Jackie Leven – The Borderline, London

The live review in Uncut (online 1 May 2003) opens with the verdict “one of the oddest gigs I've seen in a long time”. The weathered Leven sings mournful songs of loss and regret in a rich, soulful voice, and is a “big poetry man”, quoting Pablo Neruda on his new album Shining Brother Shining Sister. Yet more often than being a melancholic, working-class minstrel, he is a man of the people in an entirely different manner: for at least half his time onstage he tells bawdy shaggy dog stories. If he were not sitting on a stool, he would be a great stand-up.

Most of his tales are filthy; one explores the similarity between cheap dog food and human faeces at interminable length. He is a natural, and his fiftysomething followers are in fits of laughter, but it means any mood evoked by the songs is chucked out with the bathwater. “You come expecting Johnny Cash; you leave having witnessed Johnny Vegas.” You would say he is in the wrong line of work, except that he is a lifer, an authentic folk-hero, once in post-punk enigmas Doll By Doll but touring for decades as a broody balladeer; he has survived a troubled personal life of addictions and crashes and clearly relishes the role of wiser, wizened, antipretty spokesman for fans who mostly share his Scottish/Irish connections and his age group.

Flanked by two colleagues, ironically named his “Sex Trio”, Leven lilts through his sorrowful songs; one thinks of L. S. Lowry, noble stooping northerners and all that. “Another Man In The Old Arcade” and “Classic Northern Diversions” are splendid examples of the new material. But mostly one is thinking of Johnny Vegas's jowls: the scatological anecdotes stretch on for ever. He is either shooting himself in the foot or, after a life fully lived, displaying “cavalier career apathy”. We learn that on a train Leven engaged in a surreal conversation with a drunk, that in Cardiff he stared at an enormous human mess on the pavement, and that his girlfriend, through “comic misunderstandings”, thinks he has trouble with his bowels. He is supporting Richard Thompson in Europe, then touring the UK; the reviewer hopes his inner Roy Orbison turns up, not his inner Roy Chubby Brown.