Obituary: Jackie Leven - Maverick musician from Fife whose talent and eccentricity inspired great devotion

Personal obituary by the Scotsman music journalist Colin Somerville, who first met Leven in 1994 in a telephone interview about Mystery of Love and was friends with him. He describes childhood in the new town of Glenrothes with an Irish-Cockney father and a “Geordie” mother (north-east England), Leven's aversion to his old home (he looked grimly across the Forth from the Old Chain Pier in Newhaven), expulsion from school for drug possession, marriage at 16 and being driven out by youth gangs. There follow years of wandering, Berlin, Spain, Control as John St Field and Doll by Doll, who were said to be neither punk nor New Wave. Somerville moves the assault to Islington: Leven was throttled from behind at a cash machine and permanently lost his falsetto range. Then heroin, healing with a Chinese method, CORE with the Princess of Wales as a supporter. Somerville stresses Leven's closeness to Robert Bly and the Men's Movement, the collaborations with Mike Scott, David Thomas, Robert Fisher and Ian Rankin, and the unusual loyalty between Leven and Cooking Vinyl boss Martin Goldschmidt. Anecdotes: two fans from Teesside, in front of whom Leven did not want to play at a late-scheduled Fringe show and who sat in the front row the following year; the beer glass with a mystery cocktail on stage; the poet Paul Reekie before a Leven festival show. Tenor: affectionate, Leven as an unsung Scottish hero.