Jackie Leven: Gothic Road (Cooking Vinyl/TUBA)

The newspaper Hordaland (Voss) writes in Nynorsk on 29 April 2010 about Gothic Road (Cooking Vinyl/TUBA), ahead of the concert Leven gives on Saturday with Knut Buen in Ulvik. As storytellers both are ‘hardwood’, the paper says, even if their expression is quite different, and together they are to honour Sigbjørn Bernhoft Osa, another great storyteller in words and music. The headline calls Leven a “Scottish storyteller of history”.

Leven’s lyrics are “not exactly suited to putting you in a radiant mood”, but then they are about the shadow side of life. The reviewer describes his background: with an Irish cockney father and a mother from Northumbria he grew up as a classic outsider in Scottish Fife; school – minus English and essay writing – was a drudge, and that still marks his lyrics and music. The humour is “coal-black and intense”.

Leven fights his war with guitar, lyrics and a deep Scottish voice as weapons – “and they are weapons that serve”. The music is rhythmically creaking and rattling, sparingly portioned out. Admittedly tracks such as ‘Absolutely Joan Crawford (With a Bit of Tilda Swinton on the Side)’ and ‘In a Shivering Blaze’ brighten the picture musically, where blues and country swing gain a certain upper hand. The page is interleaved with an excerpt from Lars Osa’s memoir ‘Med pensel og boge’; the passage about the man gnawing a meat bone in the gutter belongs to that, not to the review. The biographical details are the newspaper’s own.