Overlooked and underplayed: Doll By Doll

‘Doll By Doll’ (Magnet/MCA-5269, 1981)
CD review
Star rating: *****





“I put a penny in the toilet door
then I quickly stepped inside
to some graffiti and a greyhound paper
and the gentle thought of suicide
a razor blade would make the perfect bride.”

Unlike the sixth song on ‘Doll By Doll’ (first track on the second side of the vinyl release), “perfect romances” and revisited memories rarely live up to our expectations. Recordings unheard for 25 years usually amass a kind of mental hyperbole in the interim; a promise no revisit can fulfil. Having built up the album in my mind, I feared that this might be the case with ‘Doll By Doll’ but, after repeated listens over the last few days, although I can scarcely believe it, it actually exceeds my expectations. And one song is so stellar I’d go so far as to say that it represents the finest few minutes of pop I’ve ever heard by anyone, ever.

There always seemed to be something subterranean about Doll By Doll; as though a secret network of subversives existed to mould their image, design their record covers and promote their appearances — in fact, it did, and they called it Hard Ventures, back in the glory days when they were the special guests of acts such as Devo at the Hammersmith Odeon. But apparently it was a venture too hard ensuring that anything other than a single rough diamond remains of Doll By Doll’s recorded legacy. Hardly any of their songs can be judged by members of the public, unless they’re prepared to go to the same trouble and expense I’ve just endured.

The Perfect Romance from the band’s self-titled 1981 album presaged a challenging period in the life of its Romany-Scottish singer and frontman, Jackie Leven. As his biography on the unofficial website has it:

After a late night recording session for a solo album due for release by Charisma/ Virgin (1983) Jackie was the subject of an unprovoked street attack during which he, along with other injuries, was nearly murdered by strangulation. Unable to speak or sing, he lost his record deal, friends and way, entering his own period of psychic disorder, taking heroin (the classic drug of despair) and living in isolation for nearly a year.

He re-joined the world in 1985 after a successful course of traditional Chinese five-element acupuncture and psychic healing, and co-founded The CORE Trust — ‘an holistic approach to addiction’. To this day the trust operates a centre in central London, working with people with all forms of addiction. Jackie has been their manager, chair of trustees, and is presently the patron, having at one time enjoyed a good working relationship with the late Princess Of Wales, who took a strong interest in the Trust. During one encounter with HRH, she said to him, “I understand you used to be a singer.”

“I am a singer,” was his bristling reply.

“Well, sing something now,” she suggested.

That something was the traditional Scottish air The Bonnie Earl Of Moray which had formed the basis of his celebrated Doll By Doll song, Main Travelled Roads.

Although recorded in 1980, in a Maida Vale basement, using a mobile studio, ‘Doll By Doll’ sounds as original today as it did when it was first released. And it hasn’t dated because it wasn’t produced with the aim of being fashionable in the first place. ‘Wild’ Tom Newman (the co-producer of Mike Oldfield’s original ‘Tubular Bells’, and of ‘Doll By Doll’ with Leven) created a crystal-clear soundscape of crisp, rumbling basses and rippling trebles, blending to form an atmosphere of electrical energy. The wimpy 1980s’ mid-range frequencies, later beloved by Duran Duran and the New Romantics, were eschewed in favour of a crystalline hardness; and yet the result sounds remarkably balanced.

Figure It Out, with its Stones-ish rhythm guitar touches and derisive tone, is a noble pop song but probably shouldn’t have been the album opener; that they took the risk is proof the music industry was a different, not-yet-extinct animal in the 1980s. Leven’s voice, it has to be said, is characteristically huge from the very first note and lends his lyrics the right tone of biting sarcasm. But if I’d had to choose the opener it would have been the next song, Caritas.

Caritas represents the closest I’m ever likely to get to hearing perfection in songwriting and recording. A special extended version was released as a 12-inch single, backed with Murder on the Highway (3’25”) and An Honest Woman (8’44”), the latter recorded live in June 1981 at Richard Branson’s Venue on London’s Victoria Street. It should have been a top 10 hit at least. Of course, there’s never been justice in pop music, and I’m sure BBC Radio One’s producers didn’t know what to make of it. From the first, angry notes of guitar feedback to its crunch ending, this is what yearning, terror and beauty in music are all about. Leven’s voice is edged with threat, and the phased guitar arpeggio that builds out of the intro; the trebly chopped funk chords; and Tony Waite’s ribcage-rattling bass provide the impetus that drive Caritas forward. But it’s Jo(e) Shaw’s overdriven lead guitar that steals the show. His mainly low- and mid-register guitar solo is thoughtful and doesn’t noodle. But he saves his best for the lick 02’26” into the song, between the fifth and sixth of the short, three-line verses. In context, the most beautiful two seconds in all of pop music come after the line: “…the blue jets scream into the sky.

“Sing it to me now…
Caritas.”

Not only is the impossibly fast, stuttered “now” Jackie’s, but also the swirling falsetto background vocals; highlighting the sheer range of his voice before his larynx was crushed in the assault. At 04’15”, this is on the long side for a pop masterpiece, but since it received hardly any radio airplay at the time it was released, that’s irrelevant.

Soon New Life starts pensively, with a tentative, melodic bass before a calypso guitar transforms it into a celebration of coming fatherhood. It wouldn’t surprise me to discover Jackie can no longer listen to this song. As he explains on the liner notes to his album ‘The Argyll Cycle – Volume One’, at the time of recording it, not only was he about to experience near murder by strangulation and symptomatic heroin addiction, the love of his life was about to run off with the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard. The chant-like chorus line of this song seems to repeat “Since you left”, and not the song’s title; this album predates much of Jackie’s misery, but so many of the lyrical ideas seem to prophesy it that the entire album may feel to him like some dreadful form of alternative therapy.

You can hear faint echoes of the next song, and the traditional melody upon which it’s based (the one he sung for Diana), in many of Leven’s later tunes; not least My Spanish Dad from 2001’s ‘Creatures of Light and Darkness’ and Classicnortherndiversions from 2003’s ‘Shining Brother Shining Sister’. But Main Travelled Roads is the source at its purest. When Jackie’s voice gets down and dirty for the third verse the melody comes into its heartbreaking own, and he hits some high notes that seem unlikely after you’ve heard him hit the lower ones.

The Perfect Romance strikes up harmlessly enough. But again, Tony Waite’s bass impels this short (03’14”) track forwards, and it’s undoubtedly the darkest and most dangerous song on the record. The chorus is wondrously debauched; Leven sounds like a crazed Scottish laird serenading his ghost bride amidst the wreckage of a bacchanalian feast. Only Nick Cave gets darker, but Jackie out-sings him, out-baritones him and out-mans him.

The intro to I Never Saw The Movie is redolent of a hobo plucking a guitar in railroad car, but thudding bass and howling bottleneck soon put paid to that. The glorious bridge (“I was so dazed / I should have been praised / I will never feel that beautiful again”), the rumbling false-ending and consequent fade-in prevent you from dismissing this as an insubstantial pop tune built around a catchy chorus.

Up is as advertised; from its claps, finger-clicks and chiming harmonics to its rowdy, shouted “I wanna be up / Don’t wanna be down again” chorus, pre-dating Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping by at least 15 years. Shaw turns in a lovely piece of 1950s-style rock ‘n’ roll guitar before the song turns full circle for the chiming simplicity of its ending.

There are three absolute standout tracks on ‘Doll By Doll’: Caritas, The Perfect Romance and A Bright Green Field. And if you remain unmoved by the latter, you have no pulse, no blood coursing through your veins, no soul. Waite’s bottom-E rattles your skeleton, but this is Leven’s five minutes and thirteen seconds to shine, and he’s incandescent. Listen to the supernaturally intense way in which he stretches the notes on the word “rain” and “sand”. The dexterity, range and sheer variety of his vocal is mind-boggling, and the lyrical imagery — with its centaurs, demons and holy wine — gives him plenty of room to manoeuvre. He sounds possessed and extrapolates every note beyond its comfort zone. (Towards the end, there’s a brief drop-out in Vinyl Revolution’s CD, perhaps caused by a bad scratch on the vinyl — the only imperfection on an otherwise pristine re-issue of a British pop-rock classic.)

The darkness that characterised Doll By Doll was of a different order from that conjured up by their west London contemporaries Killing Joke; it’s less demonic, less gothic and more humane. Leven slept rough and lived in squats through much of the 1960s and 1970s, and his encounters with damaged souls can’t help but have affected his songwriting. And yet, despite the fortress of sullenness that Doll By Doll constructed around themselves, this is a remarkably cheerful album. The contrast between light and dark is never over-done and no emotion is oversold. Each note has been agonised over without any sense of the spontaneity having been lost.

Twenty-five years on, it’s clear what a brave band this was; recording for an uncompromisingly commercial label, the musicians and producer stuck to their guns, made an intelligent record with an unmistakeable identity and a recognisable sound, only to be punished by a cloth-eared industry that didn’t know where to put anyone who defied pigeonholing. I defy you to find a more cohesive and satisfying record.

“The last four men were waiting
for their call to take the stage
and when the curtains opened
they stood like lovers in a cage
the crowd in perfect silence
closed their eyes to hide their shame
the dressing rooms are empty
and nobody is to blame.”

(Lyrics © Jackie Leven, published by Chappell and Co.)