Nachruf auf Jackie Leven: Der Vagabund

Edo Reents of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's arts pages opens his short obituary by saying that Jackie Leven will go down in history as one of the singers and songwriters most dogged by bad luck. He started early, but under a false name (John St. Field), so that his folk – in Reents's view not as varied and intense as that of his Scottish compatriot Gerry Rafferty – could not be permanently attributed to him; his debut Control sold little and was quickly forgotten.

The founding of the “wannabe punk band” Doll By Doll came, in Reents's account, at the wrong time, since after 1975 one had to offer “disco, wave or really hard stuff” to stay in business. When Leven was about to make a second solo attempt in 1983 he was assaulted and was practically out of action for two years. Even the heroin he fled into could not prevent the “bear of a man with a tender soul” from still becoming a performer who, in his late phase, took his cue from Johnny Cash's “destructive musician's strategy”. His records, released regularly from 1994, did not reach a mass audience but were valued by lovers of “unobtrusive, moderate country and folk”. The first was called The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death; Leven and his followers can now get to the bottom of this truth separately, in the hereafter and in the here.

On Monday Leven, who came from the barren country of Fife, a “descendant of a Roma family” (Reents's words; the ancestry rests on Leven's own account) and a welcome guest in Germany until the end, died aged 61. The tone is detached; the standfirst calls him a folk singer, Cash epigone and wannabe punk who never found the large audience. Doll by Doll are otherwise usually classed as a new wave band; the label “wannabe punk band” is Reents's own sharpening.