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.

Many a Guardian reader can surely still hear the flat, irresistible voice of Leonard Cohen singing these lyrics. In the 1970s, earnest middle-class teenagers knew that here was a poet. That was the whole point of the notorious voice. You could hear that he wasn’t a singer. He was a poet,

There’s a lot of love for Leonard. These days, you’d be hard-pushed to find a singer-songwriter who doesn’t claim to be Cohen’s biggest fan. As well as being a poet of iconic status, the self-anointed Godfather of Gloom is a musician’s musician, a primary influence on generations of new artists.

Leonard Cohen has a famous face. He is fond of telling the story of how a fan once stopped him on the street and congratulated him on his performance in Midnight Cowboy. A fan of Dustin Hoffman, that is. The anecdote is old now, and so is the face. At 58, the Canadian songwriter and groaner could be Hoffman’s father.

For me, the perfect song is ‘Suzanne’, by Leonard Cohen. The perfect lyric with the perfect melody.

He was the voice in every lonely boy’s bedroom. The Godfather of Gloom. But after years on Mount Baldy, a Buddhist retreat, Leonard Cohen has finally found peace. Here he talks about drink, drugs and women, and why nirvana is now a mean tuna sandwich.