes – I won a big national award in Germany a few years back and a string quartet played an arrangement of one of my songs (St Judas from Fairytales For Hardmen). Unfortunately it was so obscure I couldn’t recognise the song and had to admit as much which was taken as a marvellous sign of essential working class Scottish chavness, so they loved me all the more!”
You see, the bloke’s got class. He’s been making records since 1971 and still manages to find plenty to say in interesting ways – his latest project is an album of songs by the late Judee Sill and Lightnin’ Hopkins – but there’s a growing demand for the back catalogue of the band he broke out of Dorset at the front of Doll By Doll. This year has seen widespread praise for the release of a live album and Jackie’s forever being asked when the band’s official releases will be available again.
“I spend a lot of time fretting about my old age, but on the other hand I continue to write like the demon I am and that’s what keeps you fresh.
“We could release all the old Dolls albums tomorrow except for the fact that Warner Brothers have lost the internal paperwork that proves to themselves that they own the albums! With luck they’ll find it before I’m dead – which they’d probably prefer, more sales!”
For now though, fans will have to content themselves with Jackie in the flesh on Saturday.
“I’ll be playing loads from all my albums plus new songs. Joe Shaw, the Dolls guitarist is coming down to Hobo with me – we’ll do some stuff together – he might do some of his. Also I’ll be telling some new filthy stories!”
• And again in March 2010:
‘HE was in the year below us at school, but we were terrified of him. He was a genuine hard man and in Scotland in the mid-1960s that was really quite something – if you’ve not had cause to experience that head on then you might find it a little hard to conceive of, but he was tough.
“A truly nice guy too.”
Singer songwriter Jackie Leven is talking about an old schoolmate of his from Kirkcaldy High in Fife.
Jackie, who has been releasing records since the early 1970s, was the first schoolboy busted for drugs in Scotland. He went on to form the savagely articulate rock band Doll By Doll in London and Dorset in the late 1970s. Not long after their demise he was mugged and strangled, nearly losing his voice.
The incident precipitated rampant heroin addiction and a relentlessly chaotic life until he self-cured and founded a charity for addicts that attracted the patronage of Princess Diana.
He’s also found time along the way to release some 30 albums of songs crafted to ponder the many shades of the human condition. The latest, Gothic Road, is out on Monday.
His schoolmate became Prime Minister.
“I’m a fan of Gordon’s, a big supporter. What you see is what you get and you have to respect that,” says Jackie.
“It’s not mindless anti-Toryism, but it may be different if I thought David Cameron is what he says he is, but I just don’t buy it and I shudder to think what will become of us if he wins the election. I heard Gordon on Woman’s Hour this morning and he seems to have shed the plasticity that infects him when he’s trying to be the nice guy he thinks we want him to be – he was just being the nice guy he is.”
But while Gordon Brown could do a lot worse than hire Jackie as a campaign manager, Mr Leven has work of his own to be getting on with – namely explaining his new album.
“I have this notion that we all walk two roads – the Royal Road on which every day is sunny, we’re in love, all is right with the world, we like our job; and the Road of Poverty and Death, on which none of these things is true.
“It’s my feeling we spend most of our lives somewhere between those roads and my name for that place is Gothic Road.”
Hence the album finds Jackie quoting Bob Dylan, Joy Division and Mud’s Tiger Feet; as well as fantasising about Tilda Swinton and Joan Crawford; and paying earnest tribute to Cornelius Whalen, the last of the Jarrow marchers, in a duet with Ralph McTell.
“Well, yes, exactly. I love that Mud song and I’d have to be deeply worried about anyone who said they didn’t love it.
“But I think we should remember I deal with places like Germany a lot and over there they want every album to be a concept album and I have to explain to them that it’s not a grand concept it’s simply that I’ve got a bit more articulate in explaining what the album is about.”
There’s also a credit in memory of Tim Mycroft, the musician and songwriter from Blandford who died earlier this year.
“I first knew Tim many years ago when I was living in Poole and we used to play some funny little pub gigs with mates like Joe Shaw who joined Doll By Doll. I stayed close with one of his exes, Krystle, who runs a club in Hamburg called The Fabrik, also his daughter Natalie and he had friends in Stavanger where I play once a year. So we had this cyclical rolling relationship that centred on late nights in some wonderful bars – a lovely way to remember an old friend.”
• Also in October 2008:
TROUBLED chanteuse Amy Winehouse could find salvation thanks to a piece of used soap and a large Scotsman whose heart lies in Dorset’s fields.
Jackie Leven is no stranger to hard times and a life skewed by the dregs at the bottom of a dirty glass. His creative imagination feeds on the darkest corners of the human experience and is at its most eloquent on his latest album Lovers At The Gun Club which he will be drawing from at the Opera House tomorrow.
But his lifelong quest to find the savage beauty in the most broken of souls could see Jackie doing Amy a favour. “I would love to produce her next album,” he exclaims in all seriousness. “I want to get a hold of her and shake her and say ‘right, stop moaning and let’s make a bloody great record’.
“Her first album, Frank, was loaded with these wonderful klezmer-soul tunes in which she was sexually jeering at men – you don’t get that from pop performers. Her writing and stylings were wasted on Back to Black and I don’t think Mark Ronson’s settings did her any favours.
A brief interlude as a recording artist – John St Field – in 1971 left behind a cult classic psychedelic record called Control before he headed south and rented a farmhouse near Blandford to plan his next move.
Stints in Corfe Mullen, Parkstone and Westbourne were to follow as Jackie noted the rage of punk and applied it to the brutally literate works of his new outfit, Doll By Doll.
They made five critically acclaimed albums for Warner Bros, ripped up live stages across the land and sold extremely badly before bowing out disgracefully in 1982.
A solo career was in the offing when one dark night in 1983 Jackie was attacked on the way home, strangled and almost killed. Unable to speak or sing he subsequently welcomed friendless heroin addiction and psychotic despair with open arms.
It took a two-year hell trip for him to surface again, co-founding the Core Trust to deal with addiction. Moving back to Scotland he rediscovered songwriting and embarked on the solo career that fate had robbed him of.
These days he bunks down in Hampshire and has immortalised his adopted home in Fareham Confidential, one of the stand out tracks on the new album. An apparently lighter tune than many in its company, it documents a droll catalogue of minor, parochial frustrations that echo and surpass more contemporary commentators like Mike Skinner of The Streets fame.
“Now, of course, there’s all this fame and image stuff to get round and I know all the arguments about Amy – my right- hand man, Michael Cosgrave, won’t even discuss her with me – but I did some work recently at the same studio as her and Laurie, the guy who owns the it, came out and surreptitiously gave me this half-used piece of Imperial Leather soap and said that Amy Winehouse left it in the shower.
“I look at it from time to time and think I have to use this somehow. I thought about putting it on eBay – I did all right when I sold Elton John’s loofah!”
No doubt, but on the evidence of a string of well-realised albums over the last 15 years or so, Jackie could well have something to offer the floundering Amy. The characters in his songs may grub around on the fringes of life, but he has a way of honing in on their humanity. It wasn’t always that way.
Born into a Romany family of an Irish Cockney father and a Geordie mother in the kingdom of Fife in 1950, Jackie’s outsider status was evident from his first breaths. School didn’t agree with him, but music did – from blues and folk songs to Elvis and The Beatles – and he embarked on the hobo route, ending up busking for bread on the South Bank Centre in London.
A brief interlude as a recording artist – John St Field – in 1971 left behind a cult classic psychedelic record called Control before he headed south and rented a farmhouse near Blandford to plan his next move.
Stints in Corfe Mullen, Parkstone and Westbourne were to follow as Jackie noted the rage of punk and applied it to the brutally literate works of his new outfit, Doll By Doll.
They made five critically acclaimed albums for Warner Bros, ripped up live stages across the land and sold extremely badly before bowing out disgracefully in 1982.
A solo career was in the offing when one dark night in 1983 Jackie was attacked on the way home, strangled and almost killed. Unable to speak or sing he subsequently welcomed friendless heroin addiction and psychotic despair with open arms.
It took a two-year hell trip for him to surface again, co-founding the Core Trust to deal with addiction. Moving back to Scotland he rediscovered songwriting and embarked on the solo career that fate had robbed him of.
These days he bunks down in Hampshire and has immortalised his adopted home in Fareham Confidential, one of the stand out tracks on the new album. An apparently lighter tune than many in its company, it documents a droll catalogue of minor, parochial frustrations that echo and surpass more contemporary commentators like Mike Skinner of The Streets fame.
“Well thanks for the comparison, but it has a heart of darkness that is revealed at the end – ‘And the women talk together in the lunchtime pizza house/The shadow of their pain knocks out the sun’ is a hell of line.
“That song started with making a loop out of the drums at the beginning of Kenny Rogers’ Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town and then we subtracted it at the end, so Kenny started it for us 20 years ago.”
In the age of the iPod shuffle function it’s gratifying to come across an album that requires you to listen to it from beginning to end. It is the kind of thing Jackie does consistently – and knowingly – well.
“I’m really pleased with Lovers at the Gun Club though, I’ve excited myself about this one. It’s not like some records where you get to the end and you’re just exhausted, I know this is a really good one.
“There is a Jackie Leven zone that includes a wide range of influences but I think about that every time I make an album. The thing is for my last two albums I’ve really enjoyed working with this group of musicians and I wanted to take that further, just like I wanted to work with [absinthe drinking pal] Johnny Dowd as he brings this darkness to everything he sings.
“However, I feel I have maybe exhausted this particular line of enquiry and the next album will be different – although I have no idea what that difference will be.”
Equally as digital downloads threaten to render record companies obsolete, Jackie enjoys the perfect relationship with his label, Cooking Vinyl. Indeed, copies of his new album were sent to reviewers accompanied by an exchange of emails in which Jackie apologised to the label’s director for recording an album he’d neglected to tell them about.
“It’s very simple. If we put out a record that sells enough copies they will continue to put records out, but if it doesn’t then you get the sack. Of course they will have previously made a judgement that you are stable and talented enough to make that record.
“And I am.”
After everything, thank goodness for that.