Jackie Leven

The user “Bogart” (later also active in the Afterword) opens a thread on 08.11.2011: Leven is “very poorly in hospital”, and people are asked to collect stories and thoughts about him; he will hear about them and it may help him. He sketches the path from St Judas and John St. Field via Doll by Doll to solo artist and recalls that the Independent once called him Britain's “great lost popstar”. Over the following days around 17 users write: several discovered Leven through “The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ” on an Uncut cover CD; a reader from Nova Scotia says Leven cancelled an appointment there and calls him “Van Morrison with his inspiration intact”; a man from Birmingham, whose concert two weeks earlier had been cancelled and moved to early January, tells his “Wrapped Up In Blue” anecdote (the same as in the Afterword 2021/2024). “duco01” came to Leven through his songs for Kevin Coyne; asked whether he had ever sung with Coyne, Leven replied that he had preferred to sit in the audience, and he gave a young guitarist from the writer's family a guest-list place and advice.

On 13.11.2011, the day before the death, the user “Turner” copies a notice from Leven's website into the thread: Leven was gravely ill with cancer and had “only a few days to live”; the same biographical paragraph follows (“In a career stretching over forty years …”, with the error “solo resurgence through the 1980s”) that after the death stood on the obituary home page. From 15.11. words of farewell follow; at the end Bogart quotes a line from “Working Alone / A Blessing”.