from his website http://www.jackieleven.co.uk/:
Please excuse this rather impersonal note. Sometimes, you have to tell people about the Bad, as well as the Good. It is with a heavy heart, therefore, that I have to relate the sad news that the great Scottish singer-songwriter JACKIE LEVEN is gravely ill, suffering from cancer, and, in all candour, has only a few days to live.
In a career stretching over forty years, Jackie Leven has carved an impressive reputation as a uniquely gifted singer-songwriter. From his emergence as leader of the underrated DOLL BY DOLL in the seventies, through well documented addiction problems which Leven overcame with remarkable strength of will, culminating in a solo resurgence through the 1980s to the here and now, Jackie has amassed an amazing body of work – the composer of over four hundred songs, including arguably his greatest song – ‘Call Mother’, from the album ‘Mystery of Love’ (ranked by Q magazine as one of ‘100 Best Albums of All Time’.
If sales didn’t always reflect the overwhelmingly positive critical reception his albums received, he nonetheless remained a perceptive writer and performer. Jackie was imbued with a restless creativity, and always searching for new settings for his ruminative lyrical forays, laced with humour and melodic grace. As a performer, Jackie could enthral and entrance the audience with picaresque tales taken from first-hand experience. Those that have worked with Jackie will know of his mordant wit and very idiosyncratic world view. His latest release, Wayside Shrines and The Code of the Travelling Man, recorded with multi-instrumentalist Michael Cosgrave was yet more proof of Leven’s enduring talent and inexhaustible creative energies.
Live, Ancient Misty Morning and Working Alone:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLkJ-8BuKdQ
The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuMcwfZjQGY
Call Mother a Lonely Field:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhI1uXNFfCc
Like young Irishmen in English bars
the song of home betrays us
Call Mother a Lonely Field
Call Mother a Lonely Field
Like truthful glances we exchange
the song of home betrays us
Like letters written in despair
never to be opened
Call Mother a Lonely Field
Call Mother a Lonely Field
I took her picture from the wall
I poured her scent away
Call Mother a Lonely Field
Call Mother a Lonely Field
I wished her well among the stars
I sheltered from the day
And now the places that I love
Allow me no returning
The shining dreams of winter skies
the sadness and the burning
Call Mother a Lonely Field
Call Mother a Lonely Field
the ferries vanish in the snow
we telephone our children
I'll never love like this again
I couldn't lift the burden
Call Mother a Lonely Field
Call Mother a Lonely Field
and like young Irishmen in English bars
the song of home betrays us
what does that mean?
what does that mean?
It means a fallow field in winter
When frost is on the land
when the fox is on the run
down by the riverside
where the furrow meets the sun
where the furrow hugs the riverbank
and nothing can be done