Unofficial Jackie Leven guestbook (jackieleven.com / home.xnet.it/tout), 2003

With well over 90 entries, 2003 is the strongest year of this guestbook. It accompanies Shining Brother Shining Sister (February 2003), which fans from Cornwall, France (a record dealer who wants to sell 200 copies), Kiel, Asker and Hamm (Radio Runde Hamm: “CD of the month”) celebrate; the radio DJ Ecki Stieg writes that the album almost saved his life. The February/March tour with Richard Thompson and Midnight Choir can be followed place by place: Haarlem (19.02., with Michael Cosgrave), Hamburg St. Pauli-Theater (20.02.), Berlin (21.02.), Vienna (25.02.), Oslo John Dee (06.03.), then a German tour whose dates a fan posts (Tuttlingen, Tübingen, Frankfurt, Essen, Bremen, Kiel, Singwitz, Hannover, Bielefeld), with an argument over whether Kiel took place at the Halle 400 or the Räucherei. A host in Tübingen recalls conversations about Rilke and Blake. Further traces: Bein Inn (Fife, January), Penzance, Flowerpot Derby, Førde (Norway, June), Edinburgh Fringe (August), New Roscoe Leeds, Midlands Arts Centre as support for Cara Dillon (July), a US thank-you for Leven's contribution to the Frankie Miller tribute.

Many entries revolve around Doll by Doll: one fan saw them in 1979/80 “blowing Devo off the stage”, a musician from Leeds played support in the Clifton Villas era and saw Jo Shaw smash his Stratocaster, a pedal steel player lived with Vincent Crane in Warwick Avenue in the 1970s, and people keep asking about CD editions of the Doll by Doll albums, until someone mentions CD-R bootlegs. Fans praise the monthly columns and wish for them as a book. At the end of the year a buyer complains that his cheque has been cashed but the CD has not arrived – a foretaste of the problems of 2008.