En annen manns regn

Double-page report with interview, conducted on the day of the concert (Wednesday, 26.09.2007) in Svolvær; published a week later. Photos show Leven with organiser Jan Åge Johansen (“to gode venner”). Opening: Leven sits in the car, rain on the windscreen; the author recaps the attack of 1983, the loss of his voice and record contract and the way out of heroin via holistic therapy.

Leven says (self-reports): on first entering the Præstengbrygga he had thought the room, with a staircase in the middle of the hall, hopeless – and had been wrong. He told his Norwegian agent he wanted to see not just Oslo and Bergen but the whole country. The relationship between audience and artist is like being in love. Once, on a Saturday night in northern Norway, he played to a noisy audience, so bad that Johansen went home; otherwise the Brygga is a place where people listen, and the friendship with Johansen matters. He writes constantly in a notebook; as occasions for songs he names a woman in a bar who asked him to sell a car and died the same evening, a homeless man by the railway tracks in Trondheim and a man on the Hurtigruten who wanted to go home in the Trollfjord. Norway's nature is frightening to him, Lofoten a brutal version of the Scottish north-west coast; he used to hike alone in the Hebrides, now here. He lives on the English south coast with a view of the Isle of Wight. In Europe he plays with a band, in Scandinavia alone – a band in northern Norway would be too expensive, and he likes the solitude. He has an “almost erotic relationship with rain” and wrote “Another Man's Rain” about it. The evening's concert is being recorded and is due to appear on CD next year; in 2008 a new album is coming and he will return to Kabelvåg.