The Jackie Leven Obituary

The most literary obituary, written by the music journalist Paul Du Noyer, who met Leven in 1979 and was his friend for 32 years. Published in The Word (March 2012) together with the cover CD “Heroes Can Be Any Size”, compiled by Du Noyer; the website version contains the track list at the end. Du Noyer asks who Leven actually was, and interprets the persona “Jackie Leven” as a deliberately built house into which Alan Moffatt had moved. He describes the background (English parents with Roma and Irish roots, according to Leven), reading from John Clare to the Russian poets, singing exercises with “Rescue Me”, the squats in north London in the mid-1970s, his own experiences in 1979 (frightening pubs, drugs, conspiracy theories), Doll by Doll and the name after e. e. cummings. Leven is said to have burst into tears when Du Noyer asked him about the closing line of “Main Travelled Roads”. There follow the assault, heroin, CORE (with the expansion of the acronym) and Diana's alleged interest in Leven (his own account), Cooking Vinyl from 1994, the Men's Movement phase after the Robert Bly tape from the Dalai Lama's bodyguard, “Levenland”, bars as places of devotion, Ian Rankin. Deborah Greenwood speaks at length about Leven's restlessness, the “electric fur”, life in the village in Hampshire and some fans' expectation of seeing him suffer. Conclusion: diagnosis in September 2011, death on 14 November, funeral in a country church with “Working Alone / A Blessing”, and Leven's probably last online message about a “Belfast Of The Mind”.