Jackie Leven: Always look on the dark side of life

Interview in a London pub (“Railway Tavern”) a few days before the release of Creatures of Light and Darkness (3 July 2001), which Martin counts as the 21st album of a 30-year career. Leven says that as a schoolboy in Glenrothes he won the Scottish Round Table essay competition (topic: the career he wanted – he wanted to travel the world with a guitar), shortly before becoming the first pupil in the country to be expelled from school for drug possession. There follow the LSD years, Madrid under Franco, divided Berlin, Doll by Doll as a “defeat” he still carries, the 1983 mugging with the loss of his falsetto, heroin together with his then girlfriend and, from that, the CORE Trust (funded by Shirley Porter's Westminster Council, supported by Princess Diana). Leven says Diana asked him to sing after a charity lunch – his way back into music; later he also sang for the aged Laurence Olivier. He explains “The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ” (a mining community with 14 churches and one pub, allegedly the highest male suicide rate in Europe, voices of laid-off shipyard workers), his studio method of withholding the other tracks from musicians, his own whisky “Leven's Lament” and a Bly men's gathering in the Highlands on the subject of grief. Overall tone: respectful, with a sense for Leven's contradictions.