JACKIE LEVEN WAS A FIBBER, A FANTASIST, A JUNKIE, AN UNDER-ACHIEVER, A CELTIC FOLK-PSYCH-PUNK-POP ONE-OFF AND ONE OF THE GREAT BRITISH SONGWRITERS. AS HIS SOLO MASTERPIECE GETS ANOTHER DAY IN THE SUN, HIS FRIENDS AND ALLIES REMEMBER AN EXTRAORDINARY FORCE OF NATURE. “HE WAS A BIG FAT LIAR,” THEY TELL JOHN AIZLEWOOD, “BUT ALL HIS LIES WERE TRUE.”

JACKIE LEVEN IS IN TOUCHING DISTANCE. We’re in a traffic magnet of a Hampshire village, sip-ping herbal tea ser ved by his partner in life and music, Deborah Greenwood, at the table of his working room. It’s cramped and sepulchral, the smell is a little musty and the bookcases heave with modern poetr y; Rainer Maria Rilke is a favourite. It is a poet’s playground. And Leven, who died of cancer in 2011, aged just 61, is here, in a giant jar filled with his ashes. It’s safe to say it’s exactly what he would have wanted and where he would have wanted to be. He’d have written a song about it.

Leven was a poet, a scamp, a Scottish griot, a rogue, a warrior, a wit, a big man in ever y sense, a well-read polymath and either scar y or wonderful company. A recording artist from 1971 until the year of his death, he left behind a catalogue of extraordinar y beauty and eye-watering volume. As a performer, he was mesmeric, either as the confrontational, eye-popping singer of Doll By Doll or, later, the solo raconteur who would punctuate his ten-der, acutely obser ved, Celtic-tinged songs of love, rue and crushed hopes with the adventures of a budgerigar called Cunt. And he played guitar like John Martyn or Davey Graham. But he had better stories.

For instance: when Leven heard that much-loved singer-songwriter Sting had died in a tragic helicopter crash in Southampton around the turn of the centur y, he was on a train from Edinburgh to Kirkcaldy. Always the public ser vant, he announced the news to his fellow travellers. Mobile phones weren’t ubiquitous

then, but they weren’t unknown either. “Why haven’t we heard?” asked one doubter. “Because it’s only just happened,” said Leven with appropriate solemnity. “My girlfriend works in an office down there. She saw it…”

That wasn’t Leven’s only train drama. In October 1988 he was bound for Moscow (or was it St Petersburg?) and whom should he meet, but Bob Dylan? Naturally the two songwriters pooled their resources and wrote a song. By the time they detrained in St Petersburg (or was it Moscow?) they had written As We Sailed Into Skibbereen.

There are sceptics who argue that Sting is ver y much alive and well, and that while the splendid As We Sailed Into Skibbereen is indeed credited to Leven/Dylan, its melody is too close to One Too Many Mornings for copyright comfort.

“He was a big fat liar, but all his lies were true,” chuckles Deborah Greenwood.

So it doesn’t matter that his proprietar y whisky, Leven’s Lament, was decanted Bell’s with a new label (“nice labels though,” insists Greenwood) and that Salman Rushdie may not have actually endorsed it (“Tr y it – you’ll be sadder but wiser”) or that Elegy For Johnny Cash, Leven’s fabulous album of 2005, was recorded in Wales, rather than, as the sleevenotes claim, Beirut (“He’d got into Lebanese music and Lebanese musicians guested,” notes Greenwood). And while former Yacht and Christian Henr y Priest-man certainly played on 2000’s Defending Ancient Springs, credits that place him on other Leven albums are spurious.