Obituaries · El Lokal Zürich

On the continuously extended memorial page “Insel Olymp” of the Zurich venue El Lokal, in a section carrying no date, a short obituary by the promoter is headed “Our friend Jackie Leven has gone” (“Unser Freund Jackie Leven ist gegangen”). Leven had been to the venue “many times”. Unfortunately he had to cancel his last concert on “our island”: the Scottish singer and “wonderful storyteller” was admitted to hospital as an emergency. He died, the text says, on the evening of Monday 14 November 2011, at eight o’clock, in Southampton; he had been suffering from cancer. The exact place and time are the promoter’s statement, with no source disclosed.

They will never forget “this loving bear of a man”, the promoter writes, nor the “funny pranks” he often played on them: someone who “sparkled with wit, humour and zest for life” will never drop by again. The obituary closes with a quotation from Leven, in German translation, about two kinds of storyteller: there are spiritual storytellers and soulful ones; he hopes he belongs to the latter, whose stories reach into the earth, have sap and are nourishing, rather than striving upward towards heaven and God like the spiritual ones.