Jackie Leven Interview, Berlin, Pfefferberg

Long fanzine interview, conducted backstage at the Pfefferberg in Berlin on 10.03.1995, shortly before Leven introduced Andy White; on tour with keyboard player James Hallawell for the EP with “I Say A Little Prayer”. The introduction sums up Doll by Doll, the attack, heroin and the return to Oban and the west coast, praises The Mystery Of Love… and Songs From The Argyll Cycle, reports on the Cooking Vinyl package tour with Tom Robinson and Andy White at the Knaack in Berlin (October 1994) and mentions CORE (acronym spelt out), the men's movement around Robert Bly and the whisky “Leven's Lament”.

In conversation Leven says: Doll by Doll (founded ’76/’77) fell between two stools – too heavy for punk's opponents, not punk for punks; he regards punk as a middle-class phenomenon. The band broke up because nobody bought the records. He describes the attack here without embellishment: drunk, walking from the studio near the Caledonian Road to Maida Vale, “just got mugged”. Afterwards about two years without a voice, steroids (“electric fur”), isolation, heroin, which he describes as a journey of initiation. He developed the CORE Trust out of his own withdrawal programme, with his girlfriend Carol, who was in the last Doll by Doll line-up, on the advice of her homeopathic doctor. He came to Cooking Vinyl through his lawyer, who recommended Martin Goldschmidt. He says he was the first schoolboy in Scotland to be caught for drugs and discovered Bly in the school library; he explains the Dylan co-authorship of “As We Sailed Into Skibbereen” with a shared train journey from Berlin to St Petersburg. Finally, explanations of “Call Mother A Lonely Field” (ploughed winter fields) and “The Garden” (Machado's image of the soul as a garden, his own years in London pubs).