Leven i levende live – Jackie Leven tolker Rolf Jacobsen-dikt

Major interview on the day the tour starts in Oslo. Leven says Robert Bly stays with him when he comes to Britain; then they sit up for a week exchanging poems and life experience, and every time Bly has his “Norwegian night” – that is how he came to appreciate Rolf Jacobsen. “Sunflower” is a hard poem by any standard of manhood: we take things too personally, while an energy streams through the universe beside which one's own happiness is a trifle.

Asked about the closeness of his lyrics to depression and madness, Leven says he seeks the “freezing moment” that a good poem gives; on this record the images are clearer to him than ever before. Some, such as “Sad Polish Song”, are so strong that he cannot sing them on stage without being completely knocked over; Yeats and Jacobsen overcame themselves – that is his aim too.

Leven now wants to write more, including an autobiography, once his parents can no longer read it. To that end he stepped down as head of the centre for drug addicts: after eleven years with two full-time jobs, withdrawing is a relief, the staff are carrying on the ideas and concept, and The Big Issue wants to set up a similar facility in Glasgow. Announced are: a CD reissue of the Doll by Doll catalogue with a reunion tour, due to begin in August in Oslo and Bergen, a live record and a “sister album” to Fairy Tales entitled “Injured Women” – poems by women about women wounded in the soul, by his own account “hopefully my most miserable record”.

Steinkjer acknowledges the loyal Norwegian following since Doll by Doll and mentions the whisky Leven's Lament. On the album's second Norwegian reference, the thanks to the bar of the Grand Hotel in Tromsø, Leven says that on his last visit he spent a lot of time there working through a difficult question of life; the bar is a peaceful reminder of a world he is afraid of. He openly admits that he sometimes wishes he were not alive.