Forbidden words and broken mirrors – doll by doll

Chris Westwood wrote this piece for Record Mirror of 15 December 1979 during a van journey through the Borders from Glasgow to Newcastle; the band had recently left the Hawkwind tour and announces dates at the Nashville (17 December), the Venue with U2 in support (18th) and the Marquee (21st). Westwood loves Doll By Doll not as a “rock band” but as a community, an emotional force, “four people fighting”. Against the accusations (morbid, pretentious, joyless, pessimistic) he sets “facts”: the band is gradual, challenging, euphoric, optimistic, “emotionally anarchistic”. Gypsy Blood begins a second phase. The Leeds-born bassist Tony Waite is new; the line-up is now Leven, Jo Shaw, Dave McIntosh and Waite.

Westwood talks to Leven in a flat in the “haunted valley” community near Warwick Avenue (Bristol Gardens, Formosa Street), with vodka, a mutual friend named Claire and four hours of talk. Leven calls Remember a “black classic”, “an album of death”, and earlier “a huge vomit”, while Gypsy Blood is “an album of life”. For him the act of love is the “definitive act of violence”, and the supposed separation of the two is the root of many of society's problems. The band, he says, paid a price out of all proportion to its crime for its “massively violent honesty”. He speaks of losing his son after a woman left him holding the baby: it taught him not to fear death, since having a child is the absolute sense of creation, and he recovered his innocence. The title Gypsy Blood refers to his half-Romany heritage: Gypsies believe in souls and that nobody owns anything.

The longest stretch is about media and power. Leven says the ruling class, the “dead people”, decide through language and the media how everyone else sees life; the media are a “system of mirrors” in which people cannot see themselves, and the rulers “are breaking their own mirrors”. Doll By Doll are destroying the domineering concept of success, which is why people think they will not succeed. Westwood compares Leven with Jim Morrison, Lenny Bruce and Antonin Artaud: Morrison was called a sexual politician, they are called “emotional anarchists”. He ends alone at night with Lou Reed's Berlin; Leven is, according to the text, 29, and the warm flow of his Fife accent almost belies the remarkable power of his words. The piece is idealistic and demanding, less report than credo; Westwood closes: “Doll By Doll matter a lot to me.” A gossip item in the same issue says Mick Jones bought a Doll By Doll album at Smiths.