Jackie Leven: 'To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour'*

Poster for Two Tiny Selves benefit

the first of all my dreams was of
a lover and his only love,
strolling slowly (mind in mind)
through some green mysterious land

until my second dream begins —
the sky is wild with leaves; which dance
and dancing swoop (and swooping whirl
over a frightened boy and girl)

but that mere fury soon became
silence: in hunger always whom

two tiny selves sleep (doll by doll)

motionless under magical
foreverfully falling snow.

and then this dreamer wept: and so
she quickly dreamed a dream of spring
— how you and i are blossoming.

(e e cummings)

you find me living in forbidden worlds (Forbidden Worlds)

I don't know how to describe what Doll by Doll sounded like to me when I first heard them. Perhaps poetry’s the easiest way to do it, hence the preponderance of poetry extracts in this review.

Uncharacteristically smiling

But visually … . Imagine one of those soaring aerial shots of Middle Earth (aka New Zealand) in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, sweeping over snow-topped mountain ranges, dipping into lush valleys, swirling through towering forests, from the fantastical Rivendell or Lothlorien to the grim Mordor, you’re halfway there, you have an impression of the vast vistas of a Doll by Doll soundscape – rich and barren, monumental and minute, extreme long shot and extreme close-up. They weren’t just a rock band to me, perhaps because I didn’t see them live, having only learnt they existed after they had ceased to (as explained in my first Jackie blog but at least I wasn’t as late to the party as I was to the Kinks), until they reformed for what I thought was one glorious night at the Borderline in 1995 (apparently they played gigs in Norway and the North of the UK too), but maybe because they didn’t slot into any particular category (New Wave? Post-punk? Straight rock?) – the best music never does. They allowed me a glimpse of a different life, extremes of experience I was still too callow to have encountered but dared to hope I one day would. Perhaps they didn’t achieve commercial success because there was just something so uncompromising about them. They weren’t about to make themselves more palatable to the masses (as the Fleet Foxes did). Theirs weren’t delusions of grandeur.

The thing about Doll by Doll is that they didn’t depend on image, and I loved them through listening to cassette tapes made by my friend (am I really that old?) so had no idea what they looked like. In fact, as I mentioned previously, they looked intimidating – they weren’t part of the floppy-haired, fringed-scarf brigade. They had no uniform. They weren’t constructed to appeal to teenage girls (except weird ones like me who got into them too late). Perhaps that’s one reason they never achieved mainstream success. They never appeared to court it. Too musically accomplished to fit into even the post-punk aesthetic, they were a bona fide rock band without any poodle pretensions.

Ok, more than that – there was total commitment and scary intensity in their music. You never doubted for a moment that Jackie meant what he was singing. I never needed to know what they looked like. Once you heard the music, you knew it wasn’t relevant. I just found this quote from Jackie:

I didn't have a conscious aim in the sense of a manifesto. But I think I wanted to be a severe writer. I like things that are severe. That doesn't mean I like harsh music or harsh art. But I love it when someone puts you into that intense moment of what they're doing. I can't live without that in my own writing. Nothing would ever shake me from that intense, severe thing in the song.

This makes it sound like listening to Jackie or seeing him live was a dark and frightening experience when in fact, it was totally joyful, intimate and full of humour.

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

*(William Blake, from 'Auguries of Innocence')

This is what Jackie and Doll by Doll did so well. I can't say it any better.

I bought all the records (Remember, Gypsy Blood, Doll by Doll, Grand Passion) (there were still record shops in those days) and immersed myself in their blend of poesy and power chords, rage and rhythm, delicacy and dynamism but didn’t hear any more of Jackie until I discovered The Mystery of Love in 1994.

As we remember him

flowers unfold without being told (The Perfect Romance)

It seemed that Jackie had effortlessly shaken off the persona of unadulterated and almost completely unknown Rock God to metamorphose into the poetry-quoting, men’s group-attending singer-songwriter of the mid-90s. Now I know more about the trauma, pain and heartache he experienced and rose above along the way but Jackie always had that alchemical ability to transform tragedy into something astonishing. Although gone, he is far from forgotten as this memorial show proved. I thought he could cheat death, could intone ‘and death shall have no dominion’ and the Grim Reaper would dissolve into ashes like a staked vampire in Buffy. If only.

there is a land beyond the spoken word (More Than Human)

And his solo work proved just as uncategorisable as Doll by Doll. He would variously be labelled Celtic folk, folk rock, singer-songwriter, but labels only diminish him because his scope was simply too broad to be so easily encompassed and because each term conjures up an image of something that is far removed from Jackie (perhaps a bleeding heart liberal or someone over earnest and politically correct – anyone else heard the Hitler’s Henchmen story?), that cannot begin to describe him.

[He has left his mark in literature too, his song ‘Standing in Another Man's Rain’ being misremembered by Ian Rankin for the title of his latest book, ‘Standing in Another Man's Grave’, the Rebus character, a Jackie Leven fan.]

when the neon universe was winking to an end (Stripshow)

And so it came to pass that one night in November, when TFL had decided to shut down the Northern Line, some of the faithful made our way by other means to The Castle Rocks on Finchley Road to attend a memorial concert to Jackie Leven, all proceeds going to Macmillan Cancer Support and Cancer Research UK. This was the second tribute get-together of the week, the first being in Botley, where Jackie lived (visited last year to remember and celebrate with like minds), which was a little too far to travel for one night. I hear it was also a great success. I didn’t really know whether I could bear to hear Jackie’s songs without Jackie’s voice. It couldn’t be the same, of course it couldn’t but in the end it didn’t matter. The passion of the performers and the power of the songs prevailed.

I was never part of the Church of Leven and normally I’m anti anything that deifies a human being yet when I think of Jackie and Doll by Doll, Biblical imagery comes naturally (I’ve already used ‘and so it came to pass’ and ‘faithful’, I can't seem to help myself). Jackie inspires a sort of (ir)reverent devotion and brings out the religious in me. This gathering, the performers, the friends, fans and family, are here to sing Allelujah for Jackie. There’s a spirit of camaraderie, solidarity among musicians and audience alike because we have this one important thing in common.

The Castle Rocks

The Castle Rocks interior is adorned with posters for previous gigs, an illustrated record of its musical heritage. I recently learned that this beautiful, rambling old building is going to be pulled down.

The performers are (not necessarily in exact order of appearance, apologies if I’ve missed anyone out):

Gerry Foster and Joe Shaw, Kevin Hewick,Tom Burgess, Steve and Lucas Chapman Smith (father and son) and then Two Tiny Selves.

i hear it in the deep heart's core

Enjoyed all these performances but Kevin has me in tears with The Fountain Is Red, the Fountain Is White, a favourite of mine that I used to request but which I never heard Jackie perform live. Although heart-breaking to think I’ll never hear Jackie sing this in the flesh, it’s great to hear someone else’s interpretation and very touching.

Of note are Tom’s version of Farm Boy and Steve and Lucas’s Some Ancient Misty Morning (although this Jackie version is sublime). They also play a song that sounds like a tribute to Jackie (at least I hear the lines ‘Sweet Jackie’s Gone’); Joe Shaw tells me it’s called ‘Jackie Leven’s Gone’ but I can't find a version of it anywhere and I’d love to hear it again.

Then the main event:

then the main event: two tiny selves

(Joe Shaw and David McIntosh from Doll by Doll and Kevin Foster and Cody)

The focus is on Doll by Doll songs but the band mixes it up by playing some new tunes. Joe plans to move into more rhythm-based tracks. Joe’s vocal delivery is powerful enough to stand in for Jackie, who I prefer to think of as unavoidably delayed.

Classic Doll by Doll

setlist
(taken from the band’s so some titles might be shortened)

Up; Stripshow; Epicentre; Good Thing; Hey Sweetheart; The Human Face; Roses Are Blue; Don’t Look Down; Main Travelled Roads; Palace of Love

It’s amazing to hear some of these songs again and difficult to single out any for particular attention but here I go:

Stripshow (They could have played the whole of Gypsy Blood and I wouldn’t have complained – it really is an album that needs to be reappraised as a classic) (Jackie exposes the underbelly of the city, revealing its minutiae; elegiac in tone and instrumentation, ‘the city was bursting into flower for the spring’, tenderness and strength intertwined. It’s a great city song, not as romantic as Lloyd Cole’s Downtown, more akin to Simon and Garfunkel’s My Little Town; you get the sense that Lloyd’s only playing at walking on the wild side before hotfooting it back over the tracks while Jackie is submerged in the urban wilderness. Never a dilettante, our man.)

The Human Face (Brilliant delivery of an awesome song)

Don’t Look Down (A Joe Shaw song I presume?) (I would definitely like to hear some of the Two Tiny Selves material again)
Main Travelled Roads (Suitably epic)

Palace of Love (Visceral. I never thought I would dance, well it was more like head-banging. which I haven’t done except in jest since I went through a thankfully brief thrash metal phase in the early 90s, to Palace of Love, the typical climax of a Doll by Doll set. Where do you go from here? Savage, abandoned, pure.)

There are a couple of ladies going wild dancing at the front. We assume they are huge Jackie fans but in fact, it turns out they’ve never heard of him or Doll by Doll, just out celebrating a birthday.

Really we need to leave because there’s no tube station nearby so we have to get a bus to another bus stop and another bus in order to catch a tube to Charing Cross before our last train leaves at 12.10. We are still in The Castle at 11.30 I’m sure. If we miss the last train, there is now no nightbus to Sidcup. We have to get one to New Cross (not the best place to hang out in the early hours of the morning) and then another from there and will still have a way to walk home. But then Joe comes back on stage and starts playing Poortoun and we no longer care.

I suggest my sister ask for Endgame (quoted at the beginning of an earlier blog), a song she's always loved (me too) and a Joe Shaw composition, but he claims not to remember it. How can you forget such a beautiful song? Next time, I hope.

encore

Poortoun; Call Mother (both great choices for an encore and rapturously received)

(Jackie famously thought encores were a pointless affectation. Why walk off and wait to be called back on? He would simply play until the place closed which meant we were even less likely to make the last train.)

But there was no time for Gypsy Blood, Teenage Lightning, Natural or Figure It Out. Or Universal Blue, Marble City Bar, Single Father and The Garden. Jackie was so unbelievably prolific:

One of the many superb Leven albums

Some years ago I noticed that I was writing a lot more songs than I was ever going to record and get released, especially in these times where you can only release one studio album every eighteen months. As I am a writer of genius, this began to worry me more and more. So I went to see my Cooking Vinyl boss, Martin Goldschmidt, to ask him if I could make more records. He said no. I said to him 'Look, The Beatles once released four albums in one year, and nobody said to them, hey that's too many records in one year'. Martin said 'Jackie, this is not 1967 and you are not The Beatles'. We talked some more and we agreed that I could make records under a different name - that name is Sir Vincent Lone.

So this night was about the music but of course Jackie was a raconteur extraordinaire as well so here are some Leven tales I found on YouTube.

The benefit raised £950 and was a fitting tribute and memorial to a much-missed musical genius. We remembered; we celebrated; we danced. What more could we ask?

Just listening to Jackie on YouTube in another of his incarnations, John St. Field, a song called Soft Lowland Tongue and am surprised to see that it’s had over 3,000 views. He really does have a soft lowland tongue on this, so young and gentle.

if you could look inside my heart (Exit Wound)

... you would still see Jackie.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

(The Lake Isle of Innisfree/William Butler Yeats, 1892)

Other Leven blogs can be found at The King of Love Has Died,  Exit Wound,  I Never Saw the Movie and Adventures in Levenland.

‘The King of Love has died’ … Jackie Leven, Rest in Peace

Quote in title taken (and slightly altered) from Jackie's song, 'Some Ancient Misty Morning')

The Mystery of Love Is Greater Than the Mystery of Death

Larger than life in every way, especially in terms of his immeasurable talent, and a complete one-off, it’s hard to believe that someone who seemed more alive than most of us, and to me indestructible, is dead, this brave, lovely, completely genuine and incredibly gifted man. I felt better about the world just knowing he was in it so this is hard.

Since I found out Jackie was seriously ill, I’ve been unable to listen to more than a line from ‘Universal Blue’ without bursting into tears. I have the live version on the Deep in the Heart of Nowhere CD (quite different from the more uptempo and strangely cheerful studio one, actually a live version has just been added to YouTube) and his voice, so plaintive, goes straight to my heart. Somehow especially poignant and heart-rending in contrast to the light-hearted story that precedes it. Exquisitely melancholic. Now it’s very hard for me to hear his voice, which always had the ability to move me anyway, without sobbing. And who else is going to title a song ‘Young Male Suicide Blessed by Invisible Woman’?

I was introduced to Jackie’s music by a university friend who had all the Doll by Doll albums. Soon, I had them too but the band had already broken up without any success – their idiosyncratic talent out of step with the times as ever, too musically and lyrically accomplished for punk or New Wave and too rough-looking (they looked like a bunch of bruisers spoiling for a fight – you certainly wouldn’t want to mess with them) for an era of pastel suits, frilly shirts and floppy hair, neither a feel-good band in the 80s mould nor a pointlessly rebellious ‘what have you got?’ punk outfit. Way too real for people who wanted to escape, they pondered deeper questions with wit, eloquence and intelligence. From the anthemic ‘Main Travelled Roads' to the wild and thrilling ‘Gypsy Blood’, Jackie had this unerring ability to discern beauty in desolation and desolation in beauty, not to mention the elegiac in the everyday and the mythic in the moment (‘Some Ancient Misty Morning’), and express this in song while remaining something of an incurable romantic – ‘I do believe that lovers on the harbour wall were meant to be’ (‘Cool Skies’), I always imagined to refer to graffitied names on the wall but maybe there were real lovers, and ‘While the neon universe was winking to an end, And taxi drivers yawned from Earl’s Court to the Strand’, told me of a London I had yet to visit. Doll by Doll sounded as dangerous as they looked: ‘The Human Face’ – ‘A watched clock never moves, they said, so he never watched the clock. The only time he saw the hands, they were rushing like a torrent round a rock’ describes the song’s own trajectory, one minute soft, slow, tender, the next out of control, gathering momentum, an essay in intensity. It fit with my college life, ‘Angst, angst and more angst’ as a friend put it at the time. We were all so post-Joy Division (in fact, let's face it, post-'Blue Monday') although yet to experience any actual pain or sorrow. At the time, I wrote a poem that included the line ‘I'm in love with Jackie Leven’s voice’. I still am.

Then, when I was working in London, just as Jackie resurfaced, I had the privilege of seeing the phenomenon that was Leven live (almost invariably in shorts, him not me), many times, dragging friends and colleagues with me, to the Borderline, to the 12 Bar. All were impressed. I didn’t know at the time that some of the songs that I requested from Doll by Doll days, were, since the mugging, out of his new vocal range, ‘Main Travelled Roads’, ‘The Fountain Is Red’, etc. The studio albums are amazing but I will always treasure my memories of the gigs, which are where Jackie really shone – his magnificent, awe-inspiring voice, every emotion amplified, invested with an unbelievable vehemence, his skill as a raconteur and those incredibly funny stories. Though solo, you always felt that there was more than one person on stage, given Jackie’s skill on the guitar, – why just use the strings when you have a whole guitar? He was invariably entertaining, enthralling, entrancing. In a way, he was suited to these venues, because a Jackie gig was always a special and an intimate experience, where he would converse and interact with the crowd.

I hate to talk of Jackie in the past tense. He meant a lot to me. I did a fair amount of evangelising on behalf of him and his music. Part of me did relish the fact that he was little known but a bigger part wanted to share him with everyone.

I had some contact with him, mainly by fax (I was at work and too in awe to ring him up), persuading him to let Grant Hart play the CORE benefit show, then persuading Grant Hart to play the benefit (he was on a budget and was only paid £25 for expenses, while remarking to me that in 1987 he was paid $25,000 for one show although it was to be divided with the other members of Husker Du). Also convinced Jackie to play a gig for Bromley Acoustic Music Club, of which I wasn’t even a member, but it meant I got to see another Jackie gig. And so, my brief but exciting career as a music promoter, ended. I had a real job but this was so much more fun. I still dabble occasionally although some might call it interfering.

Although it’s lovely to read so many glowing tributes in the papers, it’s a shame they never devoted this many column inches to him while he was hale and hearty and at the height of his powers.

So, we’ve got the music and we’ve got the memories. And both are glorious. At the moment, of course, the sadness is overwhelming. Much has been written about the fact that Jackie never received the acclaim he deserved. It seemed that he would ever be on the cusp of making it but be destined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, talked up one minute and forgotten the next but I think we should all concentrate on the dedication and loyalty of the fans that he has got, evident in the posts on Yahoo and Facebook. Maybe he was just too great to be appreciated by the hordes. There are a lot of undiscerning people out there. With Jackie, you either get it or you don’t and once you do, you’re hooked. He reels you in with those haunting melodies, the poetry of his lyrics and the breadth of their reach, his heart and soul, the power and the majesty of his voice and his extraordinary gift for telling stories, either spoken or sung. He was never less than captivating.

That voice – instantly recognisable, unique – I would know it anywhere. Unparalleled. Flawless. There are no words to describe it so I’ll give up right now. It will echo forever in our minds and hearts.

We did love you, Jackie and we always will. As Jackie says at the end of this live version of ‘Exit Wound’– God bless us all. We’ll see you somewhere else.

[I’m sure Jackie would have been amused by the obituary that eulogises Doll by Doll’s Gypsy Heart. Mmm. Like that famous Bruce Springsteen album, The Stream. How can you ever have listened to the track and not know it’s Gypsy Blood, especially as in inimitable Jackie fashion, the word ‘blood’ is extended to seventeen syllables in each chorus? As I wrote in my comment: 'Shades of Marge, the New York plugger, anyone?']

Here’s a review I wrote in 1994

Jackie Leven / The Borderline 29 July 1994
Jackie still has a voice that quietens crowds in seconds – massive, majestic, effortlessly soaring – he's a one-man choir, whether playing to a packed house at the Borderline where tonight we could sample his own whisky, Leven's Lament (bemused businessmen from the restaurant above are totally won over, by Jackie, not the whisky) or, barefoot and relaxed, to a few people sitting politely at tables in a church crypt in Clerkenwell where alcohol and cigarettes are prohibited.

The songs range from hard, rocky numbers like ‘Cabin Fever’* and a frenetic version of ‘Sacred Bond’ to the melancholy triumph of ‘Snow in Central Park’ and my particular favourite, ‘Call Mother’. "Call mother a lonely field." What does it mean? Somehow when he sings, it all makes sense. I hope you’re right, Jackie.**

Call it what you will - Celtic rock, folk, whatever, Jackie and the band give it their all. Tone, thanks for telling me about Doll by Doll all those years ago.

* Can't find this song anywhere. Have I got the title wrong?

** ‘Everybody gets the chance to fall in love again’ (‘Natural’)


Other Leven blogs can be found at The King of Love Has Died,  Exit Wound and I Never Saw the Movie and Jackie Leven and Adventures in Levenland.

I mention Jackie in my first blog about modern music. Also see bashful's blog.