Jackie Leven – Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me!

Peter Felkel reviews the album in Musikexpress (February 2007). He opens with a character sketch: Jackie Leven is a "drinker and bard, sinner and saint, fool and sage", someone who abhors well-trodden paths and prefers to cut cross-country through his life and art. That he has given us, over the past decade and a half (and some years earlier with Doll by Doll), a stream of enchanting songs drawing on folk, soul, gospel, blues and pop, which breathe "the spirit of a smoky harbour pub as well as the vastness of the sky over the Highlands", is to be stated once more, he writes, and it is just as true of this album. Leven sings "as if at least his life depended on it" and tells stories of rain, guitars and pubs, friendship, childhood and being on the road.

"I've Been Everywhere" is a tongue-in-cheek rockabilly in which Jackie and his partner in crime Johnny Dowd toss city names back and forth like balls - Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf, even Schweinfurt and two dozen more. It is fun, but the highlights lie elsewhere: "Kings of Infinite Space", a song of a kind Van Morrison has not written for some years; the heart-wrenchingly beautiful "The Silver in Her Crucifix", a homage to the long-dead folk singer Judee Sill; and "Here Come the Urban Ravens", a moving requiem for the late, great Kevin Coyne, in which Dowd recites a poem by Kenneth Patchen ("The Skaters"), a banjo plinks and a blues harp sighs through the soundscapes gently woven by the multi-instrumentalist Michael Cosgrove (printed "Cosgrove" in the issue). At the end, in "Mellow My Madness", the singer seems to dissolve into thin air, just like the beings the cover warns about: "These songs may contain phantoms". Closing line: "Rave on, Jackie, rave on, you holy fool."