NEW JACKIE RELEASE AVAILABE NOW FROM COOKING VINYL
This year is The Haunted Year, in which, each season they will be releasing two Haunted Valley titles as a ‘doubleheader’ – two albums for the price of one, with a Jackie DEEP POOL in the middle.
WINTER – is MEN IN PRISON and MUNICH BLUES – Spring, if I remember correctly (sad, isn’t it?) will be MAN BLEEDS IN GLASGOW and GREETINGS FROM MILFORD. This last is mainly an album of Jackie covers with a band called THE STORNOWAY GIRLS and features wrenching renditions of songs like I’M WAITING FOR THE MAN and WHO IS HE AND WHAT IS HE TO YOU?.
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JOHN MARTYN – ‘I cannot believe in a creator. The birds are too beautiful and the trout are too speckled.’
DAVY GRAHAM – ‘I’m on that king’s highway, and I’m travelling night and day – and I cannot keep from crying sometimes.’
JACKIE LEVEN – ‘Like an echo in the deep, I hear the hammer blow of your heart in sleep.’
AMY WINEHOUSE – ‘I thought of you when I came.’
JIM WHITE – ‘It used to be when I was young, I was so hungry for oblivion. My thoughts would linger like fingers in the deadly web.’
SIMPLE MINDS – ‘Wo wo wo wo wo wo wo wo .’
The long hushed secret time of Winter is over, even though the thrall of the cold remains. Certain things must be put aside, so that little singers may rejoin the world and its wet highways and byways. Things like watching the terriers racing like speedway riders through the snow on the quay down by the creek, whilst in the background kingfishers dart from bough to snow-decked bough. Things like carousing in the Dolphin public house in Wallingford, a lovely small town on the banks of the River Thames in south Oxfordshire – this is a great bar at all times – wonderful to sit in with a newspaper, looking up from time to time, the better to take in a subtly mad turn of conversation amongst the habitués of the bar area.
However, I’m not going to look back here – there’s some looking back in the new Deep Pool – that’s probably enough.
This year seems to be full of festivals confirmed or to be confirmed, and I see that I’m going to Canada twice – it has been said that Canadians are decaffeinated Americans – sounds good to me! How I long to return to some places, and I see that all of them are coming into the Book Of Roads – it gives you fear, or at least an overpowering rush of adrenalin as you contemplate certain drives, flight, and encounters. In the early part of my life, my father was a travelling salesman, and I grew up determined never to do that kind of work: now I notice that it’s all I’ve done all of my life. Apart from building site work, factory work, a bit of journalism when very young, courier work, oh, and a bit of recovering from misjudged LSD episodes (those months alone in the abandoned lighthouse with only dog biscuits to eat – those were the days – now I can’t even look at a Bonio – do they even make them anymore? – I used to feel sad for the last lighthouse keeper’s dog, assuming that the biscuits were left by him when he moved on with his mutt, but one day some very dodgy geezers turned up, totally pissed off that I’d made such inroads into their stolen swag of dog food – ‘you ATE them? Fuckin hell, you wanna sort yourself out mate!’).
I’m currently thinking hard about my next studio album: although it won’t be released until January 2010, realistically you have to decide about now what the fundamental shape of the thing will be. That of course changes with time and events dear boy, events, but you got to believe that the shape you initially select has a truth to it, otherwise the centre cannot hold.
Lastly, I’m surrounded by pieces of paper upon which I’ve written stuff at night – I have a wee book by my bed for such events, but for some reason, when half asleep, I never use it, flailing around instead for a bit of space in the margin of a newspaper. Here’s an example from a future song which I notice I’ve called (at 3 a.m.) ‘AWAY FROM IT ALL WITH JACKIE LEVEN’
‘mother and father of everyone
please forgive your little son
walking alone down a railway line
where the lonesome engine drivers pine
a toy angel and a sugar cube
polished tables and broken ribs
a jar of honey from a kind old man
teenagers lost in the summer land
‘this guy’s in love with you’
an irish woman with tears on hands
as she remembers the ship who sang’.
NOTE: ‘ship who sang’ – from a beautiful film of Anne McCaffrey reading from her book ‘The Ship Who Sang’ and trying not to break into tears as she reaches the bit where the ship leaves earth, free at last. For her the ship was her father and the singing and the voyage was his liberation after death.
‘Lonesome engine drivers pine’ – direct quote from one of Van Morrison’s best songs – which one?
‘Railway lines and honey’ – a principle which I have absorbed from the great Polish/Russian poet Osip Mandelstam is one of deliberately bringing certain images back into play so that a rhythm both backwards and forwards is established.
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p.s. – My taxi to take me to the airport to fly to Stuttgart has arrived – I’ll refresh the other columns upon my return, and also answer any outstanding letters, album requests, complaints and suggestions – don’t worry – you’re not forgotten....
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