Album: Jackie Leven <!-- none onestar twostar fourstar fivestar -->

Elegy for Johnny Cash, COOKING VINYL

Arriving only five months after the Jackie Leven Said collaboration with Ian Rankin, Elegy for Johnny Cash was recorded late last year in Beirut, where Leven, a Romany himself, had been invited to appear at an gathering of Romany singers. Its style, however, is barely altered from Leven's customary soulful Caledonian folk-rock, other than the occasional flurry of Arabic percussion or Greek rembetika viola. His lyrical concerns are likewise unchanged, focusing on the iron in the souls of hard men struggling to retain their dignity in an age that has no use for them: the "broken men of the Mersey and the Tyne" stricken with industrial injuries in "Vibration White Finger"; the bitter, hard-drinking misanthrope in "King of the Barley"; the husband kicked out by his wife in "Blue Soul, Dark Road". The calloused nobility apotheosised by Leven is iconically represented by a few specific figures, notably the boxer Roberto Duran, turning his back mid-fight on Sugar Ray Leonard in "Museum of Childhood", and Johnny Cash, a gnarled monument of pained solitude borne with stoic grace, whom Leven imagines singing the title-track. The love songs are rather less effective (and the romances always doomed), but then women per se play pretty much the same kind of support roles in Leven's work as they do in Scorsese's films.