Larry Schwartz
After a late-night recording session in London in the 1980s, the Scottish singer-songwriter Jackie Leven was attacked and so badly beaten that he couldn’t speak, let alone sing. “I lost all my friends … I just retreated into a silent world,” he says, recalling the event on the eve of his first visit
to Australia.
Leven can’t remember the name of the steroid his doctor advised him to use. But he does know it made him feel that he “was covered in a kind of weird electric fur”.
He turned to a substance he says is sometimes called “the classic drug of despair”. The heroin proved to be “a really useful tool for dealing with that pain,” Leven says. “And perhaps, like some love that we all enter at one point or other, there came a time when I thought, ‘This has just got
to stop because the pain it’s now giving me is probably bigger than the pain it was meant to be managing’.”
A doctor who also practised as a homeopath helped him kick the addiction. Leven and his then girlfriend were so impressed that they co-founded the Core Trust, a London-based charity that favors alternative medicine, particularly Chinese acupuncture, to treat addiction.
“It still runs,” he says. “We had the highest success rate in the UK for dealing with addiction.”
Leven will be bringing to Australia a mix of his own songs, and sung and spoken versions of poems by the likes of the 15th-century Indian mystic, Kabir, the early 20th-century Russian, Ossip Mandelstam and Spain’s Antonio Machado.
Before his solo career, he fronted the English band, Doll By Doll, whose sales never matched its critical acclaim. “We were just horrendously unfashionable,” he says. “We came up at a time when you just had to be attached to some fashion or other. You had to be new wave or you had to be
punk …
“I think our commitment was to playing good songs and we didn’t give a s… what kind of cut our trousers had. We paid the ultimate penalty for that. But we also had a real good time and made some great records.”
Five of the albums recorded between 1978 and 1982 with guitarist Joe Shaw and percussionist David McIntosh are to be re-released later this year, as is Leven’s new album, Night Lilies. It explores, he says, the ways touch or smell can rekindle memories of teenage years, a period he believes
many avoid thinking about because of painful associations. Although he says there is no mission in his music-making – “I try to leave that to social realists like Billy Bragg” – he is preoccupied with the healing of a kind of hurt he believes is common among “angry teenagers trapped in men’s
bodies”.
The interest in damage and healing also showed up in song titles for Leven’s previous album, Fairytales For Hard Men: Extremely Violent Man, Fear Of Women, Sexual Danger.
“I’ve spent a lot of my life listening to the tales of men’s lives and indeed watching men listening to women,” he writes on sleeve notes, “and I have seen that few things are as potent as the power of the tale and the telling.”
Some of the poems he uses in his work have been translated and/or anthologised by the American poet Robert Bly, author of the influential books Iron John and The Sibling Society. Leven was introduced to Bly’s work at high school and persuaded the poet to read for an early 1990s album,
The Mystery Of Love Is Greater Than The Mystery Of Death (“a wonderful record,” Leven volunteers).
He has helped to co-ordinate retreats with Bly and psychologist and author James Hillman. “We take up to 100 men – sometimes in America, 50 white men, 50 black men – stick them in the middle of nowhere, without booze, for up to five days and make them listen to stories and find out
what they’ve got to say.
“And you get all kinds of reactions to this kind of setting. From furious belligerence to near-psychic collapse. But what always comes out of it is a very humbling thing of hearing people’s stories and getting your own moans and miseries into some kind of perspective.”
The cover of Fairy Tales features a painting of a bodybuilder by the artist Peter Howson.
“I was walking through Glasgow one very, very rainy evening and I saw this painting lit up very beautifully in a gallery window,” Leven says. “What I like about the man in it is how directly stupid his life has been. As a teenager, he’s thought, ‘If I just get my body all built up, someone’s going
to love me … It’s very, very sad. I think there’s a bit of us all that has this kind of incompetence, hoping to attract some kind of ultimate person with ultimate healing love into our lives. I like the sheer sadness of it all.”
Leven sees some parallels between the function of songs and the role of fairy tales in “the days before the cross, Prozac and psychotherapy”. He says that Christianity “banished such stories from the adult domain” and “banished the pagan gods and goddesses and now they are returned
as diseases.”
Leven, 48, lives in Oban on Scotland’s west coast. His mother was “a Romany Gipsy from just near Newcastle”, his father a cockney who worked as a carpet fitter; the family lived “a real proper council-house, working-class life”.
He confesses to a “big fantasy about what it’s going to be like” when he gets to Australia. “You get off the plane and get given a bottle of fine wine and get taken to a beach where someone makes love to you,” he says. “And then presumably at some point after that I’m going to have to get
on stage. But it’s going to be outside because it’s always so sunny that no one has houses …”
Leven promises an entertaining night in Melbourne this week.
“It’s going to be bit noisy,” he says. “I’m going to even have my flute miked up. I’m an absolutely brilliant live performer. So although there’s just me, don’t worry about it. It’ll be so stunning, people will be leaving in tears.”
The Sunday Age, 19th of July 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 