Review: Jackie Leven – Straight Outta Caledonia

Mike Davies reviews the best-of Straight Outta Caledonia: The Songs of Jackie Leven (School Daze, ten tracks) for FATEA Magazine. When Leven died of cancer in 2011 he left behind 26 commercially available albums (including three as Sir Vincent Lone and his 1973 debut as John St. Field) along with four as leader of Doll By Doll, of which “Main Travelled Roads” remains Davies’s personal favourite. Born in Kirkcaldy, Fife, as Alan Moffatt, he never enjoyed chart success but commanded immense critical respect and a steadfast loyal following.

Davies finds it surprising that a retrospective took ten years to appear, and that it comes from a small independent offshoot rather than Cooking Vinyl, the label he had been signed to since his 1994 solo debut, after he lost his voice for two years following an attempted strangulation in 1984, which led to a heroin addiction. The title cheekily echoes N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton. Given the vast amount of material, a single disc cannot do full justice to his Celtic folk-blues songwriting, the often metaphysical, empathetic lyrics veined with tragedy and comedy (“fairytales for hard men”, as he described them), or the warm malt-whisky intimacy of his baritone, but as an introduction it does a sterling job.

Davies goes through the selection. The opener, “The Sexual Loneliness Of Jesus Christ” (from the David Thomas-produced Creatures of Light & Darkness, 2001), retells over six minutes, beginning with church organ and spoken-word samples of unemployed Glasgow shipyard workers, the biblical story as that of a sexually frustrated, solitary man. The tumblingly melodic title song follows, from the Sir Vincent Lone album Songs For Lonely Americans (2006), then “Heartsick Land” and the cinematic “Snow In Central Park” from The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death (1994), which features Mike Scott and Anthony Thistlethwaite of The Waterboys. “Irresistible Romance” from Shining Brother Shining Sister (2003) underlines why Leven was often regarded as Scotland’s answer to Van Morrison; “Live Or Die” hints at the Righteous Brothers, whose “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” he covered on Defending Ancient Springs. “Some Ancient Misty Morning” has a Velvets feel, “Poortoun” is an acoustic reflection on childhood memories of Fife, “Single Father” an uptempo meditation on loss and loneliness, and the 113-second “Dagenham Dream” from his final album, with Michael Cosgrave, closes the set. Davies mixes up some albums and dates (for instance he dates Night Lilies to 1996 and gives the last album as Wayside Shrines and the Dreams of the Travelling Man).

Countless other songs could be argued for – “Call Mother A Lonely Field”, “Men in Prison”, “John Paul Getty’s Silver Cadillac” – but until the definitive box set comes along, this will do very nicely. A posthumous compilation had already appeared in 2012 as a magazine cover-mount, Heroes Can Be Any Size. It is about time the wider world realised that Leven was a giant.