Jackie Leven

The short review of 2 March 2007 opens with a reproach to readers: if you do not know Jackie Leven, you have only yourself to blame. He made his first record as a Fife folk singer thirty years before James Yorkston and King Creosote and led the “excellent punk band” Doll by Doll in the late Seventies, whose catalogue is to be reissued the following month. He should have been in everyone's mind, had an unprovoked street attack in 1983 not left him mute for two years and then led him into heroin addiction.

Rehabilitated for a good ten years now, he has worked his way, with an endless stream of fine singer-songwriter albums, to something like the status of Scottish national hero. He still has a “lonely Scotsman crawling under my skin”, but his quiet singing voice takes him much closer to a master like Warren Zevon than to his local colleagues. The same reference applies to the “over-clever” sharpness of detail in his lyrics, for instance when he discovers he is standing in a working-class gay bar in Hamburg, drinking ice-cold beer, while men talk quietly to each other (“how did I get here?”).

As usual he bows humbly to his idols, this time Judee Sill and Kevin Coyne, and keeps seeking out exciting collaborators. Johnny Dowd contributes a rasp to the murder story “Skaters”, the dark and charming demo blues “One Man One Guitar” and a “hysterically funny German geography lesson” in Rolf Harris's “I've Been Everywhere” (the song was in fact written by Geoff Mack; Harris made it famous). The album title is not given in the text; from the date and the guests it is probably Oh What a Blow That Phantom Dealt Me!. The closing line: this time there is no excuse for passing Jackie Leven by, though there never was before either.