TROUBLED chanteuse Amy Winehouse could find salvation thanks to a piece of used soap and a large Scotsman whose heart lies in Dorset’s fields.

Jackie Leven is no stranger to hard times and a life skewed by the dregs at the bottom of a dirty glass. His creative imagination feeds on the darkest corners of the human experience and is at its most eloquent on his latest album Lovers At The Gun Club which he will be drawing from at the Opera House tomorrow.

But his lifelong quest to find the savage beauty in the most broken of souls could see Jackie doing Amy a favour. “I would love to produce her next album,” he exclaims in all seriousness. “I want to get a hold of her and shake her and say ‘right, stop moaning and let’s make a bloody great record’.

“Her first album, Frank, was loaded with these wonderful klezmer-soul tunes in which she was sexually jeering at men – you don’t get that from pop performers. Her writing and stylings were wasted on Back to Black and I don’t think Mark Ronson’s settings did her any favours.

“Now, of course, there’s all this fame and image stuff to get round and I know all the arguments about Amy – my right- hand man, Michael Cosgrave, won’t even discuss her with me – but I did some work recently at the same studio as her and Laurie, the guy who owns the it, came out and surreptitiously gave me this half-used piece of Imperial Leather soap and said that Amy Winehouse left it in the shower.

“I look at it from time to time and think I have to use this somehow. I thought about putting it on eBay – I did all right when I sold Elton John’s loofah!”

No doubt, but on the evidence of a string of well-realised albums over the last 15 years or so, Jackie could well have something to offer the floundering Amy. The characters in his songs may grub around on the fringes of life, but he has a way of honing in on their humanity. It wasn’t always that way.

Born into a Romany family of an Irish Cockney father and a Geordie mother in the kingdom of Fife in 1950, Jackie’s outsider status was evident from his first breaths. School didn’t agree with him, but music did – from blues and folk songs to Elvis and The Beatles – and he embarked on the hobo route, ending up busking for bread on the South Bank Centre in London.

A brief interlude as a recording artist – John St Field – in 1971 left behind a cult classic psychedelic record called Control before he headed south and rented a farmhouse near Blandford to plan his next move.

Stints in Corfe Mullen, Parkstone and Westbourne were to follow as Jackie noted the rage of punk and applied it to the brutally literate works of his new outfit, Doll By Doll.

They made five critically acclaimed albums for Warner Bros, ripped up live stages across the land and sold extremely badly before bowing out disgracefully in 1982.

A solo career was in the offing when one dark night in 1983 Jackie was attacked on the way home, strangled and almost killed. Unable to speak or sing he subsequently welcomed friendless heroin addiction and psychotic despair with open arms.

It took a two-year hell trip for him to surface again, co-founding the Core Trust to deal with addiction. Moving back to Scotland he rediscovered songwriting and embarked on the solo career that fate had robbed him of.

These days he bunks down in Hampshire and has immortalised his adopted home in Fareham Confidential, one of the stand out tracks on the new album. An apparently lighter tune than many in its company, it documents a droll catalogue of minor, parochial frustrations that echo and surpass more contemporary commentators like Mike Skinner of The Streets fame.

“Well thanks for the comparison, but it has a heart of darkness that is revealed at the end – ‘And the women talk together in the lunchtime pizza house/The shadow of their pain knocks out the sun’ is a hell of line.

“That song started with making a loop out of the drums at the beginning of Kenny Rogers’ Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town and then we subtracted it at the end, so Kenny started it for us 20 years ago.”

In the age of the iPod shuffle function it’s gratifying to come across an album that requires you to listen to it from beginning to end. It is the kind of thing Jackie does consistently – and knowingly – well.

“I’m really pleased with Lovers at the Gun Club though, I’ve excited myself about this one. It’s not like some records where you get to the end and you’re just exhausted, I know this is a really good one.

“There is a Jackie Leven zone that includes a wide range of influences but I think about that every time I make an album. The thing is for my last two albums I’ve really enjoyed working with this group of musicians and I wanted to take that further, just like I wanted to work with [absinthe drinking pal] Johnny Dowd as he brings this darkness to everything he sings.

“However, I feel I have maybe exhausted this particular line of enquiry and the next album will be different – although I have no idea what that difference will be.”

Equally as digital downloads threaten to render record companies obsolete, Jackie enjoys the perfect relationship with his label, Cooking Vinyl. Indeed, copies of his new album were sent to reviewers accompanied by an exchange of emails in which Jackie apologised to the label’s director for recording an album he’d neglected to tell them about.

“It’s very simple. If we put out a record that sells enough copies they will continue to put records out, but if it doesn’t then you get the sack. Of course they will have previously made a judgement that you are stable and talented enough to make that record.

“And I am.”

After everything, thank goodness for that.

  • Jackie Leven plays the Mr Kyps Acoustic Session double bill at the Opera House on Tuesday with the Martin Harley Band and support from Alex Roberts.