Jackie Leven – Lovers at the gun club

Peter Felkel reviews Lovers at the gun club (released 15 August 2008) in Musikexpress. Leven, he writes, is a “great sympathiser, gifted storyteller and restless worker in the service of blues, folk, gentle rock, soul and, lately, jazz”, who from the windswept west coast of Scotland (other accounts say he was living in Hampshire at the time) supplies his small but devoted fan community every year with a new batch of music that makes one “rave, marvel and occasionally shake one's head”.

As an example of the latter he cites the experimental piece “The Dentist, the Fender and the Wheel of Fate” (spelt “The Dentin …” in the text), over seven minutes long: the intro recalls Miles Davis's The Man with the Horn, then it finds its way via funk to folk, quotes Frank Zappa and calls up distorted voices, sounding “like the Tower of Babel turned into music”. Felkel's verdict: “Love it or skip it.” There is also plenty of stupendous material: the title track, which Johnny Dowd delivers with the greatest possible stoicism, a thoroughly touching “Heart Full Of Soul” by David Childers, which Leven sings himself, and again some of those typical Leven tunes between pub poetry, pathos and subversive pop appeal. The conclusion: there is no new “Marble City Bar” among them, a pity, “still lovely”.