JACKIE LEVEN

THE TRUTH IS

JACKIE LEVEN WAS A FIBBER, A FANTASIST, A JUNKIE, AN UNDER-ACHIEVER, A CELTIC FOLK-PSYCH-PUNK-POP ONE-OFF AND ONE OF THE GREAT BRITISH SONGWRITERS. AS HIS SOLO MASTERPIECE GETS ANOTHER DAY IN THE SUN, HIS FRIENDS AND ALLIES REMEMBER AN EXTRAORDINARY FORCE OF NATURE. “HE WAS A BIG FAT LIAR,” THEY TELL JOHN AIZLEWOOD , “BUT ALL HIS LIES WERE TRUE.”

JACKIE LEVEN IS IN TOUCHING DISTANCE. We’re in a traffc magnet of a Hampshire village, sipping herbal tea served by his partner in life and music, Deborah Greenwood, at the table of his working room. It’s cramped and sepulchral, the smell is a little musty and the bookcases heave with modern poetry; Rainer Maria Rilke is a favourite. It is a poet’s playground. And Leven, who died of cancer in 2011, aged just 61, is here, in a giant jar flled with his ashes. It’s safe to say it’s exactly what he would have wanted and where he would have wanted to be. He’d have written a song about it.

Leven was a poet, a scamp, a Scottish griot, a rogue, a warrior, a wit, a big man in every sense, a well-read polymath and either scary or wonderful company. A recording artist from 1971 until the year of his death, he left behind a catalogue of extraordinary beauty and eye-watering volume. As a performer, he was mesmeric, either as the confrontational, eye-popping singer of Doll By Doll or, later, the solo raconteur who would punctuate his tender, acutely observed, Celtic-tinged songs of love, rue and crushed hopes with the adventures of a budgerigar called Cunt. And he played guitar like John Martyn or Davey Graham. But he had better stories.

For instance: when Leven heard that much-loved singer-songwriter Sting had died in a tragic helicopter crash in Southampton around the turn of the century, he was on a train from Edinburgh to Kirkcaldy. Always the public servant, he announced the news to his fellow travellers. Mobile phones weren’t ubiquitous then, but they weren’t unknown either. “Why haven’t we heard?” asked one doubter. “Because it’s only just happened,” said Leven with appropriate solemnity. “My girlfriend works in an offce down there. She saw it…” That wasn’t Leven’s only train drama. In October 1988 he was bound for Moscow (or was it St Petersburg?) and whom should he meet, but Bob Dylan? Naturally the two songwriters pooled their resources and wrote a song. By the time they detrained in St Petersburg (or was it Moscow?) they had written As We Sailed Into Skibbereen. There are sceptics who argue that Sting is very much alive and well, and that while the splendid As We Sailed Into Skibbereen is indeed credited to Leven/Dylan, its melody is too close to One Too Many Mornings for copyright comfort. “He was a big fat liar, but all his lies were true,” chuckles Deborah Greenwood. So it doesn’t matter that his proprietary whisky, Leven’s Lament, was decanted Bell’s with a new label (“nice labels though,” insists Greenwood) and that Salman Rushdie may not have actually endorsed it (“Try it – you’ll be sadder but wiser”) or that Elegy For Johnny Cash, Leven’s fabulous album of 2005, was recorded in Wales, rather than, as the sleevenotes claim, Beirut (“He’d got into Lebanese music and Lebanese musicians guested,” notes Greenwood). And while former Yacht and Christian Henry Priestman certainly played on 2000’s Defending Ancient Springs, credits that place him on other Leven albums are spurious. “Mind you,” Priestman admits, “my ‘massed plucked cellos’ [another Leven invention] were praised in a review of Gothic Road.”

MUCH OF LEVEN’S STORY IS SHROUDED IN MYTH, but he was likely born Alan Moffatt in Fife’s Leven Valley, his parents – so he claimed – a peripatetic Irish-Cockney carpet ftter father and a blues-loving Romany Geordie mother, hence the Doll By Doll album, Gypsy Blood. “That’s not quite true, though,” says someone who enjoyed the Moffatts’ hospitality in the late ’70s. “His mum used to say, ‘What’s all this about us being gypsies?’ Jackie’s explanation was that we all have gypsy blood. Oh, his father came from Weybridge.” There was a sister, Wendy, and, unbeknown to Scottish folk legend Rab Noakes, who knew Leven for over 40 years, a brother. Marianne Mitchelson was two years below Alan Moffatt at Glenrothes High School. “Loosely and just for a wee while, Alan was my frst boyfriend,” she reports. “Tall, very good looking, he had silky foppy hair, which he grew longer than any boy in school. He had big, beautiful eyes, a wide, shy grin and very good teeth. He appeared to be a non-conformist loner, but he was not averse to being the cenPORTRAIT BY tre of attention. He came to school every day with an acoustic guitar over his shoulder. He swaggered around with it and had adoring adherents following him.” He married young and was a periph- ➢

Out of control: Leven, AKA John St. Field, an alias he adopted in 1971 “because I was in a little trouble with the forces of law and order.”

➣ eral part of a late-’60s folk scene, based around The Elbow Room in Kirkcaldy.

“Alan would have been very welcome to join our gang,” remembers Noakes. “But he never came that close. He performed foor spots which showed a deep sonorous voice and guitar playing which refected Bert Jansch and Davey Graham.”

On February 1, 1970, Noakes and Moffatt were double booked at an Ardrossan folk club. They shared the bill and the takings. The following year, watching The Byrds at Lincoln Folk Festival, Noakes bumped into Moffatt, who explained his name was now John St. Field. An e-mail relationship developed decades later, but the pair would never meet again.

Later in 1971, John St. Field made Control, an acid-folk album of timeless beauty, “following an intense period of taking LSD,” he claimed in the sleevenotes to the 1997 reissue, adding the alias came “because I was in a little trouble with the forces of law and order”. Control was fnally released in 1973, but only in Franco’s Spain where St. Field briefy lived.

IF THE FUTURE CLAIMS OF GYPSY HERITAGE WOULD prove fanciful, Moffatt/St. Field’s restlessness was real. By the mid-’70s, he had a son, Simon, and at least one divorce to his name when he was invited by guitarist Jo Shaw (now Joe, formerly John Culshaw) to join a squat he shared in Corfe Mullen with drummer Dave McIntosh. In 1977, after a period in West Berlin, he returned the favour, moving the newly married Shaw into a squat three doors down from his own in Maida Vale.

It was here that St. Field became Jackie Leven (a dialectical pun, suggests Noakes: Jack Of Leven) and, with McIntosh and a succession of bass players, Doll By Doll, named after a line in the e.e. cummings poem, The First Of All My Dreams, were born. “The frst night we took a tab of acid and went for a pub crawl,” remembers Shaw. “Then we got down to work.”

Gone was St Fieldian folk, although the acid unquestionably remained. Older than their punk peers, Doll By Doll were Celtic new wave with an undertow of mental health concerns who lived Leven’s manifesto of being beautiful on record, but ferce on-stage. Priestman saw them at Eric’s in Liverpool on April 12, 1979. “My diary says ‘Celtic Stax Motown meets psychedelia’,” says Priestman. “They blew me away. It was scary and mind-altering. Jackie was so forbidding. A few months later we Yachts were in the same restaurant as Doll By Doll. I was too scared to go up and say, ‘I love what you’re doing.’”

Mick Houghton would be Doll By Doll’s press offcer.

“I said, ‘This is what I can do for you.’ I got no response whatsoever. Their eyes were on stalks, they were totally off their faces. Nobody I worked with polarised people so much. There was no middle ground, they were loved or, certainly by John Peel, hated. To some people Jackie had a Manson-like quality. People believed his every word and followed him.”

“We were baring all,” explains Shaw. “Sometimes it was macho and violent, sometimes sensitive. Jackie said it was OK to be angry, but it was also OK to feel your feminine side. I still can’t stand bands who smile at each other all the time.”

Maida Vale neighbour Tom Newman, co-producer of Mike Oldfeld’s Tubular Bells, was recruited to helm the self-titled third album. “Me and Jackie were both into drugs and drink,” he notes. As Leven and Newman sampled the Warwick Castle pub’s spirit shelf, the singer would read newspapers, culling phrases from the letters pages to redeploy as lyrics.

Their four extraordinary albums sold poorly (“I’m glad they weren’t successful,” says Greenwood. “Success would have killed Jackie”) and Leven’s substance-fuelled behaviour made few friends, certainly not in Devo and Hawkwind who both threw them off tours. 1982’s Newman-produced Grand Passion, Doll By Doll’s fourth and fnal album (an unreleased ffth may exist; Newman isn’t sure), probably features Warwick Castle drinking chum David Gilmour, although nobody can say on which tracks. But by then, Shaw and McIntosh were out.

“I was told I wasn’t required any more,” sighs Shaw. “It broke my heart. I walked home in the snow in fucking bits, went to the pub and put the world to rights with this guy I’d never met. He asked me to join his band, The Pretty Things. I stayed for six years.”

Celtic soul: Leven raises a glass, 2000; (left) Doll By Doll, Notting Hill, 1984; (below left) Leven and Deborah Greenwood at La Pedrera, Barcelona, October 16, 2006.

➣ more than cult status. “He was too pissed to care about me having the A-side,” chuckles Matlock. Leven’s gorgeous B-side Braid On My Shoulder would be the bridge between Doll By Doll and his solo work.

After working with Leven, Matlock turned teetotal. They would meet again, but briefy. “To be honest, he really annoyed me. I’d stopped drinking. He hadn’t. It wasn’t the same.”

Leven and Wolf stopped heroin and started the CORE Trust (now Westminster Drug Project) to help others including Shaw to do the same via holistic methods. Princess Diana’s patronage gave CORE kudos. Naturally Leven had a tale to tell which involved Diana futtering her eyelashes and asking, “What are you doing afterwards?”

1994’S MAJESTIC THE MYSTERY OF LOVE IS GREATER Than The Mystery Of Death began the Jackie Leven solo career after, he implied, a period living in Argyll, absorbing his and she discovered he’d kept the letter. “We arranged to meet the next day. That sealed our fate.” Goldschmidt resisted Leven’s desire to release an album every heritage. “He was still in Maida Vale,” chuckles Shaw. “He went on holiday to Argyll.”

From there until his death, Leven was signed to Cooking Vinyl.

“I fell in love with The Mystery Of Love…,” says label boss Martin Goldschmidt, who was aware of folk artist Alan Moffatt, but unaware until now that Moffatt was Leven. “He was a lunatic, but a friend too. You couldn’t work out the lie from the truth, but he had me every time.”

Leven’s 1994 song Heartsick Land had confessed, “I have a son that I never see… I always know he is a part of me.”

“We had a call from his son, Simon, who’d heard the song,” says Goldschmidt. “They hadn’t spoken in years and through the album they got back together.”

“JACKIE WAS A LUNATIC, BUT A FRIEND TOO. YOU COULDN’T WORK OUT THE

LIE FROM THE TRUTH.” Mick Houghton was back, too. “We hadn’t seen each other for 13 years. His penetrating stare had gone, he was less wired, more mellow.” The Mystery Of Love… thanked ‘Mr and Mrs P. Moffatt’ in the credits and introduced a new Jackie Leven. Gone was Doll By Doll’s in-your-face intensity, replaced by a Celtic poet with a beautiful croon, a deft touch with melody and in Call Mother A Lonely Field (“Like young Irish men in an English bar, the song of home betrays us”), perhaps the song of his lifetime. After hearing the album, married mother Greenwood wrote the frst and last fan letter of her life (“How is it he knows everything that’s going on in my head? This person can see into people’s souls”). Weeks later she saw Leven at the 12 Bar, alone, after friends bailed out. Afterwards, they talked three months, allowing a new alter ego, Sir Vincent Lone, to mop up some of the excess of what was becoming a canon of remarkably consistent quality. Guests abounded, from Doll By Doll’s Shaw and McIntosh, poets such as Robert Bly to fellow travellers David Thomas, Johnny Dowd, Mike Scott, Andy White and Priestman. As his most regular collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Michael Cosgrave explains, Leven would enter the studio with melody and arrangements mostly in place, leaving wiggle room for lyrical updates and curveballs such as asking drummer Tim Robinson to play “like you’ve failed a Peter Gabriel audition” on 2007’s Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me!. “I’d never met anyone like him. Still haven’t,” says Cosgrave. “I’m not confrontational and he’d reached the point in his life

where he didn’t want hassle. After the frst couple of tours, we didn’t rehearse much. All he wanted was me to be prepared live and in the studio. He trusted my playing and I trusted his songs. With me, there was much less for him to carry over a show.”

Author Ian Rankin was a fan too, as was his best-known character, John Rebus.

“The frst time I saw him, this big guy in shorts and kilt socks lumbers on-stage and starts tuning up. His shirt was untucked and there was hair in his eyes. He was not the svelte fgure I’d seen in photos, he was a guy who’d seen a bit of life. I thought he was a roadie.”

The pair collaborated on-stage where Rankin read his wry short story Jackie Leven Said as Leven played musical interludes and songs such as The Haunting Of John Rebus. There was a lot of chat and a live album.

“He and Debbie stayed with us and I loved it,” says Rankin, whose forthcoming Rebus novel, Heart Full Of Headstones, takes its title from a line in Leven’s song Single Father.

THE STORIES BECAME LESS OUTLANDISH TOWARDS the end, but Leven’s musical powers remained undimmed. The death of his alcoholic brother hit him hard and, having kicked heroin cold turkey, Leven did the same with drink. The weight fell off. It kept falling off. His feet swelled. Something was wrong beyond grief.

“I was supposed to do a gig with him in Belfast,” says Rankin. “They said he wasn’t well and couldn’t make it. That’s when I got an inkling…”

Leven and Shaw met every year at the Larmer Tree Festival in Dorset.

“The last time, I was having a beer. He was having water. He was tearful and said there’s no point going on. I put my hand on his and said, ‘What is it Jackie?’ He said Deborah was insisting he see a doctor, but he didn’t want to hear bad news…”

Greenwood threatened to leave him if he didn’t seek help. He sought help.

“His doctor sent him to Urgent Medical Care at Southampton General,” she explains, falteringly. “The surgeon said, ‘Three months at the most.’ I had to tell Jackie because they hadn’t.”

“We had a tour booked for October. Jackie cancelled it at the end of the summer. He told me, ‘I’m unwell, I might be very unwell,’” remembers Cosgrave.

Shaw visited one last time.

“It was a life-changing experience. I put a cup of water to his lips and talked about the beautiful, wonderful things we’d done together.”

Leven died on November 14, 2011. Before the funeral, in accordance with Leven’s song Gylen Gylen and Celtic tradition, Greenwood had put pennies over his eyes to pay the ferryman taking him to the next life.

“At the funeral, I was a pallbearer,” says Shaw. “But I fell to the ground crying. I completely crumbled. Our bond had lasted forever.”

Today, Greenwood has found new love and plans to move from the home she and Leven shared. In the corner of the room, his ashes still lie undisturbed: “We thought he was indestructible, you know…”

And yet, 11 years after his passing, Leven lives on. Greenwood is spearheading a campaign to have him recognised as a poet by the Scottish literary establishment. Cooking Vinyl has tended the catalogue lovingly – a vinyl version of The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death surfaced in July – and proselytisers such as Rankin have kept the flame burning and a new generation intrigued. He didn’t want to go, but as he said in Elegy For Johnny Cash – ostensibly about Cash, but, like all his work, really about himself – “Lord, don’t make me wait too long, I’m already rich. Rich in the things I’ve seen and done.” M

10 great JACKIE LEVEN songs, by the people they touched.

JANICE

(from Doll By Doll’s Remember, 1979) Joe Shaw: “Mine and Jackie’s guitar arrangement and the syncopation with the reggae-ish rhythm are fantastic. It’s very beautiful and was originally acoustic.”

HIGHLAND RAIN

(from Doll By Doll’s Gypsy Blood, 1979) JS: “It’s got everything. Some of it popped in my head the other day and I thought, ‘Where did that come from?’ It’s an incredibly complicated piece of music. Utterly, utterly, utterly stunning.”

THOSE IN PERIL

(from Doll By Doll, 1981)

Henry Priestman:

“It’s got mentions of the sea, a beautiful melody and it’s less abrasive Doll By Doll. It looks towards his musical future.”

BRAID ON MY SHOULDER

(Concrete Bulletproof Invisible B-side, 1988) Glen Matlock: “It still sounds good and it’s a great song. I put Joe’s guitars through reverb so they sounded like bagpipes. He was quite annoyed.”

CALL MOTHER A LONELY FIELD

(from The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death, 1994) Martin Goldschmidt: “The best starting point to Jackie. It hit me between the eyes and still sends shivers down my spine. I keep coming back to it year after year. When the vinyl version came out, he dedicated it to my mum who had died from cancer, so it means even more to me.”

POORTOUN

(from Fairy Tales For Hard Men, 1997) Rab Noakes: “In cultural terms, the Fife connection resonates. The deindustrialisation in the Thatcher years was critical and families were really afected. The ‘Young boys staring into burnt out cars’ might have been slightly exaggerated. I play it live: it always goes down well.”

UNIVERSAL BLUE

(from Night Lilies, 1998)

Deborah Green-

wood: “The most autobiographical song for us. It’s true. We decided we couldn’t be together any more, because it was too painful for the ones we loved. This is almost word for word what happened. Thank God we were wrong.”

EXIT WOUND

(from Creatures Of Light & Darkness, 2001) Ian Rankin: “A story of betrayal. I love Debbie’s singing on it. I saw the two of them doing it at a pub on the way to Perth in the middle of nowhere. The hairs went up on my arms.”

COURTSHIP IN SCOTTISH FACTORIES

(from Sir Vincent Lone’s Songs For Lonely Americans, 2006) DG: “The tenderness of him being the guy waiting for his girl is the most beautiful thing I’ve heard. It’s exquisite. ‘I know that friends say that I’m rough’ is so him as a young man.”

THE VIEW FROM SHIT CREEK

(unreleased, 2011) Michael Cosgrave: “I recorded this on the Jackie tribute The Wanderer. It’s the way he contextualises the alcoholic knowing where to buy the cheapest vodka, with the understanding that it’s going to lead to an early death.”