‘HE was in the year below us at school, but we were terrified of him. He was a genuine hard man and in Scotland in the mid-1960s that was really quite something – if you’ve not had cause to experience that head on then you might find it a little hard to conceive of, but he was tough.

“A truly nice guy too.”

Singer songwriter Jackie Leven is talking about an old schoolmate of his from Kirkcaldy High in Fife.

Jackie, who has been releasing records since the early 1970s, was the first schoolboy busted for drugs in Scotland. He went on to form the savagely articulate rock band Doll By Doll in London and Dorset in the late 1970s. Not long after their demise he was mugged and strangled, nearly losing his voice.

The incident precipitated rampant heroin addiction and a relentlessly chaotic life until he self-cured and founded a charity for addicts that attracted the patronage of Princess Diana.

He’s also found time along the way to release some 30 albums of songs crafted to ponder the many shades of the human condition. The latest, Gothic Road, is out on Monday.

His schoolmate became Prime Minister.

“I’m a fan of Gordon’s, a big supporter. What you see is what you get and you have to respect that,” says Jackie.

“It’s not mindless anti-Toryism, but it may be different if I thought David Cameron is what he says he is, but I just don’t buy it and I shudder to think what will become of us if he wins the election. I heard Gordon on Woman’s Hour this morning and he seems to have shed the plasticity that infects him when he’s trying to be the nice guy he thinks we want him to be – he was just being the nice guy he is.”

But while Gordon Brown could do a lot worse than hire Jackie as a campaign manager, Mr Leven has work of his own to be getting on with – namely explaining his new album.

“I have this notion that we all walk two roads – the Royal Road on which every day is sunny, we’re in love, all is right with the world, we like our job; and the Road of Poverty and Death, on which none of these things is true.

“It’s my feeling we spend most of our lives somewhere between those roads and my name for that place is Gothic Road.”

Hence the album finds Jackie quoting Bob Dylan, Joy Division and Mud’s Tiger Feet; as well as fantasising about Tilda Swinton and Joan Crawford; and paying earnest tribute to Cornelius Whalen, the last of the Jarrow marchers, in a duet with Ralph McTell.

“Well, yes, exactly. I love that Mud song and I’d have to be deeply worried about anyone who said they didn’t love it.

“But I think we should remember I deal with places like Germany a lot and over there they want every album to be a concept album and I have to explain to them that it’s not a grand concept it’s simply that I’ve got a bit more articulate in explaining what the album is about.”

There’s also a credit in memory of Tim Mycroft, the musician and songwriter from Blandford who died earlier this year.

“I first knew Tim many years ago when I was living in Poole and we used to play some funny little pub gigs with mates like Joe Shaw who joined Doll By Doll. I stayed close with one of his exes, Krystle, who runs a club in Hamburg called The Fabrik, also his daughter Natalie and he had friends in Stavanger where I play once a year. So we had this cyclical rolling relationship that centred on late nights in some wonderful bars – a lovely way to remember an old friend.”