Jackie Leven: beauty in his wounds

The Scottish singer-songwriter Norman Lamont (self-description: “came of age in the early 70s”) tells how he discovered Leven twice without hearing him first: in 1981, after a press review, he bought Doll by Doll's single “Main Travelled Roads”, and in 1994 likewise the EP Songs from the Argyll Cycle, which remains among his favourite recordings to this day. In the 1990s he wrote a song inspired by “Main Travelled Roads”, sent Leven a cassette and received a handwritten letter back immediately (as an image in the post, with a note from Leven about a new album “out on Sept 18th”). The song “Touched Again” was later recorded by Lamont's band The Invisible Helpers and can be heard in the post.

The main part is an outline of the work from a fan's perspective: Doll by Doll (with a longer quotation from Neil McCormick), assault and addiction, founding of the CORE Trust with Carol Wolf (now WDP), support from Princess Diana – Leven credited her with getting him singing again. Lamont stresses that he had heard the Diana story in several versions, which grew with the telling; an embedded audio recording gives the best version (backstage at a charity event, with Wayne Sleep). Then follow Robert Bly and the men's movement, Leven's own open guitar tuning, for which there is no tablature, the relationship with Ian Rankin, the pseudonyms and Leven's notebook text on the “code of the travelling man”, which Deborah Greenwood gave to Paul Du Noyer after his death.