Concert reviews · Kieler Nachrichten

This concert review, preserved in a weblog repost from May 2010, describes Leven through a string of contrasts: gruff troubadour, gentle rough diamond, hulking tenderfoot, hard-drinking philosopher, world-travelling true Scot. Most of the well-attended house at Kiel’s KulturForum knew him already.

The text recounts one of his stories: a woman called Deborah is expecting money from Stuttgart and, at a Western Union branch in Southampton, has to answer the security question set by the sender. The clerk asks, “Who am I?”, and Deborah answers: “You’re an arsehole.” “That is correct,” says the clerk, and pays out. In the songs, by contrast, the humour often gives way to a delicate, at times dark, hopeless and clear-sighted melancholy that, at its best, pulls the listener “into the bottomless” with inescapable weight – the review names “Elegy For Johnny Cash” and “Kings Of The Infinite Space”.

Michael Cosgrave accompanies on keyboards, “unobtrusively and elegantly”, which gives the folk-rooted songs, seasoned with soul, pop and country, more breadth. Embedded in the “thicket of anecdotes”, the critic finds them rounder, more intense and more direct than on record. The roughly two-hour concert centres on the new album Gothic Road – “Last Of The Bad Men”, “John Paul Getty’s Silver Cadillac” and “Song For Bass Guitar And Death” are named. As usual there were no encores: they are “all wrong and plastic”, and nobody, after the guests have left the house, flings the door open and yells “Encore!” after them. A funny, clever fellow, concludes the review – though the delighted audience would have liked one anyway.