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Having spent five years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, Leonard Cohen should be well versed in the Buddhist teaching of non-attachment. Tonight, on the first of a four-night run at Manchester’s Opera House, the elder statesman of song certainly carries himself with the sort of grace that a spell away from the rat race often bestows. He beams with pleasure at the repeated ovations and cracks jokes when you least expect him to. One minute he is the Dalai Lama of Dour. The next he’s listing half-a-dozen pharmaceuticals he’s taken since his last live outing in 1993, when he was ‘just a 60-year-old kid with a crazy dream’.

When The Songs Of Leonard Cohen arrived in record shops just after Christmas, 1967, its creator was already 33 years old – an unusual age to be releasing a debut album. But the patina of experience was critical to Cohen’s appeal.

Leonard Cohen has been labelled “the poet laureate of pessimism”, “the grocer of despair”, “the godfather of gloom” and “the prince of bummers”. He has, none the less, given pleasure and even laughter to the million or so people who buy his records.