Conversation with Jackie Leven at Verftet, Bergen

The paper introduces Leven as a Scot perhaps best known as songwriter, singer and front man of the cult band Doll by Doll, who made a comeback two years ago after 13 years in musical hibernation. The acclaimed The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death (printed as “Stranger than”) brought him back, and its successor Forbidden Songs of the Dying West was lauded at least as much by music experts.

The reporter meets Leven for an informal chat at the Verftet cultural centre, a place he swore 33 years ago he would never go near again. On a school trip by ship from Edinburgh the vessel had been met on its approach to Bergen by an unbearable stench coming from the factory at Verftet. Since then, the piece says, culture has displaced the sardines and the place smells of fresh coffee. A photo caption mentions a herring stench thirty years ago, so the paper itself wavers on figure and fish.

Leven has come for the Ole Blues festival, where he is giving a concert and leading a seminar. It is called “Thought of the Heart: Concern of the Soul” and is meant to show how to express feelings as well as possible in words and melodies, to speak from the heart and to grasp the meaning of the soul. In the West, Leven says according to the report, we have lost the ability to understand this, which has damaged our experience of life. The Scottish folk soul and self-esteem are also badly damaged, he says, by the behaviour of English soldiers down the ages: they robbed men of their pride and women of their self-respect, and it has been passed down through generations.

With “Leven’s Lament”, according to the article his own whisky, he wants to get across the message that the Scots must find their way back to the splendid people they once were – “and it certainly doesn’t hurt that it is also ‘damn good’”. Leven wants to make timeless music, to wake people’s sleeping souls and let them discover forgotten parts of themselves, men above all, whom he finds rather backward in some situations. “I’m gonna get those bastards!” he says, full of fight, thanks the reporter politely and strolls off to his seminar.

On the same page the same author reviews the concert at Garage, where the Irishman Andy White had warmed up the crowd (with an Abba cover and an Eurovision satire). With his eminent guitar playing and warm voice Leven hit the audience “right in the stomach”; his songs are poetry for the ear and the soul, about the West’s disrespectful treatment of life and men’s fear of their feminine side, and funny stories between the songs kept spirits high.