Doll by Doll - I Never Saw the Movie More Than Twice

That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

Robert Browning, Home Thoughts, From Abroad

It's Jackie’s birthday and it seems like a good time to post a piece on this great Doll by Doll tune from their second album, Doll by Doll.

You hear a song like this again, or it comes into your head and everything you were when you first heard it comes back to you. Songs have such power to evoke a mood, an era, in this case, youth and possibility. You realise that it’s in you, has infiltrated your blood, your consciousness, has got under your skin, is imbued in your very sinews. You played it so much, taped from someone’s vinyl, loved it so much, that you will never forget it. The song’s soul is part of your soul.

Doll by Doll, more so than Jackie Leven solo, make me want to use words like glory and majesty. They make me go all Biblical. I can only express myself in superlatives, in hyperbole, absolutes because Doll by Doll dealt in nothing else. They did nothing by halves.

There’s a palpable joy when Jackie launches into 'She asked me/Would I like to see her again/Forget that bedroom/I just want to be friends/She once told me something/I was not to repeat/And I know she was right/But I feel like making love tonight', a rush like a jet taking off. It comes crashing along, with so much vitality and hope, like the wave of the century and you’re carried on the momentum to a place where all love is eternal (as if there were any other kind of love with Doll by Doll), swept up in the slipstream. Simply hearing those lines today, sung with Jackie’s inimitable intensity, I feel the same surge of emotion I did then.

Now the almost tangible elation that resounds through that stanza and that I feel when I hear it, is interlaced with sorrow that Jackie is gone and will be forever missed and my life is no longer fresh and new and maybe my dreams never amounted to much but I know that I once rode the crest of the perfect wave with Doll by Doll and  shared it with people I really cared about.

There are many Leven fans who only know Jackie’s solo material. I didn’t know about Doll by Doll until some time in the 80s when they were no longer together but my belated immersion in their sonic grandeur meant that years later, when I saw Jackie’s name in a gig list in 1994, I was there, so excited: to be able to hear him sing, perform live, to think he was still making music, music that I could buy. It was like a reprieve from a sentence I didn’t know I was serving.

And now, despite the sadness, we still have songs like this and the moments we shared with friends at the 12 Bar or in some civic hall in Bromley or a crypt in Clerkenwell. I’ll quote Abba here: 'And I've often wondered, how did it all start?/Who found out that nothing can capture a heart/Like a melody can?/Well, whoever it was, I'm a fan.'

So thank you Doll by Doll and thank you Jackie. Gone but not forgotten.

Other Leven blogs can be found at The King of Love Has Died,  Exit Wound and

Jackie Leven: 'To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour'.