ATTENTION - UPGRADE OF VENUE NEWS!Jackie’s show at Mr Kyp’s in Poole on 12th October has been moved to the Bournemouth Opera House on October 14th, with the Martin Harley Band also on the bill. See you there!Bournemouth Opera House,Christchurch Road,Bournemouth,UK
Welcome as ever to my website – as I write to you here, my bruiser of a cat, Mr Big is ‘helping’ me with my work. This involves him headbutting me whilst purring very loudly. He also like my hands dancing over the keyboard (shorthand/typing ‘Higher’ from my Scottish education donchaknow) and tries to bite my pinkie as I flurry. Oh, he’s calmed down now, lying on my diary with his tail across November/Norway.
Meanwhile, under the desk, Basil (white terrier) is playing happily with a lime which is in poor condition – I bought it round the corner in the Co-op, only because they had no lemons. His complete ability to amuse and immerse himself in this way is most poignant and reminds me of a Donovan song from A GIFT FROM A FLOWER TO A GARDEN – the song is called ‘Islay’ I believe: ‘How high the gulls fly o’er Islay How sad the farm boy deep in play’.
Tremendous relief round Jackiesville now that my latest studio album LOVERS AT THE GUN CLUB has received universally great reviews, and, whilst out touring the UK, people whose opinion I highly respect say the same thing – that it’s a fantastic rekird. You never really know what’s going to happen with a release: when I made an album called DEFENDING ANCIENT SPRINGS it received excellent reviews and I felt the next one, CREATURES OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS was just as good, but it was as if ‘Jackie fatigue’ had set in, and it fared poorly by comparison in the critical turntable stakes. Life’s too short to dwell on these things, but fear eats the soul. It is said that there is nothing to fear but fear itself – hmmm....(well, there was one poor review, in the communist newspaper the Morning Star, which said the songs were too long, were dour (Scots word: means humourless and boring) and didn’t appear to be about very much. The guy said that he ‘accidentally’ listened to it again at night whilst driving and it sounded a little bit better. I blame that Johnny Dowd – he takes a perfectly good song and flattens it into nothingness...).
I’ve been listening obsessively to my new SIR VINCENT LONE album – TROUBADOUR HEART which will be available from next month only at the TROUBADOUR COFFEE HOUSE in Earl’s Court, London if you turn up in person, or from me on the road. It opens with a scary song called THE POTATO PICKERS. Vince is beginning to trouble me – his albums are selling real well, and the spectre of Jackie getting fired by the record company while Vince goes on to better things is a worrying one. I wake up mortally anxious about this in the middle of the night – Vince is lying there, contentedly snuffling and whuffling, a sickening little secret smile playing round his botoxed lips as the moon falls gently on his proud but twisted nose ( that bloke in the Playhouse in Edinburgh all those years ago – he didn’t miss).
By the time you read this I’ll be on the road in Europe on a tour which goes from Berlin to Vienna to Amsterdam to Kiel and to so many places in between. I mention this because if you’ve sent off a letter to get my wonderful new live album JACKIE LEVEN AND THE SMALL WORLD ORCHESTRA – ‘LIVE FROM A CORNISH PUB IN GERMANY’ and it’s not with you yet, there’s nothing to worry about – I’m a cottage industry and there’s nobody in my cottage at the moment – I’ve sent out loads of ‘Cornish Pub’ but can’t do any more until I get back on 29th September. On that day, I shall enter the house, watch Columbo (the one with Johnny Cash in it), have a talk with my terriers, take them down the tidal creek to swim out after driftwood, then get down to posting your album to you. Sorry it’s not like Amazon! It’s the Slow Movement – takes a while but is beautiful when it arrives: as I say in my song ‘Rove On Wraith Of Raith’ from TROUBADOUR HEART: ‘just when you think this crazy world can get no faster here comes a solo on a Fender Stratocaster the notes are pouring out like teardrops in a fountain they sink into the earth and go back to the mountain’ - It’s the going back to the mountain that takes time, the tears and the guitar notes fighting through the earth to get back to the source: you can’t even see it happening but it is.
Rainer Maria Rilke says that ore, the ore that is the material basis of day to day metals, is homesick and wants to go back to the mountain. This is such a great idea – you spread some butter (or other shit) on a piece of toast and all the time you’re doing this, the knife in your hand is sending the most faint of messages that it would like to stop this activity, and, like metal in the body travelling inexorably to the heart, it continually keens toward its place of extraction. Our orbits move ever outward, round and round, in the shrill faint and distinct hope that we will suddenly bang into some fuckin huge object (‘What was THAT?’) which sends us danging into a whole new, unpredictable trajectory until we SPLAT into warm sand and, dizzy at first, shake our head, prop ourselves up on our elbows and look round, only to find the Queen staring at us curiously from a deck chair, before she says ‘Have you travelled far?’
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