Interview and concert report: Jackie Leven at Dikselen, Haugesund (picture caption “Opp fra rennesteinen”)

Conversation and short report on the previous evening's performance (08.04.2010) at the Haugesund venue Dikselen, the opening of the 2010 Norway tour. Leven played material from the just-released Gothic Road as well as older songs such as “Big Tears” to a “conscious and marginal” audience. The author recalls that The Pogues had played at the same venue in 1984, with Elvis Costello as sound engineer.

Leven says he travels through Norway to see the country; friends in London hardly dared leave the city. People envied him his “interesting life” – a misunderstanding, he says; his life has something “cinematically bad” about it. He describes his audience as people who think for themselves and do not let a lifestyle be sold to them; in England many young people come. The article summarises his biography (Doll by Doll 1978–1982 without mainstream success; friendship and collaboration with Ian Rankin, Glen Matlock and Frank Black) and describes the mugging on his way home from the studio during work on his first solo album: two years without a voice, mental problems, isolation and heroin. Leven partly takes the blame on himself, in his own account – he had been drunk and had walked alone despite the engineers' warning; he grew up because of it. About his label he says that indie companies are no better than others and dropped him without hesitation, so he must have done something right. Gothic Road is presented as his 16th solo album; Dagbladet's critic Fredrik Wandrup gave it five pips.