The Wild Boy at Rest

Feature in the Toronto free culture paper on the North American release of The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death (True North/MCA), based on a telephone interview with Leven in London. Anderson frames the piece with his own scepticism towards Robert Bly's Iron John and introduces Leven as the British spokesman of the “Mytho-Poetic Men's Movement”. He calls Doll by Doll an unjustly overlooked band, best on Remember and Gypsy Blood. Leven tells the Oban story: after the attack, heroin and a break-up, a night drive through a snowstorm to the west coast, in a bar the invitation from a half-Scottish, half-Polish giant to an arm-wrestle, from which a lifelong friendship grew – for him a turning point in his life. The “Argyll Cycle” (15 songs on an album and two EPs in 1994) documents the dying of his younger, wild self; you have to be defeated and betrayed to know who you are (“ignominy” as “no name”). Leven distances himself sharply from commercial men's courses (the warrior is an archetype we live in) and defends Bly against the charge of misogyny. On the cover of “I Say A Little Prayer” he develops the idea of the “black woman in you” for whom Bacharach/David wrote. Tone: very positive, compares the album with Fisherman's Blues.