Ian Rankin Said

As if the bestselling author isn’t busy enough, he’s now doing the interview rounds for a new and somewhat different project — an album of music co-written with Fife-born Jackie Leven, which will debut next month:

IT STARTED when singer-songwriter Jackie Leven found himself
name-checked in one of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus detective novels.
The two self-confessed "wary Fifers" struck up a relationship that
resulted in Rankin writing a short story called Jackie Leven Said for a
joint one-off performance at Glasgow’s Celtic Connections festival in
the spring of 2004. Rankin read the story, Leven provided the
soundtrack.

The enthusiastic response encouraged them to repeat the performance
at the Edinburgh Festival last summer. Now the collaboration has
spawned a CD, a book and some additional live shows, including one at
the Adam Smith Theatre in Kirkcaldy, where the story is set and where
Leven and Rankin grew up.

Jackie Leven Said tells the story of a record producer living the
good life in London who returns to Kirkcaldy for his mother’s funeral,
stirring up the ghosts of his past. These include his brother, working
in a factory and still playing at the folk club once a week, his first
serious girlfriend who is now married to his brother, and his violent
father.

If the story is parochial and the setting personal to both men, the
theme has a universal ring. Rankin says: "The thing is, you write
something that seems personal to you and the place where you are, and
then you find that it translates to many different places."

For Leven, the story evokes psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s phrase on
rites of passage: separation, initiation, return. "My mother died
recently and I found myself going back to Fife and doing hard internal
work that I could never articulate. It’s about a sense of return, I
suppose. I could never live there again but it’s very important to make
my peace with it; to be somehow sure of it."

The collaboration was primarily done by email, but that didn’t hinder their ability to get things done:

“Instead of doing what I’d done in Holland – reading from one of my

books – I said, ‘Why don’t I write something new that is specifically

for this performance’, which is where Jackie Leven Said came from.

“I thought, ‘What themes do I deal with in my books that Jackie also

deals with in his songs, bearing in mind this is for a Celtic music

festival?’ And I thought, ‘Music. Rebus loves his music and Jackie

plays music, so that’s got to be central to it. The Fife background –

that’s got to come into it. Jackie deals very well with what you could

call disappointed hard men and Rebus is dealing with these people all

the time’.

“I wrote it in four 10-minute chunks so that there was space for

Jackie to play some songs that would be thematically relevant. And we

do comment on each other because I quote from the songs and then he

plays the songs I’ve just quoted from.

“We didn’t do much by way of rehearsal. We just turned up in Glasgow

thinking, ‘Well, let’s see what happens’. And we were amazed by the

reaction we got on the night. There was a standing ovation and people

coming up to us saying how fantastic it was.”

On a side note, the “real Rebus” — aka Joe, who lives on Rankin Drive — gets an amusing writeup in the Glasgow Sunday Mail.