Jackie Leven: 1950-2011

Tribute by Graeme Thomson on the morning after Leven's death. He calls Leven one of the country's most distinctive songwriters with a stubbornly low commercial profile and describes the cast of his songs (Serbian prostitutes, Earls Court taxi drivers, convicts, pub philosophers from Dundee), with whom Leven identified; as his best songs he names “Poortoun” and “Universal Blue”. Leven was an ex-junkie, brawler and enthusiastic drinker, the late records often uneven, the concerts with their digressions (Laurence Olivier, a photo session in a Glasgow alley) always worth seeing. Thomson last saw him in August 2011 in Edinburgh, physically weakened.

The original version (preserved in the LiveJournal reproduction) was followed by an edited version of an older Herald profile by Thomson, in which the 56-year-old Leven tells at length: being an outsider because of his Roma family in the Fife of the 1950s, nights spent fleeing gangs, LSD years and episodic mental illness during the Doll by Doll period, the 1984 mugging after a bottle of Canadian Club on the way to Maida Vale, two years without a voice and with heroin, healing through acupuncture and “psychic healing”, CORE Trust (Lady Diana, Westminster City Council award), monthly acupuncture to this day, a visit to Oslo and the forthcoming Doll by Doll CD reissues, including musings on a reunion. The current page contains only the obituary part.