From Tom Newlands to Robert Louis Stevenson via Jackie Leven and the Kingdom of Fife

The thread “From Tom Newlands to Robert Louis Stevenson via Jackie Leven and the Kingdom of Fife” on the British forum The Afterword (24 October 2025, 55 comments) starts with a question about Tom Newlands's debut novel Only Here, Only Now and grows into a collection of Scottish writers and musicians. The opening poster, who lives in Stockholm, writes that research on Fife led him to the music of Jackie Leven, born in Kirkcaldy. One commenter calls him “the Late Great Jackie Leven” and says you can't go wrong discovering his musical legacy.

Asked where Leven fits in, the original poster pastes long passages from Paul Du Noyer's obituary. According to it, Leven was born Alan Moffatt in 1950 and grew up in the Pictish region he called the Kingdom of Fife; his parents were English, with Romany and Irish ancestry. He claimed to be the first child ever expelled in Scotland over drugs and to have been a schoolmate of the future Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Kirkcaldy. His real love was bars, which he listed on every album sleeve – especially the haunts of old working men whose lives had lost meaning with the closure of mines, mills and factories (“Poortoun”, 1997, draws on images of Fife). Ian Rankin, also a Fifer, was drawn to this dimension, picturing his detective Rebus consoling himself at night with these songs: “stories about disappointed hard men”.

Leven's own anecdote is quoted too: when Ted Heath visited his school and asked what he wanted to be, he said he would like to be one of those wee men in flat caps standing outside the pubs – Heath laughed, the headmaster did not. Leven's partner Deborah Greenwood explains the image: as a boy he waited outside bars for his father; that was where the men were, where the big mystery would be revealed, “a Congregation of Men”. Other comments recall Rankin's background in Cardenden and a meeting of Leven and Ralph McTell with Gordon Brown at Downing Street. Most of it is second-hand; what is telling is how Leven's self-mythology has settled in the minds of a late audience.