Encounters

How it all began

I used to run a charity, an activities centre for disabled people. Jackie visited one day in 2004 and said he would like to do a show for us. “Great,” I said, not knowing the first thing about putting on a show. I got in touch with a local promoter, John Roberts, who had put on a Jackie gig in Portsmouth recently. He said he could get me a PA and publicity, and persuaded me to do a weekend of music (“if you’ve got the gear, it would be silly not to …”). This became the legendary Jockstock: 17 acts across three days in June 2004. Everybody (mostly everybody) played for free, it was a great weekend, and it made some money for the charity.

Three years later, as the tenth anniversary of Townes Van Zandt’s death went by unremarked, Michael Weston King and I thought: if nobody else is going to do it, we should. So we organised something called No Deeper Blue, and Michael Weston King, Jackie Leven, Jason McNiff, Jinder and Antony Greenwood came together to play Townes songs.

I first saw Jackie in Essen in 1994, on his first tour with Cooking Vinyl artists. More about that later.

In 1996 Jackie played the Philipshalle in Düsseldorf as support act for Runrig. He wasn’t particularly fond of that clichéd, somewhat bombastic Scottish folk music. After the concert my friends invited him to a huge pub in the south of Düsseldorf. He was still a little frustrated by the enormous hall and the dope dealers behind the stage. Luckily the pub had a separate room where we could sit down to a leisurely meal. He was very happy to find listeners who responded to his music with such commitment.

At the end he said to us – and we stayed loyal to him for years afterwards: “I am happy to meet you, you do not belong to the people who go through life like tourists.” It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. The Düsseldorf group then became a kind of fan club, the Friends of Jackie Leven in Germany. More about that later.

Background: on 12 September 2002 my father-in-law died. On the same day Warren Zevon announced to the world he had cancer. A year later, to the day, Johnny Cash died. The actor John Ritter died the day before Cash.

Fast forward to 20 July 2005: Jackie Leven and I are driving to a gig in Bournemouth (the Boscombe Arts Festival’s Big Top). He tells me that his new album will be called Elegy for Johnny Cash and will be out on 12 September. Oh, right, I say, the anniversary of Cash’s death. Really? says Jackie. I didn’t know that. Strange, freaky, weird – are you sure?

Suddenly I’m not sure. It’s something I just know, and I start to wonder if I’ve conflated the dates. Jackie says he’ll contact his record company the next day and check.