WOMAD

Jackie Leven

From United Kingdom

Jackie Leven, like the whisky he sells, is a distillation of a wild Scottish spirit, matured with age but redolent of the fire within. As frontman of self-destructive post-punk, psycho-rock band, Doll by Doll, he put his resilient body through a chemical assault course, flirting with the demonic handmaidens of youthful demise on a daily basis. It all came to an abrupt stop when, in 1983, he was attacked whilst stumbling home from a whisky-fuelled rehearsal. An unknown assailant squeezed the life out of his throat and he thought he was going to die. He survived, but when he came to, his most precious gift had been shattered. The larynx, which nature had built to sing of the suffering and wonder of mankind, was crushed. The despair of a life without music was too much for him. He embarked on an 18-month affair with heroin, which inevitably ended in total mental collapse.With no other way to go but up, he rebuilt his life and his larynx, kicked the smack and began, with his girlfriend, to help others to do the same. They were good at it, eventually receiving funding to set up the CORE Trust which has been succesfully helping addicts to deal with their enslavement ever since. Mr Leven has become the self of his former shadow. A poet with a wealth of experience of the extremes of life, there is joy, despair and humour welling up with the resonance of his guitar. His album on Cooking Vinyl, 'The Mystery of Love is Greater than the Mystery of Death', is a beautifully produced recording with a unity that belies its eclecticism. Mandolins jig alongside electric guitar, whilst a bouzouki frolics by, and the haunting spectre of a lonely saxophone sings its story. Friends Mike Scott and Robert Bly add their musical and prose poetry to the whole - a whole with an underlying tang of the highlands washing in and out like the cold, grey waters of the Scottish coast. As Salman Rushdie apparently said of his Leven's Lament whisky: "Try it - you'll be sadder but wiser."