Drinking with Jackie Leven

Norman Lamont publishes, with permission, the recollections of a reader, “Tom in Glasgow”. Tom knew Doll by Doll only vaguely and discovered Leven in the mid-1990s through the library CD The Mystery of Love; “Call Mother A Lonely Field” blew him away. After that he saw him regularly in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 2000 he got tickets for a recording at the Glasgow club The Ferry, filmed by STV – as he remembers it, for an episode of the programme Artery about Leven; on watching it again on YouTube, however, the concert excerpts did not come from the Ferry, possibly because of technical problems.

Through a companion he met the painter Allan there, whose pictures Leven used for Haunted Valley live albums; Allan later introduced him to Leven, and the three of them occasionally sat in the bar after concerts or watched the main act together when Leven was playing as support (named: Caravan at the Ferry). Away from the stage Leven was somewhat milder, but a masterly storyteller, of whom one never knew whether a story was true. Tom says Leven mocked a musician who had asked him about his guitar before a concert as nosy, right there on stage. In 2009 he saw him with his future wife at the Tolbooth in Stirling. The high point was a concert at the Woodend Bowling and Tennis Club in Glasgow in November 2010: Leven talked as much as he played, overran heavily, and a coarse story about a night-time photo shoot behind the central station brought the house down. He missed the summer 2011 gig at King Tut's; tickets for another Woodend concert in autumn 2011 expired because Leven died a few weeks before. He says he knew Leven was ill, but not how seriously.