En fyr uten om det vanlige

Full-page portrait on the release of Defending Ancient Springs, according to a note at the end based on a text by Kjell Haglund in the magazine Pop (no. 24/1997). The biography is told in Leven's version: born some 50 years ago among the dying coalfields of Fife, on the road at 18 as a hippie (Dorset, Madrid, Berlin, western Ireland), living for two months in an abandoned lighthouse on dog biscuits and water; in this period the “acid-soaked” album Control as John St. Field. Doll by Doll is compared with Television (long, complex songs, Verlaine-like poetry); after ever quieter records the band split up in 1983 out of exhaustion.

The attack is described like this: Leven was walking home at night with a freshly signed solo contract in his pocket when someone choked him from behind until he lay unconscious in the gutter; prescribed painkillers led to pill addiction, then heroin addiction. A withdrawal took him to little Argyll, where he recovered after a year of addiction and began writing again in 1985, while building up the CORE Trust. After a failed relationship he moved to London; meeting Robert Bly and his men's movement (Iron John, in Norwegian “Mannen”) shaped his career – five albums in four years – and spun on the Celtic thread of “Main Travelled Roads”. Musically he sounds like a sharpened Van Morrison at his best. Conclusion: Leven's life is the message that one can stumble and get up again.