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Jackie Leven and Scots John in an Islington recording studio, circa 1983 © Tina

Warning: these words may contain phantoms
This is a remembrance of someone whose music and spirit I love. That’s all. It’s not an obituary, or a tribute – of which there are finer examples already. They’re thoughts put together for someone who didn’t know me but whose voice I hear every day. For the sake of relativity, and for no particular reason, I haven’t heard my own brother’s voice for almost 15 years. Jackie Leven’s work is so bound up with my own creative output, I feel honour-bound to pay my respects more thoroughly than I’ve already done. I feel his presence, his soul shimmering, every time I hear his voice. I didn’t know I was going to miss him this way. I didn’t know it could hurt this much. I feel as though a piece of me has been broken off. But it’s time to let go.

The Mish Nish, Tobermory, Mull

To live at all is miracle enough

Jackie Leven - photograph © Simon Murphy

To live at all is miracle enough.
The doom of nations is another thing.
Here in my hammering blood-pulse is my proof.

Let every painter paint and poet sing
And all the sons of music ply their trade;
Machines are weaker than a beetle’s wing.

Swung out of sunlight into cosmic shade,
Come what come may the imagination’s heart
Is constellation high and can’t be weighed.

Nor greed nor fear can tear our faith apart
When every heart-beat hammers out the proof
That life itself is miracle enough.
Mervyn Peake

Well, this is unusual, but it’s good of you to drop in – under the circumstances. So what do you think of my choice of bar? I have to say, this pub wasn’t at the top of my list, being as it’s about 13,800 kilometres from home, as the supernatural crow flies. It’s going to be a fucking long walk home at closing time.

I got the idea to come here and raise a glass to you when I noticed you credited this bar on the liner notes to Forbidden Songs of the Dying West, but I hadn’t counted on finding you when I got here. I needed somewhere for a virtual wake; you know – a couple of drams of Leven’s Lament and your song ‘Grievin’ At The Mish Nish’ on the jukebox. Do they even have a jukebox?

To tell you the truth, I’d never connected the place and the song before. I’ve been listening to your albums – interrupted only for sleep – for weeks. I can’t listen to anything else, and haven’t been able to since 14 November. So it’s uplifting if kind of disconcerting to find you propping up this bar because otherwise I’d be talking to myself again – and the things I’m struggling to say aren’t just about you, they’re for you.

I have to say I haven’t been coping very well. I’ve been finding it difficult to concentrate on work, to think about anything but you and your music. I had a meltdown with a couple of mates, sitting outside an Auckland pub the other night, because I was so cut-up about you leaving – a couple of guys I wouldn’t normally feel comfortable shedding tears in front of – and I had no choice: the dam burst and there was no stopping the flood.

I feel as though a piece of me has been broken off and discarded; which is weird because you’re as much here as you ever were – maybe more so: a big voice coming out of the loudspeakers. There’ll be no more new music but there’s probably enough left for me to discover in my lifetime. I should feel humble in my grief. So why don’t I, can you tell me that? Not your problem, Jackie, you don’t owe me any answers and I already have enough to thank you for.

I don’t have much to bequeath, but for years I’ve vainly imagined ‘Men In Prison’ being played at my funeral. How sad is that? Before I emigrated to New Zealand, while my marriage was self-destructing, I was listening to The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery of Death and The Forbidden Songs of The Dying West a lot. It wasn’t only music that was providing me with comfort but those albums were definitely the grievin’ soundtrack. Your songs helped me through that breakup and it’s been since then that I’ve been hearing your voice pretty much daily. I wasn’t prepared for a New Zealand winter when I arrived here in August 1997. ‘Sir Patrick Spens’ made those stormy nights feel cosier, less like a strange land at the ends of the Earth.

Strong spirits
I had a hard-drinking phase in my 30s – the mid-1990s in Hamburg were a whisky-flavoured blur for me. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not blaming you for the drinking. I don’t even drink that often any more, but these days I only have to hear your voice to feel slightly intoxicated; to sense that curious kind of longing, similar to that illusion that anything is possible after two drinks. With drink it’s all downhill from there, of course, but that’s another story – there was no hangover from the music, at least until you left us.

I mention this only because there are times when it’s difficult for me (an atheist from way back) not to believe – in something. I don’t know what it is: coincidences, I suppose. It wasn’t until my hard-drinking phase that I discovered by chance you’d being mugged and almost strangled to death and that the repercussions of that event had almost killed you.

We’d actually met years before that; but I’d have been surprised if you remembered me – I was just the messenger boy for Magnet Records, the label that once had you under contract when you were fronting Doll By Doll.

Around the time of your mugging I was spending a lot of time in Maida Vale; late-night tube trips from Warwick Avenue, after visiting a top-floor flat on Warrington Crescent where my best friend lived, back to my place in Turnham Green. I had a brief infatuation with one of my friend’s flatmates, about whom I wrote my first and first-published short story, ‘On Formosa Street’ (not knowing at this time that you’d lived in a squat on that street with the rest of the band).

I don’t know where you were when you were mugged, when it happened or if anyone was ever charged. What would they have had them up for, do you reckon – grievous bodily theft of the best falsetto ever possessed by a Centaur?

You were on your way back from a studio in Islington. But in my mind it was the night there was a huge storm – a hurricane so strong that mature trees outside the window of that Warrington Crescent flat disappeared entirely in the gusts for a minute at a time. The morning after, I remember walking, hungover, down to Warwick Avenue tube. When I got back to Turnham Green I discovered the storm had been so strong it had blown down a tree on Chiswick Common opposite the place where E. M. Forster used to live and killed someone in a parked car… Unconnected coincidences.

Jackie with Princess Diana, patron of the Core Trust, which he helped establish in 1985 as a recovering heroin addict, to aid people suffering from drug, alcohol and other addictions. Diana encouraging Jackie to sing something to her got him singing and performing again following the mugging that stole the falsetto end of his vocal range in 1983.

Doll By Doll’s long-suffering A&R man, Dave Novik at Magnet Records, would despatch me (still virtually a teenager, at least in complexion and demeanour) to drop off and collect production masters and multi-track tapes to and from various recording studios. My flawed memory gives me a view of a shadowy basement in Clifton Villas, a less-than-salubrious part of Little Venice; although even in those days it was a generally upmarket part of town.

I’d been in squats before (Bad Manners, another Magnet act, rehearsed in one in Stoke Newington), but this was somehow scarier. I didn’t go inside; tapes somehow exchanged hands. ‘Wild’ Tom Newman, of Tubular Bells and Richard Branson’s Manor studios fame, engineered the ‘Doll By Doll’ album and lived down the street from Doll By Doll’s basement studio; maybe ‘Wild’ Tom opened the door. How the fuck do I know. I got back to York Street in one piece, in time to get the big boss his salt beef sandwiches.

A ‘found photo’ of a building on Bristol Gardens, Maida Vale, a street on which there was another squat occupied for a time by Jackie, Doll By Doll and friends.

[Excerpt from Hansard report] “I shall cite one single example—the organised squat in and around Elgin Avenue in the Maida Vale area of London, about 600 squatters have been organised by the International Marxist leader Mr Piers Corbyn, who was quoted recently in our national daily Press as saying that squatting was all useful preparation for the revolution. It is apparently a fact, incredible though it may seem, that there is in circulation a handbook called The Squatters’ Handbook, which lists properties which are considered to be ripe for squatting and actively encourages people to join this particular type of lawlessness.” Mr. John Cordle (Bournemouth, East)

I also vaguely recall another occasion when, on a similar assignment, I was told to deliver to or pick up tapes from Utopia Studios in Chalk Farm or Primrose Hill, North London (where ‘Doll By Doll’ was mixed) – far more luxurious surroundings, but other than perpetual twilight and the frigid atmosphere of the air-conditioned foyer, the details of that visit are lost to time – I honestly don’t remember seeing you there.

I do, though, obliquely remember the whole band – but especially you and Jo Shaw – sitting on the cushioned bench in Magnet’s reception (the same corridor-like room in which I’d heard the news of the shooting of John Lennon from a receptionist on whose brittle Essex tones I imagined the woman’s voice on ‘Fantastic Sensation’ was based… but I digress), waiting, in dark and daunting mood, for a meeting with the aforementioned big boss.

Dave the A&R man would often go to two or more gigs a night. Once, he asked me to go to a South London pub to see you with Doll By Doll because for whatever reason he couldn’t be there. The pub was in the back of beyond (I wish I could remember its name); Crystal Palace or Croydon – somewhere far from my Streatham Hill bedsitter but even further from Magnet’s west end office in York Street (Baker Street).

Doll By Doll press shot, circa 1980

I’d be lying through my teeth if I were to claim I remember much about your show that night. There weren’t many punters at show-time, and those who were there didn’t look like Doll By Doll fans. Possibly some flat caps and mufflers. I sat at the front watching my pint glass rattle on the small, copper-topped table. I’ll never forget your looming presence; the rawness, volume and intensity coming off the tiny stage; and the self-belief. Doll By Doll was like a mad dog that’s a little scared but isn’t going to let that stop it tearing your throat out. It might have been the conviction evident in that performance that fiddled with the trip-switches in my brain and converted me from spotty teenage dork to Jackie Leven Power – 20,000 volts, direct current – so thanks for that, too.

(Had Dave asked me to introduce myself to the band as Magnet’s representative, I’d have failed, I think, because I’d have been far too shy to talk to you. You were pretty intimidating; no wonder the guys in Devo were scared of you and had you dropped from one of their tours.)

Magnet released ‘Main Travelled Roads’ (with your vocal melody a radically slowed-down take on traditional Scottish air ‘The Bonnie Earl Of Moray’ that you’d later sing to Princess Diana) as a single. I remember some negativity among the more commercial-minded label staff, on the basis it’d never be a hit. They were right but not because of the song. It was the fault of the way the business wheels turned. That song is now rightly considered a masterpiece, ending with that line of Yukio Mishima’s, “Eternal is the warrior who finds beauty in his wounds”; more than a creed or epitaph, an entire philosophy.

The same year, I fell in love with ‘Caritas’, your next single. Even some of my more cynical London friends had grown to love ‘Doll By Doll’, the album, by the mid-1980s. Those records weren’t available on CD until the 2000s and could only be found on second-hand vinyl – all those FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY copies record company employees and people in the industry had sold in times of need, I guess. I don’t remember the twisted paths that led me back to your solo releases in the 1990s.

The German connection
I emigrated to Germany, a country where you found some of your most loyal followers. ‘Standing In Another Man’s Rain’ from Oh What A Blow The Phantom Dealt Me! mentions Hamburg. Pre-internet, I was living in that city and started ordering your CDs from a German mail order company called JPC. There was a “working class gay bar” on Falkenried, down the street from the Virgin Records promotion office, which my ex-wife managed at the time. My stepfather used to like to drink in that bar when he visited. He isn’t gay, either – no doubt he wondered how he got there, too.

I realise this sounds like I’m straining for fame by association but, even now, these incidents and coincidences befuddle my mind because they feel as though they happened to someone else, not me. Just intersecting circles of beer on a bar-top, the dregs of a solar system, or something more? Because the thing about music is, if you hear enough songs by someone with a voice and sound as distinctive as yours (not that there are that many), and you listen to them for over 30 years, they accompany failed relationships as well as happier ones; underscore good times and bad.

And what’s music for if it’s not to provide context, to express experience? I want to say more about this but find it demands a musical backing; maybe ‘Honeymoon Hill’ or ‘Stranger On The Square’. But I’ll live to cry another day, and at least there’s the taste of salt water to remind me I’m alive.

And remind me your voice sounds like the voice of the older brother I never had.

That’s why I credited and thanked you in my short story collection The Bumper Book of Lies. Your music accompanied and inspired so many of my stories and other writings, it’s a Jackie Leven-shaped part of me.

Social media, Jackie style
Discovering your twitter feed was a short-lived joy. Tweets are rarely poetic but some of yours took me to a quiet, meditative place far from the insanity of social media. I loved what you did with your Twitter profile:

There were meditative moods:

Travelogues worthy of Tobias Wolff:

Incisive comment on current affairs:

Then there was that poignant final tweet.

Jackie in his John St Field days

In February 2005 I attended the writer Russell Hoban’s 80^th birthday celebrations in London. Gillian Capper – who’d somewhere spotted my mentioning you in print – approached me and said, almost conspiratorially, something like: “I notice you’re a Jackie Leven fan. I’m Jackie’s ex-wife. I married him when he still called himself John St Field and I was 21…”

To say I was surprised by the synchronicities of this would be like saying I was mildly freaked out by the fact that you recorded Defending Ancient Springs, Creatures of Light and Darkness and Oh What A Blow The Phantom Dealt Me! in Bethesda, North Wales, about an hour from the town where I was born. Or that one of my favourite musicians, Chucho Merchan, played the bass on ‘Stranger On The Square’, ‘Looking For Love’ and all of The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery of Death. Or the fact that Thomas Keller’s Bouchon gets a mention in the booklet for ‘Shining Brother, Shining Sister’. Or…

But hardly any of the above became apparent until long after the fact – like all great circumstantial evidence – and although it’s only relevant to me, it adds meaning to the strangeness of existence. And we need to acknowledge just how strange life is as often as possible. As you know, sometimes the weight of the Universe can be too much to carry on your own. Without knowing it, I’ve been relying on you to help hold it up, re-reading your album liner notes and trying to strip the sense away from the facts to return them to the state of mystery where they belong.

But I’m also noticing some positive side-effects. My girlfriend has been borrowing your CDs to play in the car (I think the Argyll Cycle Volume One is her favourite). I’ve made a few new Facebook friends. And, you know, if I wasn’t a confirmed non-believer, these incidents, coincidences and freakish twists would have me thinking there’s actually something spiritual going on… after all, where’s all this energy, this light, this positivity coming from? From you, of course. It might just be like the residual heat left from the Big Bang, but it’s measurable.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve read a lot of people lamenting your failure to achieve commercial success, saying with no lack of logic, “It’s great he’s getting all this attention now, but where was it when he needed it?” What was that thing you said about fame?

“I hold an ace of sunlight
In this weatherbeaten game
It’s the card that saved me
From the injuries of fame.”
Jackie Leven, ‘Last of the Badmen’

And I can tell just from the smile on your face that commercial success is the least important aspect of the creative endeavour. We all need to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our heads but beyond that, creating is more important than almost anything else.

Everything you did was fortified with such intensity, a desire to channel something few of us are capable of expressing. You might occasionally have been wide of the mark but not often. Your albums hold together as more than just a string of songs; there’s a completeness few songwriters manage nowadays. There’s a lesson in that about not compromising – yes, it’s OK to compromise your material ambitions, but not your creative expectations. The mystery is in you to find. And we shouldn’t let anybody tell us it’s not there.

Since you left I’ve been buzzing with the realisation that I need to change the way I live; be braver, more daring, more willing to take risks. I have to thank you, Jackie, for introducing me to Judee Sill, Antonio Machado, Robert Bly, Sir Patrick Spens, and encouraging me to acquaint myself with some places in my head I’d never been to before.

**Another thing: you know how your album liner notes often had a list of bars? The way you credited them with allowing you “the ancient light”, for “moments of reverie and inspiration” or, best of all, “for being there at the same time as me”? “For me there’s been a sanctuary thing about bars, but I also really like the old idea of them being public houses before they became commercialised and purely drinking holes,” you told Iain Shedden of the Australian. And even when your lists were fanciful and included establishments like “The Fuckin Bastard, Dundee” and “Ye Olde Potte of Bloater Paste, Shithaven”, I took your recommendations seriously as an acknowledgement of sanctuaries, temples of solitude and sociability – fine old public things that social media can never be.

But the internet is good for proving the fact you were blessed with extraordinary gifts – just take a look at the outpourings of grief since you left us. So many strangers expressing that loss so eloquently, so similarly. The internet not only amplifies my sense of loss but puts it into perspective. Far from being the only one to feel as low as I do, there’s a legion of strangers whose hearts are as heavy as mine. And there are some good souls out there – more than I’d ever imagined. Your music was not something to be glossed over, not something you played in the background. It doesn’t leave listeners unchanged. And that’s something else I have to thank you for.

I don’t know about you but I could use another dram of Leven’s Lament about now. Make it a quadruple. I’d be a lesser man without you, Jackie, and I’m a lesser man for your passing. So I’ll finally shut the fuck up and give you the last word:

Jackie Leven 1950-2011

“…the men that made the first bell, to mimic the sound of worlds talking to each other, when such conversations could still be heard – in the time of real silence. Now millions of bells, the colour of dried blood, lie whole or broken underground, or dreaming on the bed of ocean, river and lake. But their original pealing moves ever outward into the void, blending with incoming whisperings. In this way, songs from before time reach us – we who are slowly learning to hear again…” from ‘Origins of Analogy’ by JACKIE LEVEN

Things you ought to know:

• There are plans for one or more permanent Jackie Leven memorials
• The Jackie Leven Facebook Fan Page
• The Jackie Leven Yahoo Mailing List
• The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery of Death was number 2 in Q magazine’s Top 10 recordings of 1994 (behind Blur’s Park Life), and in January 1995 was included in the ‘In Our Lifetime: Q’s 100 BEST Albums’ list.

Recommended listening:

• ‘In A Shivering Blaze’
• ‘My Philosophy’
• Doll By Doll: ‘Main Travelled Roads’
• Doll By Doll: ‘Stripshow’
• ‘Call Mother A Lonely Field’
• ‘Clay Jug’ (with Robert Bly)

**Thanks to these bars for moments of madness, solace and uncontrollable blubbing:

• Right Track Sports Bar & Café, Fort Street, Auckland (NZ, 2011)
• Timbuktu, Rutschbahn, Hamburg (D, 1990s)
• Windschirm, Schlüterstraße, Hamburg (D, 1990s)
• Deschlers, High Street, Auckland (NZ, 7 Sept, 2000)
• The Brewery, Customs Street, Auckland (NZ, 2011)
• Hotel DeBrett, High Street, Auckland (NZ, 2010-2011)
• The Royal Oak, York Street, London (UK, 1978-1984)
• The Robin Hood, Lower Road, Market Drayton (UK, 2000s)
• The Tabard, Bath Road, Turnham Green, London (UK, 1980s)
• Kentish Hotel, Queen St, Waiuku (NZ, 2010-2011)
• Pink’s Cocktail Bar, Crawford Street, London UK (1978-1980)