Songwriter Jackie Leven radio interview, November 2010 BBC Radio Scotland, Stark Talk

Roughly 26-minute conversational portrait from the BBC Radio Scotland series “Stark Talk” (BBC programme page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00w68bh). According to the BBC, broadcast on Wednesday, 1 December 2010 (15:30), repeated on 5 December 2010 and – “Another chance to hear … Jackie Leven, who died recently” – on 20 November 2011; no longer available from the BBC. The YouTube description dates the recording to November 2010 (presumably the month of recording; uploaded on 4.11.2014). Stark introduces Leven with Rankin's quip about the “Bob Dylan of Scotland”, Neil McCormick's praise for “Gypsy Blood” and the new album “Gothic Road”, and then works through his life chronologically: why fame failed to materialise (Leven says he avoids psychotherapy out of the superstitious fear of otherwise losing what is good in his writing), childhood in Leslie and Glenrothes as an outsider family, his mother's blues records, skipping school to be out in nature, the school librarian who slipped him Russian and American poetry, the gift of his first guitar and his own tuning. Next come fleeing a Glenrothes gang, years in Spain and Berlin, the Dorset squats, the London squat Bristol Gardens, Doll by Doll as “genuinely violent music”, LSD (Leven names Grof/Halifax's “The Human Encounter with Death” as his favourite book), tours with Hawkwind and Devo, both of whom threw the band off. Leven recounts the mugging after a studio session (almost strangled, around a year without a voice), depression, heroin as a painkiller, getting off it with five-element acupuncture, the founding of the CORE Trust and meeting Princess Diana, who at a charity lunch asked him to sing – for him the beginning of the comeback. The close: meeting Deborah Greenwood through a fan letter about “The Mystery of Love…”, the story about the girlfriend and the Dalai Lama's bodyguard, and the question of stadium fame, which he calmly dismisses. Overall verdict: a warm, humorous portrait; Leven as a self-mocking storyteller whose statements are throughout his own accounts.