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As part of an ongoing series of articles, interviews and reminiscences about and inspired by the late Jackie Leven, the following short feature by Liam Carson was written around the time Jackie was working with writer Ian Rankin on the music and spoken word project that would become Jackie Leven Said.

This picture of Jackie from the cover of a Norway-only mini-LP released in 1984, entitled ‘Some People Are Ratz’, found by Lars Petter Andersen on Facebook.

“There’s a lovely beauty in what’s left behind, the ghost-ridden sense of the dying of those communities is the legacy. I hope my songs do something to clarify those experiments in resilience.” Scottish singer Jackie Leven is talking of a vanished world. “I grew up in the kingdom of Fife, on the east coast, it’s a dog-headed county stuck between Edinburgh and Dundee. Back in the 1950s and 60s, it was still a thriving coal-mining community, and a big woollen and paper-making county, particularly where I lived, the Glen of Leven. I’m still strongly connected to images of all those factories, the workforce surging to and from work.” Leven’s songs are shot through with images of abandoned canals, mines, factories, “disappointed tough guys” in bars; and also with images of winter – ice, frost, snow.

Jackie Leven is the former frontman of self-declared “art terrorists” Doll By Doll. Their brief but incandescent career lasted for four albums – Remember, Gypsy Blood, Doll By Doll and Grand Passion – released between 1979 and 1982. Hailed by some critics as one of the most viscerally intense yet melodic bands of their time, their confrontational flamboyance alienated others. Their sound was a heady fusion of guitar-driven heavy rock, psychedelia, pop and sometimes disarmingly tender folk. They were impossible to pin down, and equally impossible to market . Leven now describes the band as emerging from the “betwixt and between”. “We had no connection to punk; we identified with The Yachts, The Original Mirrors, The Only Ones, Pere Ubu, The Soft Boys… outsider bands.”

Jo Show, Jackie Leven, Tony Waite of Doll By Doll (not pictured: drummer Dave Mcintosh)

What Doll By Doll also had was a uniquely literary sensibility. Their name came from an e.e. cummings poem; their songs were permeated with lines from Anna Akhmatova, Louis MacNeice, Kenneth Patchen and others. The band’s logo was a photograph of French dramatist Antonin Artaud.

They eschewed the populist leftist sloganeering of most late seventies bands, instead playing benefits for the Philadelphia Association, a mental health charity linked to controversial thinker R.D. Laing. Songs such as ‘Main Travelled Roads’ and ‘The Perfect Romance’ explored a psychic landscape of pain and lost love through Leven’s powerhouse vocals and highly-charged poetic lyrics:

“I fear the fear I feel of missing you
I fear it down to my soul
But it is when my soul is touched
Piercing floods of pulsating gold
I know that flowers unfold without being told.”

At times Doll By Doll seemed to have a messianic mission to reorder the very way people thought and felt about themselves. I wonder how Leven sees things now. “Part of me gets embarrassed by the Doll By Doll thing,” he confesses. “We did a lot of very powerful live performances. And there’s only so much that you can do before you become a parody. You lose impetus. We couldn’t carry on pretending.”

Leven then had an ambitious stab at pop glory with the exquisitely catchy (and shamefully ignored) singles ‘Love is Shining Down on Me’ and ‘Uptown’. Their failure hit hard. Worse came when a vicious assault left him unable to sing for eighteen months after his vocal chords were damaged by a kick to his throat. When he recovered, his famous falsetto was gone. He then took solace in heroin, the classic ‘drug of despair’.

Eleven years in the wilderness followed. I remember fruitlessly scouring the newspapers for news of a comeback. Finally in 1994, I was heartened by a story in London newspaper, where Leven was interviewed in his capacity as founder of the drug rehabilitation organization, CORE (Courage to Stop. Order in life. Release from addiction. Entry into new life). His comeback album The Mystery of Love is Greater than the Mystery of Death featured ‘Call Mother a Lonely Field’, undoubtedly Leven’s greatest song, a haunting evocation of his mother, family ties, love and homesickness. It opens with the sounds of drunken revellers singing ‘Danny Boy’ before crashing into a full-blooded rock anthem, replete with reeling fiddles and gorgeous lyrics:

“Like young Irishmen in English bars
The song of home betrays us
The ferries vanish in the snow
We telephone our children
I’ll never love like this again
I couldn’t lift the burden.”

So what happened to Leven in those wilderness years? “I spent a lot of time, hitchhiking, stealing food, having no life whatsoever. I spent a lot of time half-frozen to death in public toilets in the middle of nowhere. And at the time I remember saying to myself, ‘What the fuck have I chosen for myself?’”. His emotional recovery came through an encounter in an Oban bar, where he was challenged to an arm-wrestle by a ‘lumberjack type’. He declined the offer, but instead found himself listening to the same man reciting page after page of Robert Bly’s translation of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger.

Leven had long been an admirer of Bly’s work, and Bly’s poetry and studies of mythology, most notably Iron John, acted as a source for his new songs. But Bly’s radical gender politics are the subject of much contention, and I mention to Leven the fact that Irish Times columnist John Waters has frequently cited Bly’s The Sibling Society to both defend Bush’s and Blair’s decision to attack Iraq, and to reinforce his criticisms of leftists as spoilt children ignoring the wiser counsel of their leaders. “Robert Bly is the ultimate pacifist,” he replies. “Blair and Bush are boys trapped in men’s lives, they’re not men. Bush is clearly not a man, and Blair is exposed as not a true man. They are in no way father figures for anyone. They’re obviously fundamentalists driven by an abandoned idea of the father and by an invisible jealous male god. They have an absolute lack of maturity.”

With Bly, Leven shares a concern about western society’s inability to cope with grief. “It’s a big issue with me. Because the collapse of our old ways of understanding grief is a real big problem. I’m always struck by when you see somebody killed in Palestine, everybody loses it at the funeral. It’s unnerving to watch from a western point of view. But at least they’re fucking doing it. I’ve been to loads of protestant funerals in Glasgow, and everyone is so uptight, getting ill just being there’”.

Leven’s own mother died a few months ago, and he fondly recalls her love for the blues. “She was crazy about Lightning Hopkins, and my father would always say ‘Why is it when I come home there are always black men shouting in my house?’” Leven also has a great affection for sixties bands The Yardbirds, The Animals and The Pretty Things. “They make me think of really cold mornings in Scotland, getting up and having to go to work. It has a hard edge to it.” His next album will see their influence. “It’ll have Lebanese musicians, not playing ethnic Lebanese music, because what they actually love is 60s British rhythm and blues. I’ve already played with them. And though these are their models, they haven’t quite got their heads around it. I remember Paul McCartney once saying, racistly in my opinion, that the reason why reggae sounded the way it did was because they couldn’t do rock. Which is ridiculous because it’s a great form. But there’s an element of that, and it’s very exciting”.

Leven is nothing if not prolific. His latest release (on Glitterhouse Records) comes under the pseudonym of Sir Vincent Lone, Songs for Lonely Americans. Why the alter-ego, I wonder? “It’s illuminating to write as a different personality. It’s a kind of freedom.” It blends hip-hop, folk, blues and chants – and ranges from the bizarre ‘The War Crimes of Ariel Sharon’ to the upbeat pop of ‘Straight Outta Caledonia’, a paean to his native Scotland. Under his own name he is currently working on an album with crime writer Ian Rankin, with whom he has performed live. This month sees the DVD release of Meetings of Remarkable Men, a film record of a live gig with Rankin; Pere Ubu’s Dave Thomas; and my brother Ciaran Carson.

Those unfamiliar with Leven’s work should check out his many excellent Cooking Vinyl releases – Forbidden Songs of the Dying West; Defending Ancient Springs; and Night Lilies feature his most potent work. At his best, Leven’s songs have the capacity to transport the listener to the heart of a mythical landscape that is instantly familiar, that of our dreams. Leven himself sees it as a place called Raerona, an imaginative land with aspects of Scotland and of the Mediterranean. “It’s a mythical place, with feelings attached. It could be anywhere. It might for me be a vision of eternal peace. It’s just an important place, for me, to exist.”

LIAM CARSON is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Call Mother a Lonely Field, published by Hag’s Head Press. He was born in Belfast in 1962. During the 1980s he lived in squats in Brixton and Kennington in London. During this period he worked as a civil servant, labourer, dish- washer, and painter and decorator. He is the director of the IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival, which he founded in 2004. The festival aims to take its audiences on a ‘voyage of discovery’ that reveals the diversity of modern Irish- language literature through imaginative and eclectic events. Key IMRAM projects have included the Gaelic Jazz Project—a radical fusion of jazz, sound sculpture and poetry—and The Magic Swirling Ship/The Dylan Project, in which poets Gabriel Rosenstock and Colm Breathnach translated Bob Dylan’s work into Irish. Over the past twenty years, Liam has also worked as a literary publicist for many Irish publishers. His reviews, critical articles, essays and poems have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Fortnight, The Irish Review, New Hibernia Review, Comhar, An Guth, Irish Examiner and Sunday Tribune. He lives in Dublin with his partner, Niamh Lawlor, a puppeteer, and their daughter, Eithne. He is well known for talking at length about Bob Dylan after a few pints.

Other things you should know
Writing about and inspired by Jackie Leven on wordsSHIFTminds:
Grievin’ at the Mish Nish
This one’s for you, Jackie
Doll By Doll: The perfect album?
Caol Ila: a spell for time-travellers
Recommended Soundtrack – The Bumper Book of Lies
Fareham Fourth Dimension

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.

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