Ever since I first saw Jackie in concert in Drammen in the early 2000s, he has been part of my life. Not constantly, not always as close, sometimes absent for a while. But he keeps coming back into my orbit and is there when I need him.

I find it hard to explain why, and I don’t really want to try. This spring, he came back with particular intensity, so strongly that I wanted to know more about him as a person.

So I searched the web and realised that Jackie is gradually fading into obscurity. His website, which revealed so much of him as a person, is no longer online. On social media, there is little activity, if any. In the press – hardly anything at all. His music is rarely listened to on Spotify and similar platforms. One of his songs gets listened to a little more often. I suspect, though, that people who click on it usually do so because of the title, not the music.

That is why this site came into being.

The history of jackieleven.com

Jackieleven.com grew out of a fan site founded by Jan Saghaug in 1996. From 2002, Jackie contributed his monthly column, The Deep Pool. In 2008 his website moved to jackieleven.co.uk; the .com domain was parked later that year and subsequently used for unrelated content.

With this site, I hope to carry on some of the work of the people who created that fan site and developed Jackie’s websites with him.

Jackie’s writing

The old websites have been offline for years, but many of their entries survive in the Internet Archive. The Deep Pool collects Jackie’s columns and blog posts from 2002 to 2011, along with the announcement of his death in November 2011. The texts are presented in their original English, with links to the surviving archive copies.

The timeline places excerpts from this writing alongside events in his life. These quotations remain in English on both versions of the site. Some biographical accounts disagree; where a year is approximate, the entry says so.

The pastiche

The biography is a pastiche we have written, drawing on Jackie’s way of telling a story. It combines memories from his columns and blog posts with imagined scenes and conversations. In the chapter notes, we explain what we drew on and what we imagined.

Memories and contributions

If you would like to share memories of Jackie or contribute to this site, please get in touch. I’d also appreciate hearing about any mistakes or writing that is missing from the collection.