FRANKFURT: Bij de dood van Jackie Leven (1950 – 2011). Een persoonlijke herinnering

The Dutch music journalist Peter Bruyn explicitly writes not an obituary but a personal recollection. He says he began listening to Leven seriously around the turn of the millennium, after a Doll by Doll LP had sat gathering dust on his shelf for years. He was first moved by the idiosyncratic melodies and the voice (compared with Scott Walker, David Thomas and Robert Fisher of Willard Grant Conspiracy), then by the themes: ordinary people groaning under the weight of life, losing work, wife and ideals, and taking stock in front of a bottle of whisky. Bruyn briefly recounts the biography (the near-strangling in the eighties, damaged vocal cords, heroin, founding a holistic detox clinic, the voice returning in the nineties).

In 2005 Bruyn visited Leven in Münster for an interview, a week before a gig at the Patronaat in Haarlem; he describes him as driven by deep compassion and at the same time very funny, with introductions that lasted longer than the songs. Another Patronaat concert had been planned for the end of September 2011, but the tour was suddenly cancelled because Leven was ill.

The main part is an anecdote: in January 2006 Leven played at a private party that Bruyn held in Haarlem for his own 50th and his partner's 40th birthday, and kept around eighty guests quiet for an hour. Afterwards he only wanted to take his guitar back to the hotel briefly, but got stuck at the bar of the Proeflokaal De Blauwe Druif with an old man, then lay down for a moment at the hotel, fell asleep and woke only shortly before his flight from Schiphol; the next evening he phoned and apologised profusely. The text ends with the sentence that Leven will now never wake up again. Tenor: warm, humorous, sad.