Jackie's Coming Around : A tribute to the late Jackie Leven

My new single Jackie's Coming Around is a tribute to the late singer-songwriter Jackie Leven. Today ( June 18th ) is the date that would have would have been Jackie’s 70^th birthday. 

Jackie Leven was a Fife born singer-songwriter, who started out in rock outfit, Doll by Doll in the 70’s after having to flee his hometown because of local gang violence. After a tumultuous time, with the band imploding and a serious mugging that damaged his larynx and nearly cost him his voice, Jackie became addicted to heroin. Eventually, Jackie managed to get himself clean and headed back onto the road as a solo artist.

Here is the dip pen ink portrait that Bill drew of Jackie Leven, featured in the video below.

Bill says  “As a portrait artist I use different media and felt that for Jackie I would use old style dip ink pen. With this technique you literally scratch the lines onto the canvas – this really helped to add the intensity I wanted to draw out for the portrait.”

About The Song

'Jackie's Coming Around' merges elements of my own songwriting journey alongside a brief musical biography of Jackie Leven’s life and weaves multiple references to tracks from Leven’s 2007 Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me album throughout. 

We've recorded and produced the song at our Hushland Studio and aside from the singing, I've added acoustic guitar, banjo, harmonica, keys and soprano sax, while Bill T-B has added slide and electric guitar, bass and percussion to the mix.

RachelTaylor-Beales · Jackie's Coming Around

The Story Behind The Track 

I first met Jackie when I opened for him in Cardiff Barfly, back in 2008. Travelling the UK with my own music, I’d often heard stories about Jackie from other artists and fans, so I was curious to finally have an opportunity meet and hear the man in person. That night I was completely blown away by his songs and story telling. The dry humour and characters that Jackie evoked were wrapped up in his voice that could soar ethereally one moment and then punch you in the guts with gravitas the next. 

After the gig we chatted about Kevin Coyne, one of my long time musical heroes and the highs and lows of life on the road. Jackie offered some generous comments about my own songwriting and pointed me in the direction of Karen Dalton and Judee Sill as artists he thought I would resonate with— and he was right. I walked away from that gig commenting that it was a crime that Jackie wasn’t more well known, it certainly wasn’t for lack of showmanship, musicality or ability.

On November 14^th 2011, I was working on a collaborative project with composer Gill Stevens. Gill and I were just breaking for lunch when an enormous bang, made us both jump. A blackbird had crashed into her glass conservatory roof and died. At that same moment I had looked down at my social media and read the words that Jackie Leven was gone.

In these difficult and uncertain times, when so many of us are battling with the loss in different ways, I’m reminded of the way that Jackie Leven seemed to revel in defiance— against all the odds, he rebuilt his life and kept on following the muse and making music. Having had to personally rebuild myself after a serious accident in 2012, that left me unable to perform for a season, I’ve found myself drawn to the stories of those who have found a grace within, to begin again. I wrote this song on a day when future plans had fallen through, but hearing Jackie’s songs coming around on my playlist was a lifeline. Like so many artists right now in this age of necessary social distancing, I don’t know yet when I’ll next be back on the road and able to tour, but in the meantime as we work behind the scenes to figure our game plans, I’m grateful for the all gifts and encounters with so many inspiring people, that a life working in music has brought me. I’m buoyed by the stories of folks who have faced difficulties and yet found the courage to ‘keep on keeping on’— and today, on what would have been his 70^th birthday, I’m celebrating the music of Jackie Leven.

Watch the Jackie's Coming Around Video here 

June 18th 7.30pm  (GMT) I've been invited to contribute a live version of the Jackie's Coming Around song - to the celebration of Jackie Leven at 70 event on Facebook hosted by Jinder- alongside 

Ian Rankin

Deborah Greenwood

Henry Priestman

Michael Weston King

Jinder

Tom Burgess

Nick Hall

Phil Burdett

Joe Shaw and Kevin Foster

Doghouse Roses

Michael Cosgrove

Lance Riley 

and more...

See the link here for more info Celebration of Jackie Leven At 70 

And finally a lovely write up from Mike Davies on the singles bar- round up of singles and eps on Folking.com https://folking.com/singles-bar-53-a-round-up-of-recent-ep…/

This is what Mike writes here: 
'June 18 would have been Jackie Leven’s 70th birthday, and to honour his memory RACHEL TAYLOR-BEALES has recorded ‘Jackie’s Coming Around’ (Hushland), a Bandcamp download single that interlaces elements of her own journey as a songwriter with a musical biography that includes references to tracks from Leven’s 2007 album Oh What A Blow That Phantom Dealt Me. With Rachel on guitar, banjo, harmonica, soprano saxophone and keyboard and husband Bill playing slide, electric, bass and percussion, opening with a memory of how a blackbird crashed into their conservatory and died at the same moment she read about Leven’s passing, it’s a suitably atmospheric but musically vibrant number, delivered in her hushed, understated voice as she recalls his advice to "keep following that muse"and reminds that while he’s gone, his music lives and on 'Jackie’s coming round to play".'

The General Relativity Of Success And Failure

I was very sad yesterday. One of the projects that I was hoping to be working on next year with poet Susan Richardson, didn't get its funding. We'd been shortlisted after the 1st round of applications and had, had some very positive encouragement from the funders, but this round was unfortunately unsuccessful. I know so many folks who know all about the highs and lows of the funding game- but as I've been posting a fair bit about successes lately I thought I'd keep it real and post about the disappointment also.

Most of the time it’s a gamble being creative. You do it, but you have no idea how things are going to be received. You hope that what you’re making will fly, knowing full well that the opposite is always possible and that your creations might fail, flop, crash and burn. Sometimes they do fail. Sometimes things go quite well, but not as well as you’d hoped. Sometimes they’re incredibly well received, but that doesn’t translate into anything substantial beyond the moment of critical acclaim, and occasionally everything seems to come together at the right time, in the right way and all is hunky dory… till the next time you create…. And then it’s back to square one all over again… 

I am still waiting on the results of another funding application for my big Stone's Throw, Lament of the Selkie project next year. It's hard to hold it all lightly, knowing that all the planning and dreaming may not work out in the way that I want it to, or maybe even in the way it deserves to. I was aware that last time I was successful with R&D funding, that for all my joy and excitement there were many worthy and exciting ideas that didn’t get to be made. How sad this business is that we’re all scrabbling round and forced to compete to be able to realize the creative visions we have.

On the up side of things Susan and I following this funding rejection are still going to find a way to make some new work together and will be plotting the next strategy for this soon.

Anyway, yesterday I needed a bit of space to lick my wounds. I walked away from what I had planned to be working on as I found I couldn’t focus very well and instead I ended up writing a new song about Jackie Leven. And now today I find myself asking if I would I have written this same song, without the disappointment of failure? Did something new get born from the frustration of yesterday’s crushed hope? Could this have existed without it?   

Jackie (for folks who don’t know about him) was a Fife born singer-songwriter, who started out in rock outfit Doll by Doll (after having to leave his hometown because of local gang violence). After a tumultuous time, with the band imploding and a serious mugging that damaged his larynx and nearly cost him his voice, Jackie became addicted to heroin… Eventually Jackie managed to get himself clean, created The Clore Trust charity to help addicts and headed out onto the road as as a blues- tinged, balladeer in the tradition of artists like Kevin Coyne.

Jackie, like Kevin Coyne, observed the lows, the grime, the seedy, the pain, the mundane and the obscene. Always a storyteller and often hilarious, Jackie wove a tapestry of complex broken characters within his songs, but in doing so he gave them dignity and a spark of beauty.  

I met Jackie when I opened for him back in 2007 at the Barfly in Cardiff. I’d heard many stories of both praise and disdain about him from other artists, but on the night I met him, he was a lovely person and an extraordinary performer. Bill and I walked away from that gig commenting that it was a crime that Jackie wasn’t more well known, it certainly wasn’t for lack of showmanship, musicality or ability. Riding the rollercoaster of success and failure Jackie, sometimes spoke of his own disappointments that his work hadn't had the recognition over the years that others had achieved. He also spoke of the ongoing need for rejection of comparison. He followed the muse and made the work and that in itself was success... the comparison game is a battle every artist faces, no matter how successful...It takes a lot of conscious effort not to be continually dragged into and down by it. 

The day I found out that Jackie died, I was working on my Selkie project in its original form, a collaboration with composer Gill Stevens who had introduced me to the folklore tales. Gill and I stopped for lunch and suddenly we heard an enormous bang. A blackbird had crashed into her glass conservatory roof and died. Moments later as Dylan, Gill’s husband carried the dead bird away I saw the news on my social media feed that Jackie had also died.

It is just a week since the 7^th anniversary of Jackie’s death.

My original Selkie project with Gill also didn’t get it’s funding. We then planned instead to create a streamlined version of it that would be performed on my return from touring in Italy. It was to be the last project before the birth of our daughter and it was another outcome that didn’t work out as planned. During that tour in Italy I fell from the stage and injured myself and lost my ability to perform for a season…

Life is funny....The letting go of that incarnation of the project was painful yet it led to a completely different version of a Selkie project, which in turn led to my album, which in turn played a part in my mental recovery, (see the 10 part Turbulence blog series on that) which in turn led to this years arts council funded R&D project, which has led to me putting in the application for the big grant to create the full touring show…Which may or may not happen…

Yesterday’s disappointment brought into sharp focus the reality of the fact that I might not be successful in this next round of funding for the Selkie project…

But I will cross that bridge in a few weeks time- when I come to it.

In the meantime, today has been a day for pragmatism… I’m still sad that specifics of my project with Susan won’t be realised in the way I’d intended them to at this time. It’s hard not to feel deeply frustrated after all the effort and time that goes into applications not amounting to equivalent outcomes, but I can’t stay in that place- I know it too well and I know that it won’t help me to stay there… Today I need to pick myself up, dust myself down and reassert my perspective on the general relativity of success and failure…

So for now I’ll just remember Jackie and focus on the fact that I have written a new song.

(I’ll see about recording a version of it soon)

Here’s a link to Paul Du Noyer’s excellent in depth article on Jackie Leven https://www.pauldunoyer.com/the-jackie-leven-obituary/

Author Ian Rankin on Jackie Leven

Here’s Jackie’s own tribute to Kevin Coyne, anotherr hugely underrated artist... 

Life is Fight : A Tribute To Jackie Leven

The Spiral Earth website invited me to write a tribute to the great singer songwriter Jackie Leven
Jackie was a highly talented and respected singer songwriter, whose commercial success sadly did not reflect his widespread critical acclaim... he will be much missed! Below are the thoughts that I wrote.... www.spiralearth.co.uk

Yesterday (Tuesday 15^th Nov) at 2pm I was sitting by a wood-burning stove in the open plan kitchen of Gill Stevens, a dear friend and current musical collaborator. We’d spent the morning working on pieces for our new project and had just stopped for a well over-due lunch break. I was in the middle of a discussion with Gill’s partner Dylan Fowler about rock n roll and the state of punk music and the parts it did and didn’t play in politics, when out of nowhere there was an almighty crash from outside. We looked out to discover that a pigeon had fatally flown head-on into a window and broken its neck- not a pretty sight. Moments later (after a cowardly ‘bagsy not cleaning it up‘ comment ) I stepped inside to check my phone messages and casually switched to scan the news feed of my face-book pages in typical voyeuristic- social media addicted style.  The words hit me with a force somewhat similar to the crash sound the pigeon had just made seconds before, high impact and head on. Jackie Leven was dead.

I didn’t know Jackie Leven well. This morning as Spiral Earth editor Dave Kushar invited me to write this piece my first instincts were to say ‘but how can I, who am I to comment on the life of this person who my path crossed with so fleetingly?’ But I find myself typing regardless.

I was first introduced to Jackie’s music from the cosy hospitality of Barton and Humber’s MTM music promoters Mark and Jan. Being good friends with Jackie and genuine fans of his work they offered up many entertaining anecdotal stories of their recent encounters with him and urged me to check out his music. I did so and in doing so I was not disappointed. Personally I’ve been a long time fan of the music of Kevin Coyne, and found that Jackie’s songs filled with portraits of struggling, eccentric under-dog type characters resonated with me in a similar way to those of Kevin’s music. It came as no surprise when I finally met Jackie to discover that he was also a Kevin Coyne fan.

When an opportunity arrived of sharing a gig with him on the stale beer scented stage of what was then Barfly in Cardiff a few years back I seized it. Watching Jackie play his barfly set, I remember looking around the room that was two thirds full and thinking it a crime that a performer of his calibre was not filling much larger venues. At the same time however, the grotty, sweaty grime of the venue didn’t detract but served, as a fitting backdrop to the gritty content of his songs and stories.  Engaged from the word go, Jackie and his music took me on a journey and I left a different person to the one I’d arrived as. First things first, the obvious one, Jackie Leven was a big man, filling the stage with his larger than life stories. But it seemed to me that he was also a man engaged with the tiny details. He had the ability of inhabiting a moment completely, reinterpreting a full spectrum of emotion inside a sentence or two. He was authentic. Very much aware of his own failings he didn’t pretend and had no time for anyone who did, taking the what you see is what you get approach.  A skilled guitar player with his own trademark blues style and a wordsmith who knew his craft. An engaging storyteller who could reel you in and hold you captivated with a self-deprecating humour and sharp, sometimes sardonic tongue that could as likely rip you to shreds as build you up. A performer and artist engaged with the ongoing battle of ‘eeking out a living as a musician and keeping on keeping on regardless of the outcome. Stating the obvious again here I know, but I guess it comes down to the power and gift of music and song, the transforming connection that it makes with an individual. Jackie and his music stirred me. Entertained me. Moved me. Amused me. Uplifted me. Challenged me. Stayed with me and travelled beyond the initial first listening and took root (as all good art does,) in some part of me.

After the gig we chatted about our common love of Kevin Coyne, and Jackie recommended that I go check out the music of Judee Sill and Karen Dalton (I’m guessing he may have suggested this to most female singer songwriters he met on the road!) Which I dutifully did and was rewarded by what I discovered in both of them!

I was recently involved in a songwriting project with Roma teenagers.

And one of the phrases that we used was the Romany saying  “Zivot Je Boj” meaning, ‘Life is fight.’  Thinking of Jackie Leven as an artist and a man, I find myself reminded of this phrase (not least of all as Jackie’s own mother was Romany.) And though there are countless stories that I’ve heard about Jackie and his temper and his crazy punk rock ‘n’ ways, I mean this fight in the most positive way it can be interpreted. It seems to me with my very limited knowledge of Jackie as a person, that whatever the circumstances he just kept on fighting. From the outset, having to leave his Glasgow estate for fear of his life due to gang threats. Fighting literally for his own life after being mugged and left for dead in London. Fighting to overcome the heroin addiction that followed. Fighting on behalf of others to setting up the CORE TRUST a holistic treatment centre for alcoholics and drug addicts. Fighting on as a solo performer all these years.

But the impression that is foremost in the front of my mind as I type is that of a person engaged in the struggle, the fight that is this thing called life and for myself as an artist I’m deeply grateful for the impact that both he and his music have made on me.