THE DEEP POOL - MARCH 2006

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Deep Pool alert - ATTENTION! - A person who saw me in Leeds last month is awaiting a record from me - i can't read your name or address - here's hoping you read the Pool and get in touch with Paul at the website on infoATjackieleven.com.

THIS PERSON: seems to live at 21 Roundwood ave or drive or road, West Yorks - last bit of your postal code seems to be D17 7LB- first letter missing - i can't even read your name!! - although it seems to begin with N then D for surname.
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A beautiful Sunday train journey to the city of Bath was spoiled by aggressive football supporters going the League Cup Final in Cardiff. All i wanted was to watch the mystical smooth chalk hills roll by in lemon-grey morning light - the passage between Salisbury and Warminster is particularly heartstopping - at one point the train goes right past Madonna's house and on this occasion i saw her, sitting on the bonnet of an Aston Martin in green underwear, absentmindedly picking her nose and eating it whilst Vinnie Jones scratched his ear with a toy shotgun in the doorway of her (surprisingly modest) mansion. (* see footnote)

But, as i say, there was no enjoyment to be had because nearly all the way from Southampton to Bath, arseholes in Manchester United shirts were saying 'Cmon mate, play us a song, c'mon man, fuckin hell, just get yer guitar out and give us a tune'. I shook my head over and over - 'it's not my guitar - i'm just delivering it to someone'.

'Well give it to me and I'LL play a fuckin song'.

'Sorry, i can't do that - it's not my property'.

'Just hand it over pal - you don't want to mess with us y'know - just give us the fuckin guitar'.

On and on and on...i was on my way to Bath to record for one day with a phenomenal banjo player called Leon Hunt and my old pal Michael Cosgrave. A bad thought crossed my mind: these fucking bastard 'supporters' would all be on the train back to Southampton that night, plus lots more of them, all shitfaced from a day's boozing, win or lose, saying 'HEY! - it's the bastard wi' the guitar again - 'oi, you'...etc.

Later that night i went back to the train station and got to the platform where a bunch of 'we're not kidding' coppers were pacing around, waiting for the football train. One of them looked at me and the guitar - 'Where are you travelling to sir?'

'Southampton' - a pained exchange of looks among the policeman - 'If you can manage not to travel tonight, it would be in your best interests - we're expecting' - 'Yes i know', i interjected, 'i came up on the train with them this morning'.

'Well, say no more - they've been well out of order since they got on the train in Cardiff, and that was over an hour ago'...

I nodded - 'yeah, i was thinking about this earlier - i think i'm going to book into a hotel and travel tomorrow - thanks for your concern'.

'Aw shit - here they come now' - all police eyes turned to the little Wessex Train creeping along the platform in the dark.

I looked back as i went down the platform stairs to the honey-stone city below - the train doors had opened and you could hear a YUUUUURL of voices and clinking bottles. A posse of police dogs and their handlers were standing by at every train doorway - i knew what was about to happen - the coppers were going to confiscate all the booze on the train before it resumed its journey - the 'supporters' would be absolutely furious -thank god the Guitar Man would not be in their midst.

So i booked into the Royal Hotel opposite the station and went for a mid evening walk in one of the world's loveliest cities - at least i could see how some of the bars were doing - Leon had already shocked me by saying the world famous Hat And Feather had closed and turned into something called Hudson Bar and Grill. A fucking tragedy - many were the happy weekends i spent in this greatest of all bars, drinking farmhouse cider on my own, not really speaking to anyone, just watching the sparkling young raggedy clientele carousing, laughing, listening to excellent loud music, all with a sense of true timeless abandon which was wonderful to watch and be part of, even, perhaps especially, from the outside. On Sunday mornings there was usually a first class scratch band led by a singer called Johnny G who ended their long bravura session by singing 'Free Africaaaaa...' - then i'd have to stagger down to the station and get a train back to the grey old nowhere London that was my personal lot in those faraway days of lostness.

Apparently, according to Leon, the regulars had moved to the Bell, a more sedate but still lively jazz pub just down the road. I decided to go there and see what was happenin' man. The Bell was quite quiet on a very cold frosty Sunday night - some studenty kids were playing chess by the fire, and at the bar, a group of older men and women who looked as if they'd escaped from a horrible Francis Bacon painting were constantly wheeling about in a tight circle of activity, all talking at once: one woman in particular who had a terrifyingly mobile face, like a wank fantasy Picasso might have, kept looking at me to see if i'd fallen madly in love with her yet, as presumably all men and any man would do before too long. A serene young girl with jet black hair came downstairs behind the bar and offered the barman, a lovely tall kid with mad red hair, a bowl of decent looking thai rice and vegetables. He thanked her for it, but didn't want it, so he asked the chess playing lads if they were hungry. They took a break from what seemed to be an intense game and shared the bowl of food. All this was happening with the correct Hat and Feather kind of caring 'anything goes but don't go too far' ethos, and i left after a while, reassured that something shining and good was still in the world.

I had been looking forward to recording with Leon Hunt who is in a band with Michael Cosgrave called Daily Planet. Leon turned out to be a peaceable, noble kind of geezer who looked very much like a lost native American Indian - 'I just stepped out of the teepee for a piss, had a dizzy spell - next thing i come round and i'm about to play banjo on a song about Kevin Coyne written by Jackie Leven - they're European musicians by the way'. The track - 'Here come The Urban Ravens' (as discussed last month) turned out great, and i'll let you know when it's due to appear on the Mad Pride album of Kevin Coyne songs....

In front me as i write are a handful of reviews of an autobiography by fellow Fifer, the poet John Burnside, called 'A Lie About My Father'. If the book is as distressing as the (good) reviews, i'm going to take a deep deep breath before i start it, but start it i will. It's the story of John's insanely fantasising drunken violent father, and the journey John had to make to escape his psychic tentacles. Years later John discovered that his father had been a foundling - a baby left on a doorstep to be discovered and cared for by others, and a significant part of the book is John working out how this traumatic beginning carved out the man his father was to become.

Looking at photos of John in the paper, i remembered how i had, at the very last moment, put a line from one of his poems in the liner notes of my album Defending Ancient Springs. Also i kept thinking that John looked like someone i knew, then with a judder i realised that that person was me.

It got me thinking back to my own childhood in Fife - in the days before anybody had a television. Somehow we knew they existed, but nobody had ever actually seen one, except on television. I remembered how all the families in our street had their own piece of wood which was the size and shape of a television screen, and how jealous we would be if one of the families aquired a bigger wooden screen...

We'd all sit together as a family looking at the piece of wood, and the kids would take it in turn to 'turn it on'. After a while, someone would say 'This is shite -can we see what's on the other side?' If this was duly agreed, we'd turn the piece of wood over and sit watching that. Eventually someone might say - 'This is just as fuckin bad, plus it's covered in slaters'. (Wood lice). Well, at least we were making our own entertainment...

Not much dog news to report this month, but on tour in February in the UK i was surprised by how many folk i encountered who now consider my dogs Basil and Harry to be their 'virtual' dogs, so i do try to have some kind of bulletin. When i was up at the gypsy field the other day, Basil (very small Jack Russell type of dog - a gorgeous charming nutter, really not much more than a massive jaw on legs) ran over to his favourite immense puddle (almost a wee pond). He loves to dive into this - sadly for Basil, it was frozen over, which he failed to notice, so he went sliding across the ice to the middle where it wasn't frozen and duly disappeared. A superb Disney moment - when he surfaced, looking astonished, he tried to get a pawhold on the ice which kept breaking in front of him. This caused bellows of laughter from the old lads in their allotments behind the fire station, and Basil was eventually pleased to be the centre of such rattling warm attention.

I'm looking through my diary at the year ahead - i'm scared already. I'm back in Germany, Austria and Switzerland at the start of April, and back at the Bein Inn at Glen Farg, Scotland on the 5/6 May - i'll go to the Robinson Crusoe Hotel and drink lager...then back to Germany in June, festivals in Summer of course, and an album to make in Summer - USA, Canada and China in Autumn, more UK dates - the list goes on...

Later this month i'm going back to Townhouse Studios in London, to oversee the re-mastering of all the old Doll By Doll albums. I started this process a couple of weeks ago, but me and Giovanni the engineer noticed that some of the tape masters were missing, so we decided to stop until such time as we could do it as one job. Handling the old analogue tape master boxes once again after all these years, i was surprised to feel how familar they all were - it was as if i had last seen them just yesterday. The few pieces of music we did listen to the other day - an out-take called Body Shy for instance, sounded beautifully fresh. You hear so much bullshit about the superiority of digital sound that i'd allowed myself to think that these old analogue recordings would sound limited and muffled by comparison - on the contrary, they had a warmth and clarity which was deeply appealing.

The studio names on the boxes - Utopia, Sarm, Sound Box, Wessex, reminded me of all the cold-weather recording that i've done in my life - walking across Primrose Hill in the snow at night from Utopia, the driving freezing rain every day at Wessex, sitting in a frosted concrete pipe in a children's playground near Brick Lane to escape the pressure of recording at Sarm.

March is my favourite month for some reason, and suddenly all those thousands and thousands of little black musical notes of recorded and live music that have surrounded me through the years seemed to spin away into the sleeting sky, back through time itself to join the crows which were forever blackly mobbing in the winter trees outside my childhood home in Fife, where my mother sat in the gathering afternoon dusk, listening to horse-racing on the radio, waiting for me to come home from school.

jl

* A number of readers have expressed doubts about the passage in the latest Deep Pool in which i describe Madonna at her mansion in the South of England, particularly wondering that she would ever wear 'green underwear'. I can assure all my readers that the lady in question WAS wearing green underwear, and, having thought a little more about this, i think i know why...

Madonna, as a fan of all things British, would be aware that the Aston Martin marque has, classically through the decades, been associated with the colour British Racing Green, and i would contend that, when she knew she was going to pose in her underwear on an Aston Martin, she, as a show business person with an eye for the appropriate colours on stage, instinctively pulled out green underwear from her ample drawers of such articles, so as to 'blend in'' with the car as prop.

As it happens, the Aston Martin in question, being a brand new model, either the Varnish or the Vamoose, hard to tell from distance to the untrained eye of a non-driver, was in fact silver-grey as is the modern way, and thus Madonna, in a strikingly different hue, was easy to discern in all her glorious undress.

A further footnote to this: Madonna was in fact wearing a 'peek-a-boo' brassiere in which her nipples were clearly visible. (I had not wanted to mention this detail in the first instance, lest i be thought to be trying to titillate the readership). Further, her nipples had been painted a (nearly) matching green to her scanties.

I called an old friend of mine, Cindy Cyborg from 'The Nipple Shack' in Blandford Forum, who, after some initial reluctance, was able to confirm that the paint job was carried out in situ by her good self, and that the green nipple hue was as close to British Racing Green as they were able to get (Spewy Morning is the actual name of the tone for Madonna anoraks who need to know these things).