1. INTRODUCTION
2. BIRD ON THE WIRE
3. INTRO TO SO LONG, MARIANNE
4. SO LONG, MARIANNE
5. INTRO: “LET’S RENEW OURSELVES NOW…”
6. YOU KNOW WHO I AM
7. INTRO TO POEMS
8. LADY MIDNIGHT
9. THEY LOCKED UP A MAN (POEM)/A PERSON WHO EATS MEAT/INTRO
10. ONE OF US CANNOT BE WRONG
11. STRANGER SONG
12. TONIGHT WILL BE FINE
13. HEY, THAT’S NO WAY TO SAY GOODBYE
14. DIAMONDS IN THE MINE
15. SUZANNE
16. SING ANOTHER SONG, BOYS
17. PARTISAN

The fans topped up Leonard Cohen’s pension fund and were repaid with an evening of pure gold

UNCUT

Leonard Cohen 4 stars

Hey, that’s the way to say goodbye. One classic gig, on two CD.

Buy ‘Live in London’ from BangCD.com

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. Here was a singer – no, a poet – who could write about the usual stuff, chiefly girls – well, women – with a rueful and weathered maturity far beyond the range of his younger contemporaries.


It was a good trick then, and it remains so four decades later, as Leonard Cohen continues his extraordinary comeback tour. While the likes of The Rolling Stones tackle the songs of their youth in an absurd if bracing defiance of age, and Bob Dylan and Neil Young often seem to have an ambiguous, sometimes fraught, relationship to their back catalogues, Cohen has no comparable problems. The older he becomes, the better he inhabits many of these uncannily graceful and profound songs.

Consequently, Live In London is much more than a souvenir of a memorable show at the O2 Arena in July 2008. It showcases a (then) 73-year-old singer with still-growing wisdom and an ever-deepening voice, who now brings an even greater gravity to songs that were hardly bubblegum in the first place.

Take “Who By Fire”. It’d be risky to claim that this live reading is a more definitive version than the original on 1974’s New Skin For The Old Ceremony. But the incantatory resonance of Cohen’s baritone, the way it is underpinned so delicately by the female vocals, Javier Mas’ lute-like archilaúd and Neil Larsen’s Hammond B3, make it sound more like sacred music than a folk singer’s appropriation of sacred music, band introductions notwithstanding. An enterprising film director would do well to cast this Cohen as the voice of a god – if Cohen could reconcile the complexities of his own beliefs to accept such a frivolous gig.
Then again, as Live In London proves, Leonard Cohen is a covertly frivolous man. If he has been stereotyped for 20, 30, 40 years as the laureate of misery, these shows have redefined him as more of a droll old charmer, not averse to satirising himself.

“It’s been a long time since I stood on the stage in London,” he intones wryly before “Ain’t No Cure For Love”. “It was about 14 or 15 years ago. I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Welbutrin, Effexor, Ritalin, Focalin. I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies and religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”
He says more or less the same every night, but the crafted wit is well worth repeating. Rehearsal does not preclude warmth, and the three months of preparation that Cohen and the band went through before the tour began last spring – down to the ad libs, perhaps – is one good reason why Live In London has more in common with a measured studio album than most live sets.


Spontaneity isn’t necessary here. Instead, meticulous control is crucial to the potency of these 25 songs, particularly in the marvellous sequence that closes the first half of the concert, running through “Who By Fire” and “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye” to a broadly celestial “Anthem”.
These are not complete reinventions: the musical director, Roscoe Beck, was imbuing Cohen’s songs with the same stately pacing, with similar Mediterranean fringes, as far back as 1988, judging by the Cohen Live album released in 1994. Now, though, there’s a shade more discretion to Bob Metzger’s guitar playing, and fewer cruise liner flourishes from Dino Soldo on the “instruments of wind”. Javier Mas, the Spanish guitarist, is an obvious star, but as the whole band take compact, jewel-like solos during “I Tried To Leave You”, it’s hard to spot a weak link.

Cohen himself, of course, may be more reliable these days, having lost his old habit of drinking three bottles of wine before a show. He has a clutch of relatively new songs, too, with two from 2001’s underrated Ten New Songs included in the London show, plus a stirring recitation of verses from “A Thousand Kisses Deep” that didn’t make the original recording. A meditation on love, memory, mortality and related topics, it’s an apposite highlight, not least when Cohen intones, “I’m still working with the wine, still dancing cheek to cheek/The band is playing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, but the heart will not retreat.”

It captures a man forced back on to the road by financial exigency – back to “Boogie Street”, he might say – only to discover that something else is driving him onwards. Perhaps that something, Cohen realised, is a chance to achieve a resolution of sorts, with both his art and with his fans. An uncommonly thoughtful victory lap, which deserves – and has received – a handsome recorded memorial.

JOHN MULVEY

For more album reviews, click here for the UNCUT music archive

As the godfather of gloom turns 70, Tim de Lisle describes his brush with death – and lists 69 other things you may not know about him

Friday September 17, 2004
The Guardian

1 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.

2 He will be 70 on Tuesday, the first of the 1960s singer-songwriters to reach 70. He was born in 1934, shortly before Elvis Presley.

3 His new album, Dear Heather, is out next month. It includes a song about September 11, called On That Day.

4 Since his mid-50s, his stock has risen steadily. Late middle-age tends not to be easy for pop stars, if they get there at all, but it has smiled on Cohen. There have been several tribute albums and covers by Bono, REM and Johnny Cash. His influence has been cited by Nick Cave, Suzanne Vega and Rufus Wainwright, who said recently: “I really believe he’s the greatest living poet on earth.”

5 Cohen’s albums regularly go to no 1 in Norway.

6 In America, his last album entered the Billboard chart at number 143.

7 In 2001 he said: “When Alberta Hunter was singing many years ago, at 82, I came to New York just to listen to her. When she said ‘God bless you’, you really felt that you had been blessed. It’s wonderful to hear a 20-year-old speaking about love. As the Talmud says, there’s good wine in every generation. But I love to hear an old singer lay it out. And I’d like to be one of them.”

8 Birthday parties are planned in Toronto, Edmonton, Barcelona and Toowoomba, Queensland. In Barcelona, a singer will perform Cohen’s songs in Catalan.

9 Cohen was 32 and an established poet and novelist before deciding that songwriting might pay better. When he first touted his songs around New York, agents said to him: “Aren’t you a little old for this game?”

10 He has never married – “too frightened”. He had two children with Suzanne Elrod, and also had a long relationship with the film star Rebecca De Mornay.

11 “The heart,” he says, “goes on cooking, sizzling like shish kebab.” He likes the image so much, he used it to interviewers in 1977, 1988, 1997 and 2001.

12 He has used many musical styles, from acoustic folk to electro-pop. But his lyrics have made only one stylistic leap, from lush lyricism to dry humour. His vocals have gone from a limited but appealing wail to a heroically smoky rumble. Soon, he may be audible only to dogs.

13 Cohen’s maternal grandfather, a rabbi, wrote a 700-page thesaurus of Talmudic interpretations.

14 His father, who was in the garment trade, died when he was nine.

15 His middle name is Norman.

16 His first band, formed when he was 17, was called the Buckskin Boys.

17 In his high-school yearbook, he gave his ambition as “world-famous orator”.

18 At McGill University, he was president of the debating society.

19 His friends were fellow poets. “Each time we met, we felt that it was a landmark in the history of thinking, let alone poetry.”

20 Cohen was a poet and novelist before he was a pop star. He published his first volume of poetry at 22, and won a $2,000 scholarship to travel around Europe when he was 25.

21 He liked the Greek island of Hydra so much that he bought a house there in 1960 for $1,500. It had no electricity or running water. He could live there for $1,000 a year, so he would go back to Canada, earn the money with his writing and head back to Hydra “to write and swim and sail”.

22 His second novel, Beautiful Losers, about a love triangle, was hailed by one reviewer as “the most revolting book ever written in Canada”.

23 His big break was meeting the folk singer Judy Collins. He sang Suzanne down the phone to her and she immediately promised to record it.

24 He was then asked to lunch by John Hammond of Columbia Records, one of rock’s greatest talent-spotters: he had signed Bob Dylan, and went on to discover Bruce Springsteen. Hammond asked Cohen to sing some songs in his room at the Chelsea hotel. He played six or seven, and Hammond said: “You got it”. Cohen never worked out whether he meant he had a contract or merely a gift.

25 A week later, they were in the studio, with Hammond as producer. Cohen started singing and Hammond said on the intercom: “Watch out Dylan!”

26 The young Cohen’s signature tune was Suzanne. He once called it “journalism”, as the details were drawn from life in Montreal. Suzanne was a friend, Suzanne Verdal, who really did serve him tea and oranges in her loft by the river. Cohen wrote the line “I touched your perfect body with my mind” because she was married to a friend of his.

27 Singing it in concert decades later, he sometimes found the emotions hard to unearth. “I was never so good that I could make a song sound real or authentic without it being that, and if it isn’t, people know. I find that quite a lot of red wine will do it.”

28 He is a lifelong manic depressive. Asked about drugs, he has said: “The recreational, the obsessional and the pharmaceutical – I’ve tried them all. I would be enthusiastically promoting any one of them if they worked.”

29 From 1965 to 1968 he was a vegetarian. A few years later, he took up yoga.

30 Some time in the early 70s, his songs were dismissed as “music to slit your wrists to”. The phrase stuck. “I get put into the computer tagged with melancholy and despair,” Cohen said. “And every time a journalist taps in my name, that description comes up on the screen.”

31 His hero is Federico García Lorca. Cohen named his daughter after him: “She’s a lovely creature, and very inventive. She really deserves the name.” He translated a poem of Lorca’s into the song Take This Waltz, which took him 150 hours.

32 On Anthem (1992), he wrote: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” Later he said: “That’s the closest thing I could describe to a credo. That idea is one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs.”

33 His song Chelsea Hotel No 2, about Janis Joplin, may be the only song overtly written by one pop star about sex with another. “You said to me then, you preferred handsome men, but for me you would make an exception … giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street.”

34 Much later, he said: “I never discuss my mistresses or my tailors.” But for Joplin he had made an exception.

35 One woman who resisted his charms was Nico, whom he met at Andy Warhol’s club in 1966. “The most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” She said she preferred younger men, but introduced him to Lou Reed, who had some of his books. “We told each other how good we were.”

36 In 1968 he moved with Suzanne and the children to a cabin near Nashville. John Hammond said, “Nashville was astounded by him, because they hadn’t seen anything like him, and they never will again.”

37 Cohen has been with Columbia for 37 years, but relations are ambivalent. Accepting an award in 1988, he thanked Columbia and said: “I have always been touched by the modesty of their interest in my work.”

38 When he wrote Bird on a Wire, Cohen felt he hadn’t “finished the carpentry”, but Kris Kristofferson said the first three lines would be his epitaph: “Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free”

39 When sport loomed ever larger in the 90s, some in the music business were taken by surprise, but not Cohen. “In the 60s, music was the mode, the most important form of communication,” he said in 1988. “I think today it’s sports. The sports figures in America are much more attractive and interesting and their lives are much more dangerous than the rock figures. They are in the traditional heroic mode.”

40 Asking him where the songs come from is fruitless. “If I knew, I’d go there more often.”

41 His album Death of a Ladies’ Man was produced by Phil Spector, the reclusive genius of girl-group pop. “I was flipped out at the time,” Cohen said later, “and he certainly was flipped out. For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable. In the state that he found himself, which was post-Wagnerian, I would say Hitlerian, the atmosphere was one of guns – the music was a subsidiary enterprise … At a certain point Phil approached me with a bottle of kosher red wine in one hand and a .45 in the other, put his arm around my shoulder and shoved the revolver into my neck and said, ‘Leonard, I love you.’ I said, ‘I hope you do, Phil.’”

42 Cohen has described the album they made together as “grotesque”.

43 In 1988 he released I’m Your Man, and reinvented himself as a boulevardier with synthesisers and jokes. “Everybody knows you’ve been discreet,” he sang, “But there were so many people you just had to meet/ Without your clothes.”

44 Cohen’s work has been chosen on Desert Island Discs by the artist Jack Vettriano (I’m Your Man), Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour (Anthem) and the singer and Velvet Underground viola player John Cale (Alexandra Leaving). The actress Gillian Anderson chose covers of two Cohen songs – Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah and Roberta Flack’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.

45 In 1988, Cohen told Musician magazine: “As you get older, you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality.”

46 A writer in the 1950s, a folk singer in the 60s, a has-been in the 70s, a cult rock star in the 80s, Cohen decided to become a monk in the 90s. He joined a Buddhist community on Mt Baldy, near Los Angeles: in the city of permanent summer, he had gravitated to the one part of town that had winters. He acted as driver to the senior monk or Roshi (teacher), a man in his 90s. Cohen was called Jikan, “the silent one”.

47 “Cohen in Roshi’s company was like a fish in water, or a non-fish in non-water, or like neither,” wrote Leon Wieseltier, somewhat enigmatically. Cohen was clearer: “I’m not looking for a new religion. I’m quite happy with the old one, with Judaism.”

48 In 1986, he made a guest appearance in Miami Vice as a character named François Zolan, head of Interpol.

49 In 1992 he released a song called Democracy, which was unlike anything else in his oeuvre or the pop canon – a satirical march, highly politicised although not party-political. It was later used by Ralph Nader in his presidential campaign, and sung by Don Henley at the MTV Ball during Bill Clinton’s inauguration (“slaughtered,” according to Leon Wieseltier). The song came out after the LA riots of April 1992, but was recorded before them. “Some people have suggested that it’s prophetic. It’s hard to wear that mantle. But when you’re writing, your antennae go up, and you’re sensitive to nuances in the air.”

50 Katie Melua, Britain’s best-selling new singer of 2004, was asked recently what her ideal band would be. She picked John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers on guitar, Eva Cassidy as the singer and Leonard Cohen as the songwriter.

51 In 1995, Cohen was profiled in Interview magazine by Anjelica Huston, who described him as “part wolf and part angel”.

52 Cohen is always rewriting. In 1988 he was full of enthusiasm for a song he was writing called My Secret Life, but it took him another 13 years to get it right. “I can’t discard a verse until I’ve written it as carefully as the one I would keep.”

53 For many rock stars, age is something you handle with make-up, surgery or denial, but Cohen has faced up to getting old. “Now my friends have gone and my hair is grey,” he sang on Tower of Song in 1988, “I ache in the places where I used to play.” Seven years later, I asked him what had happened to those places. He replied with morose delight: “I can’t even locate them.”

54 Last year, Cohen was made a Companion to the Order of Canada by the governor-general, Adrienne Clarkson. A statement from her office described him as “a venerated dean of the pop-culture movement”.

55 There was a show at Edinburgh last month about Kurt Cobain, called Leonard Cohen Afterworld. The title came from the Nirvana song Pennyroyal Tea: “Give me Leonard Cohen afterworld/ So I can sigh eternally.”

56 Cohen said of Cobain after his death: “I’m sorry I couldn’t have spoken to the young man. I see a lot of people at the Zen Centre, who have gone through drugs and found a way out that is not just Sunday school. There are always alternatives, and I might have been able to lay something on him.”

57 Cohen’s fans form a loose-knit cult. A convention was held in New York in June, while the Brighton festival presented an evening of Cohen’s songs performed by Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright and others under the direction of Hal Willner.

58 Online, the faithful congregate at LeonardCohenFiles.com. The webmaster is a Finn named Jarkko, who keeps a list of covers of Cohen’s songs. So far, he has found 890, including 78 versions of Bird on a Wire, 44 of Hallelujah and 124 of Suzanne.

59 Hallelujah was covered by Kathryn Williams, the young British folk singer, on her album, Relations. At a recent concert she introduced it by saying, “I’d really, really, really like to shag Leonard Cohen, but I know his heart just couldn’t take it.”

60 In 1995 Cohen’s manager, Kelley Lynch, put together Tower of Song, a set of his compositions sung by bigger stars including Sting and Bono. She asked Phil Collins, who turned her down. Cohen himself sent Collins a fax, saying: “Would Beethoven refuse the invitation of Mozart?” Collins faxed back: “No, unless Beethoven was on a world tour at the time.” Cohen understood: “It’s kind of a pain in the ass, to think about somebody else’s dismal songs when you’re not even in the studio.”

61 As a marketing ploy, cafes in the US that had “the Leonard Cohen vibe” were sent a free copy of the Tower of Song album. “I’d like to go to some of those,” Cohen said. “I can rarely locate my own vibe.”

62 His best-selling songs on Napster are Suzanne and Hallelujah.

63 Cohen has probably the best manners in pop. When you ask how he is, he says, “Can’t complain”, as if he hadn’t built a career on elegant lamentation. When he rings off, he says “So long”, as he did, famously, to a lover named Marianne.

64 His songs have featured in dozens of films from McCabe and Mrs Miller to Natural Born Killers, and television dramas including The West Wing and The L Word. They provide an index of his rising stock: the log at LeonardCohenFiles.com lists 13 productions from the 70s and 80s, and 63 since 1990.

65 There’s an episode of Absolutely Fabulous in which Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley go to an awards ceremony and Saunders has to make a speech. She is so drunk that she slurringly recites the words of Bird on a Wire. The audience doesn’t appear to notice.

66 Cohen was much admired in 1960s France. The president, Georges Pompidou, was reputed to take his LPs on holiday, and it was said that if a Frenchwoman owned one record, it was likely to be by Cohen.

67 Cohen’s latest published work is a self-portrait for the Canadian current-affairs magazine the Walrus.

68 He always has excellent backing vocals. “My voice sounds so much better when a woman is singing with me,” he has said. “Some dismal quality is neutralised.”

69 His son Adam is a singer-songwriter who has just released his second album, Melancolista, written in French. His daughter Lorca is a chef turned antiques dealer.

70 In 1994, Cohen said: “If you’re going to think of yourself in this game, or in this tradition, and you start getting a swelled head about it, then you’ve really got to think about who you’re talking about. You’re not just talking about Randy Newman, who’s fine, or Bob Dylan, who’s sublime, you’re talking about King David, Homer, Dante, Milton, Wordsworth, you’re talking about the embodiment of our highest possibility. So I don’t think it’s particularly modest or virtuous to think of oneself as a minor poet. I really do feel the enormous luck I’ve had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn’t want to write.

“But I don’t fool myself, I know the game I’m in. When I wrote about Hank Williams ‘A hundred floors above me in the tower of song’, it’s not some kind of inverse modesty. I know where Hank Williams stands in the history of popular song. Your Cheatin’ Heart, songs like that, are sublime, in his own tradition, and I feel myself a very minor writer. I’ve taken a certain territory, and I’ve tried to maintain it and administrate it with the very best of my capacities. And I will continue to administrate this tiny territory until I’m too weak to do it. But I understand where this territory is.”

· With acknowledgements to LeonardCohenFiles.com and Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen by Ira B Nadel (Bloomsbury, 1996). Leonard Cohen’s album Dear Heather is out next month.

John Mullan
Wednesday April 20, 2005
The Guardian

Suzanne takes you down

To her place by the river.

She gives you tea and oranges

That come all the way from China…

- Leonard Cohen

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, allowing some of his poems to become songs. You could even have the books on your shelf; he was a writer for years before his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, came out in 1967. Not just poetry. When he published his novel Beautiful Losers in 1966, the Boston Globe announced: “James Joyce is not dead. He is living in Montréal under the name of Cohen.” He was serious.

Now in his 70s, Cohen has attained what Dr Johnson called “the dignity of an ancient”. He has gone through the painful phases required of a proper poet. First there was gravel-voiced despair (“Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir”). Next came mid-life libertinism (see New Skin for the Old Ceremony, and its paean to oral sex with Janis Joplin, Chelsea Hotel No 2). And then there was late-life religion, with 1984’s Various Positions, written after Cohen tried taking “theBodhisattva path, which is the path of service”. “Once you start dealing with sacred material, you’re gonna get creamed,” reflected Cohen. The true poet has to pay a price. Now is the time for his reward. How can the Nobel prize committee say no?

The most gifted songwriters of our time are paying tribute to the Godfather of Gloom this weekend. Fiona Sturges celebrates his enduring appeal

Published : 20 May 2004 The Independent

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.

Among the more distinguished covers of his songs are those by Willie Nelson (“Bird on a Wire”), Jeff Buckley (“Hallelujah”) and REM (“First We Take Manhattan”). There have been tribute albums, too, first from Cohen’s former backing singer Jennifer Warnes with 1987’s Famous Blue Raincoat and then, four years later, by alt.rock stars including REM, Nick Cave and John Cale with the shamelessly titled I’m Your Fan. The Sisters of Mercy took their name from a Cohen song (he really should have sued), while pop noirists such as Morrissey and Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch have both acknowledged his influence. In Krakow, Poland, there is even an annual Leonard Cohen Festival. All this for a man who has the indecency still to be alive.


This weekend the beatification continues with a concert at the Brighton Festival entitled Came So Far For Beauty. Curated by the producer Hal Willner, it sees a host of luminaries including Cave, Laurie Anderson, The Handsome Family, Linda Thompson and the folk siblings Kate and Anna McGarrigle performing versions of their favourite Cohen songs.

Significantly, the line-up also includes Teddy Thompson (son of Richard and Linda) and Rufus Wainwright (offspring of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III), two artists who weren’t born when Cohen was at the height of his powers. Wainwright, a 30-year-old singer-songwriter whose music references such diverse artists as Bob Dylan and Cole Porter, remembers hearing Cohen’s records emanating from his sister Martha’s bedroom. “I was about 14 or 15 at the time and headlong into an opera addiction,” he recalls. “She would play, ‘First We Take Manhattan’ and ‘I’m Your Man’. It really stuck with me. As I became more involved in songwriting and searching for influences I turned back to my roots, which is the city of Montreal, and studied his work.”

For 27-year-old Teddy Thompson, Cohen is “as influential as Bob Dylan, even though our styles are very different. To me, he’s almost like a great movie star – Marlon Brando maybe. He’s so cool and talented that you can’t help adoring him.”

The child of affluent middle-class Jewish parents, Leonard Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934. At 15 he started playing guitar and writing songs; two years later he went to Montreal’s McGill University to study English. After graduating in 1956 he began publishing poetry, and wrote two novels, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). Cohen’s destiny was sealed in 1967 when he supported the folk singer Judy Collins at an anti-Vietnam concert. When he opened his mouth to sing, his nerves got the better of him and he walked off stage. Eventually he was coaxed back, whereupon the crowd fell at his feet. Cohen was swiftly signed up by John Hammond, the man who had signed Dylan, and the following year recorded the much-lauded Songs of Leonard Cohen.

It’s Cohen’s songwriting, say his most ardent fans, that sets him above his contemporaries. “He writes songs that are dense with images,” explains Rennie Sparks, one half of the alt.country duo The Handsome Family. “They read like short stories. There’s a whole history before and after every song. They’re like little snapshots, like a lost photo on the beach all battered and curled up at the sides.”


It was during his years hobnobbing with New York bohos that Cohen found his principal muse: women. He famously wooed the Velvet Underground vamp Nico and, as he indelicately revealed in “Chelsea Hotel”, bedded Janis Joplin (“You gave me head/ On the unmade bed/ While the limousines waited in the street”). Yet Cohen has claimed he didn’t have as nearly much success with the ladies as was rumoured. In an interview three years ago he said his reputation proved a hindrance in forming lasting relationships. “They did not want to be a name on a list,” he grumbled.

Still, it is love, requited or otherwise, that has sustained his songwriting, from Songs of Leonard Cohen through to Songs of Love and Hate, Various Positions and I’m Your Man, to name but a few. “The emotional longing in his songs is almost religious,” says Sparks. “His songs are prayers to God, prayers to himself, prayers to the beloved. I’d love to be able to write in that way. I think of them as nourishing and comforting, they offer something very spiritual.” Cohen’s not for everyone of course. There are those who regard his songs as painful dirges, to be listened to with whisky and bottle of aspirin close to hand. Even Cohen once said that his record company should give razor blades away with his records.

“Well that’s fine with me,” Sparks remarks. “There are many happy songs that I find alien and cold. Cohen writes songs that understand how hard it is to be alive. If he was happy-go-lucky Leonard skipping down the sidewalk, it wouldn’t offer the same kind of comfort. I think he’s one of those poets that needs to be unhappy, that needs a longing for someone. To me, the expression of that longing is true poetry.”

The irony is that, while Cohen remains the crown prince of pain, he has found much to be happy about in his twilight years. “When you stop thinking about yourself,” he said recently, “a certain sense of repose takes over you.” In 1996 he was ordained a Buddhist monk and assumed the name Jikan, “the Silent One”. Nowadays he’s to be found in a Zen-like state on the top of a Californian mountain and, word has it, rises at two every morning to indulge in some lengthy meditation. Remarkably, despite his rigorous regime, he is still free to indulge his twin passions: women and booze.

“Sure, you could say he had his cake and ate it,” muses Wainwright. “But the fact is, he’s a true legend. I really believe he is the greatest living poet on Earth.” Is the prospect of singing his idol’s songs daunting? “No, not at all,” replies Wainwright. “In terms of lyrics, Leonard wins the arm wrestle but let’s just say that my voice is a force to be reckoned with.”

Hal Willner’s Came So Far for Beauty: An Evening of Leonard Cohen Songs, Brighton Dome, Saturday and Sunday (www. brighton-festival. org. uk)

The Joking Troubadour of Gloom
Leonard Cohen, that master of sexy melancholy,
is giving two sell-out concerts in London next month.
And, he tells Tim Rostron, he is feeling fairly cheerful.
By Tim Rostron

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.

In photographs, the face is a picture of hangdog sadness. In the flesh, he never stops smiling.

It is not a huge surprise. Fans have always found Cohen peculiarly uplifting. For them he is an intellectual bluesman who finds liberation in facing up to the awful mess we’re all in. Who finds bleak humour there, too. This aspect of his writing is more conspicuous on his recent records, but for many years he was an underrated purveyor of jokes.

“I’m glad you’ve introduced that word into the conversation,” says Cohen. “I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I’m probably the most cheerful man around. I don’t consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.”

The troubadour of gloom continues: “I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I’ve always been free from hope. It’s never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we’re invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful.” This graduate of McGill University adds: “I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.”

The touts will be smiling when Cohen’s world tour reaches London next month. Tickets for his only two British dates sold out within hours. After years in the doldrums, “I’m hot again,” he beams. His album of 1988, I’m Your Man, was a bigger commercial success than his previous nine put together. Last year’s The Future was less successful, but still did respectably in the charts.

He says of his material: “I said in 1975, these are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood. There has been some kind of interior catastrophe. People no longer feel situated in any recognisable landscape. The landmarks are down, the lights are out. And we find ourselves in some kind of flood, holding on to pieces of orange crate and flag staffs. What is the appropriate salutation in this kind of situation?”

The musical arrangements, though, promise to be upbeat in concert. He is bringing over a band to reproduce the ironically rocking sound of his two latest albums and to remove some of the earlier songs from their stark, nylon-stringed guitar settings. “We have a joke in the band: Orbisonising. That’s is, to take Roy Orbison’s approach to the old tunes.”

With an electric group behind him he will also be able to indulge in another under-celebrated aspect of his work, its sexiness. It is because so many of hyis lyrics come across like chat-up lines, rather than suicide notes, that he became big in bedsits. Lately, this tendency has blossomed in his work. No one growls the word “baby” quite like Cohen.

Cohen, a life-long bachelor and father of two grown-ups, has lately been living in what a press officer calls “an exclusive dating situation” with Rebecca De Mornay, who played the delectable psycho in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Dating has always been an important source of comfort in his art.

The money he is now making must be a consolation, too. He gave up a promising early career as a poet and novelist when he found that he could not make a living even as a bestseller. But there were lean times for him as a rock cult, too: the mid-1970s to mid-1982, for example, when his muse became unreliable and the public came to think of Cohen as his own best joke.

“Well, I have always been able to satisfy the dictum that I set myself, which was not to work for pay but to be paid for my work,” he says. “So I have always been able to make a modest living and send my kids to school and take care of the things that need taking care of. Also it’s protected me from the bitterness that poverty might have engendered.

“As one’s family grows and one’s sense of responsibility grows, yes, you need more money, but I’ve always been drawn by the voluptuousness of austerity. I would say that the sole extravagance that I indulge myself in is caviare. Unfortunately I have developed I won’t say a need, but a taste for caviare.

When not making a rare tour, Cohen spends his days writing. He takes a novelist’s approach to lyrics, producing Wagnerian stacks of verses which then must be pruned down to a performing time of around five minutes. “The verses I discard, I work on as hard as the ones I keep. It’s a curious method and I don’t recommend it to any songwriters.”

Are the records a substitute for the novels he would rather be bringing out? He claims not. He loves songs, he says — the way their meanings “move swiftly from heart to heart”. And come to that, he loves sitting at a desk. “What I liked about the novel was the regime, that foreknowledge of the day, the commitment to the desk.”

He doesn’t love songs enough to buy records, but then he doesn’t need to. “My children (a son, 20, and daughter, 18) buy enormous amounts of them. I do know quite a bit about what’s going on. Some of it’s through watching MTV. A lot of it comes through the walls from my daughter’s room.”

When he is left in complete peace, Cohen bolsters his hopeless contentment by practicing something called Za-Zen. “I made the acquaintance of an old Japanese gentleman many years ago, and we’ve become fast friends, mostly drinking companions of late. And he taught me Za-Zen. It’s sitting without a goal. All the versions of yourself arise if you sit long enough. You tire of them. And when they finally vacate the consciousness, free from answer and free from question, you experience peace. And peace is the embrace of the absolute.” A newcomer to Los Angeles, he is beginning to sound like a native Californian. But he adds reassuringly, “Of course, you can’t stay in that state too long, because you have to eat and you have to go to the washroom.”

And you have to smoke a cigarette. Except that Cohen whose vocal chords have become increasingly kippered over the years, has not touched one throughout the interview. Can he have given up? “Yeah, two years now. And of course, when you give up smoking you give up drinking a great deal too. The pleasures of the bar diminish considerably.” How is he coping? “It’s hell,” he says, deadpan.
The following article appeared in
The Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1993.

The Joking Troubadour of Gloom
Leonard Cohen, that master of sexy melancholy,
is giving two sell-out concerts in London next month.
And, he tells Tim Rostron, he is feeling fairly cheerful.
By Tim Rostron

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.

In photographs, the face is a picture of hangdog sadness. In the flesh, he never stops smiling.

It is not a huge surprise. Fans have always found Cohen peculiarly uplifting. For them he is an intellectual bluesman who finds liberation in facing up to the awful mess we’re all in. Who finds bleak humour there, too. This aspect of his writing is more conspicuous on his recent records, but for many years he was an underrated purveyor of jokes.

“I’m glad you’ve introduced that word into the conversation,” says Cohen. “I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I’m probably the most cheerful man around. I don’t consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.”

The troubadour of gloom continues: “I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I’ve always been free from hope. It’s never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we’re invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful.” This graduate of McGill University adds: “I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.”

The touts will be smiling when Cohen’s world tour reaches London next month. Tickets for his only two British dates sold out within hours. After years in the doldrums, “I’m hot again,” he beams. His album of 1988, I’m Your Man, was a bigger commercial success than his previous nine put together. Last year’s The Future was less successful, but still did respectably in the charts.

He says of his material: “I said in 1975, these are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood. There has been some kind of interior catastrophe. People no longer feel situated in any recognisable landscape. The landmarks are down, the lights are out. And we find ourselves in some kind of flood, holding on to pieces of orange crate and flag staffs. What is the appropriate salutation in this kind of situation?”

The musical arrangements, though, promise to be upbeat in concert. He is bringing over a band to reproduce the ironically rocking sound of his two latest albums and to remove some of the earlier songs from their stark, nylon-stringed guitar settings. “We have a joke in the band: Orbisonising. That’s is, to take Roy Orbison’s approach to the old tunes.”

With an electric group behind him he will also be able to indulge in another under-celebrated aspect of his work, its sexiness. It is because so many of hyis lyrics come across like chat-up lines, rather than suicide notes, that he became big in bedsits. Lately, this tendency has blossomed in his work. No one growls the word “baby” quite like Cohen.

Cohen, a life-long bachelor and father of two grown-ups, has lately been living in what a press officer calls “an exclusive dating situation” with Rebecca De Mornay, who played the delectable psycho in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Dating has always been an important source of comfort in his art.

The money he is now making must be a consolation, too. He gave up a promising early career as a poet and novelist when he found that he could not make a living even as a bestseller. But there were lean times for him as a rock cult, too: the mid-1970s to mid-1982, for example, when his muse became unreliable and the public came to think of Cohen as his own best joke.

“Well, I have always been able to satisfy the dictum that I set myself, which was not to work for pay but to be paid for my work,” he says. “So I have always been able to make a modest living and send my kids to school and take care of the things that need taking care of. Also it’s protected me from the bitterness that poverty might have engendered.

“As one’s family grows and one’s sense of responsibility grows, yes, you need more money, but I’ve always been drawn by the voluptuousness of austerity. I would say that the sole extravagance that I indulge myself in is caviare. Unfortunately I have developed I won’t say a need, but a taste for caviare.

When not making a rare tour, Cohen spends his days writing. He takes a novelist’s approach to lyrics, producing Wagnerian stacks of verses which then must be pruned down to a performing time of around five minutes. “The verses I discard, I work on as hard as the ones I keep. It’s a curious method and I don’t recommend it to any songwriters.”

Are the records a substitute for the novels he would rather be bringing out? He claims not. He loves songs, he says — the way their meanings “move swiftly from heart to heart”. And come to that, he loves sitting at a desk. “What I liked about the novel was the regime, that foreknowledge of the day, the commitment to the desk.”

He doesn’t love songs enough to buy records, but then he doesn’t need to. “My children (a son, 20, and daughter, 18) buy enormous amounts of them. I do know quite a bit about what’s going on. Some of it’s through watching MTV. A lot of it comes through the walls from my daughter’s room.”

When he is left in complete peace, Cohen bolsters his hopeless contentment by practicing something called Za-Zen. “I made the acquaintance of an old Japanese gentleman many years ago, and we’ve become fast friends, mostly drinking companions of late. And he taught me Za-Zen. It’s sitting without a goal. All the versions of yourself arise if you sit long enough. You tire of them. And when they finally vacate the consciousness, free from answer and free from question, you experience peace. And peace is the embrace of the absolute.” A newcomer to Los Angeles, he is beginning to sound like a native Californian. But he adds reassuringly, “Of course, you can’t stay in that state too long, because you have to eat and you have to go to the washroom.”

And you have to smoke a cigarette. Except that Cohen whose vocal chords have become increasingly kippered over the years, has not touched one throughout the interview. Can he have given up? “Yeah, two years now. And of course, when you give up smoking you give up drinking a great deal too. The pleasures of the bar diminish considerably.” How is he coping? “It’s hell,” he says, deadpan.
The following article appeared in
The Daily Telegraph, April 26, 1993.

The Joking Troubadour of Gloom
Leonard Cohen, that master of sexy melancholy,
is giving two sell-out concerts in London next month.
And, he tells Tim Rostron, he is feeling fairly cheerful.
By Tim Rostron

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.

In photographs, the face is a picture of hangdog sadness. In the flesh, he never stops smiling.

It is not a huge surprise. Fans have always found Cohen peculiarly uplifting. For them he is an intellectual bluesman who finds liberation in facing up to the awful mess we’re all in. Who finds bleak humour there, too. This aspect of his writing is more conspicuous on his recent records, but for many years he was an underrated purveyor of jokes.

“I’m glad you’ve introduced that word into the conversation,” says Cohen. “I am so often accused of gloominess and melancholy. And I think I’m probably the most cheerful man around. I don’t consider myself a pessimist at all. I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain. And I feel completely soaked to the skin.”

The troubadour of gloom continues: “I think those descriptions of me are quite inappropriate to the gravity of the predicament that faces us all. I’ve always been free from hope. It’s never been one of my great solaces. I feel that more and more we’re invited to make ourselves strong and cheerful.” This graduate of McGill University adds: “I think that it was Ben Jonson who said, I have studied all the theologies and all the philosophies, but cheerfulness keeps breaking through.”

The touts will be smiling when Cohen’s world tour reaches London next month. Tickets for his only two British dates sold out within hours. After years in the doldrums, “I’m hot again,” he beams. His album of 1988, I’m Your Man, was a bigger commercial success than his previous nine put together. Last year’s The Future was less successful, but still did respectably in the charts.

He says of his material: “I said in 1975, these are the final days, this is the darkness, this is the flood. There has been some kind of interior catastrophe. People no longer feel situated in any recognisable landscape. The landmarks are down, the lights are out. And we find ourselves in some kind of flood, holding on to pieces of orange crate and flag staffs. What is the appropriate salutation in this kind of situation?”

The musical arrangements, though, promise to be upbeat in concert. He is bringing over a band to reproduce the ironically rocking sound of his two latest albums and to remove some of the earlier songs from their stark, nylon-stringed guitar settings. “We have a joke in the band: Orbisonising. That’s is, to take Roy Orbison’s approach to the old tunes.”

With an electric group behind him he will also be able to indulge in another under-celebrated aspect of his work, its sexiness. It is because so many of hyis lyrics come across like chat-up lines, rather than suicide notes, that he became big in bedsits. Lately, this tendency has blossomed in his work. No one growls the word “baby” quite like Cohen.


Cohen, a life-long bachelor and father of two grown-ups, has lately been living in what a press officer calls “an exclusive dating situation” with Rebecca De Mornay, who played the delectable psycho in The Hand that Rocks the Cradle. Dating has always been an important source of comfort in his art.

The money he is now making must be a consolation, too. He gave up a promising early career as a poet and novelist when he found that he could not make a living even as a bestseller. But there were lean times for him as a rock cult, too: the mid-1970s to mid-1982, for example, when his muse became unreliable and the public came to think of Cohen as his own best joke.

“Well, I have always been able to satisfy the dictum that I set myself, which was not to work for pay but to be paid for my work,” he says. “So I have always been able to make a modest living and send my kids to school and take care of the things that need taking care of. Also it’s protected me from the bitterness that poverty might have engendered.

“As one’s family grows and one’s sense of responsibility grows, yes, you need more money, but I’ve always been drawn by the voluptuousness of austerity. I would say that the sole extravagance that I indulge myself in is caviare. Unfortunately I have developed I won’t say a need, but a taste for caviare.

When not making a rare tour, Cohen spends his days writing. He takes a novelist’s approach to lyrics, producing Wagnerian stacks of verses which then must be pruned down to a performing time of around five minutes. “The verses I discard, I work on as hard as the ones I keep. It’s a curious method and I don’t recommend it to any songwriters.”

Are the records a substitute for the novels he would rather be bringing out? He claims not. He loves songs, he says — the way their meanings “move swiftly from heart to heart”. And come to that, he loves sitting at a desk. “What I liked about the novel was the regime, that foreknowledge of the day, the commitment to the desk.”

He doesn’t love songs enough to buy records, but then he doesn’t need to. “My children (a son, 20, and daughter, 18) buy enormous amounts of them. I do know quite a bit about what’s going on. Some of it’s through watching MTV. A lot of it comes through the walls from my daughter’s room.”

When he is left in complete peace, Cohen bolsters his hopeless contentment by practicing something called Za-Zen. “I made the acquaintance of an old Japanese gentleman many years ago, and we’ve become fast friends, mostly drinking companions of late. And he taught me Za-Zen. It’s sitting without a goal. All the versions of yourself arise if you sit long enough. You tire of them. And when they finally vacate the consciousness, free from answer and free from question, you experience peace. And peace is the embrace of the absolute.” A newcomer to Los Angeles, he is beginning to sound like a native Californian. But he adds reassuringly, “Of course, you can’t stay in that state too long, because you have to eat and you have to go to the washroom.”

And you have to smoke a cigarette. Except that Cohen whose vocal chords have become increasingly kippered over the years, has not touched one throughout the interview. Can he have given up? “Yeah, two years now. And of course, when you give up smoking you give up drinking a great deal too. The pleasures of the bar diminish considerably.” How is he coping? “It’s hell,” he says, deadpan.

Ian McCulloch (Echo and the Bunnymen)

Sunday February 3, 2002
The Observer

For me, the perfect song is ‘Suzanne’, by Leonard Cohen. The perfect lyric with the perfect melody. I can’t see a fault in it. The first time I heard it, I thought, ‘Whoaa.’ I was about 14 or 15 and I’d seen the Bird on a Wire documentary about him at the pictures. He was so cool and it was my kind of music and I went straight out to get his albums. Then I went back to my mum’s house and waited for it to get dark before I played them. That song is just so instant. It goes through my soul; it’s like that bit in Poltergeist when the mother’s coming down the stairs and she feels this rush of this kid’s spirit going through her. It’s great when a song just comes at you like that.


Now ‘Suzanne’ really reminds me of Canada, I think he must’ve written it while he was still there. There’s a certain vibe in Canada that’s so different from America; I mean it’s only a border away, but I love that Canadian thing. It’s great. I suddenly start feeling like Leonard Cohen when I go there.

Meeting him really lived up to expectations. I’ve met the top four now: Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Iggy and Lou Reed. They have been the guiding lights in my life. Leonard was the one I met last and I crumbled, I was so nervous. It was a crowded hotel bar and Elvis Costello was there. I don’t know how many pints I’d had when Leonard Cohen walked in. I said ‘Elvis lad, he’s here…’ and he said, ‘Well, go and say hello,’ and I said, ‘I can’t, I’m really nervous,’ and he said, ‘Go ‘ead, you’ll regret it if you don’t.’ So, I followed him to the bar and he looked lost, he was in his fifties, his suit was crumpled, but he looked great. And I said, ‘Hello, I think you’re great.’ He was brilliant. He said, ‘Ian, people tell me you’re a great poet,’ and I said, ‘No, you are!’.

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.

Nick Paton Walsh
Sunday October 14, 2001
The Observer

Leonard Cohen is the high priest of pathos. His voice exudes misery. A suicidal Kurt Cobain, when describing the most melancholic place imaginable, in his dirge ‘Penny Royal Tea’, sang of a ‘Leonard Cohen afterworld’ where he could ’sigh eternally’. Cohen is used to this reputation. Even the 67-year-old singer says his record company should give razor blades away with his records.

But two years ago, for no apparent reason, the veil of depression lifted. For the first time in his life, Cohen sighed, looked out on the world and felt at peace with it.

‘There was just a certain sweetness to daily life that began asserting itself. I remember sitting in the corner of my kitchen, which has a window overlooking the street. I saw the sunlight that shines on the chrome fenders of the cars, and thought, “Gee, that’s pretty.”

‘I said to myself, “Wow, this must be like everybody feels.” Life became not easier but simpler. The backdrop of self-analysis I had lived with disappeared. It’s like that joke: “When you’re hitting your head against a brick wall, it feels good when it stops”.’
Leonard Cohen


Leonard Cohen
It was a remarkably late epiphany. Cohen had spent the past 50 years ploughing his way through drugs, drink, countless women and several religions in an attempt to find release from this ‘backdrop’ of self-doubt. But the cure was more simple – he learned to ignore himself.

‘When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you. It happened to me by imperceptible degrees and I could not really believe it; I could not really claim it for some time. I thought there must be something wrong. It’s like taking a drink of cold water when you are thirsty. Every tastebud on your tongue, every molecule in your body says thank you.’

Cohen’s enlightenment did not come overnight. Since early adolescence, a sadness he can only attribute to an unexplained ‘biological reason’ has afflicted him. Over a recording career spanning 33 years, he tried all drugs – emotional, illegal and medicinal. Prozac made him feel ’spiritually superior’, but proved incompatible with his lifestyle: it killed his libido. Instead, when Cohen finished touring his last album, 1992’s the Future, he decided to devote his time to his favourite drug – the Buddhist faith.

For nearly three decades, Cohen had been following the ways of the Za-Zen Buddhists. His teacher, a Za-Zen master called Old Roshi, lives and runs a Buddhist retreat on Mount Baldy, a mountain near Cohen’s LA home. Cohen explains that Roshi is 25 years his senior: ‘I thought I’d take that opportunity to hang with him while he’s still around,’ he says.

He has another sip of coffee, lights another Marlboro Light, and wriggles his toes inside his pair of comfortable brown slippers. Despite the gruelling years, Cohen is immensely relaxed, a light grin stretching across his tanned face. His arms are thin, his frame fragile, but he radiates Californian healthiness, like no 67-year-old should. He seems content, both with his new record, Ten New Songs, and – judging by the slippers and the silk tie clipped delicately behind his tailored pinstripe suit – his daily luxuries. What attraction could such a sparse lifestyle have to a man who accompanies most new sentences with a freshly lit cigarette?

‘I was interested in surrendering to that kind of routine. If you surrender to the schedule, and get used to its demands, it is a great luxury not to have to think about what you are doing next.’

Cohen’s passion for routine is evident as he describes with relish and in detail the sparse, rigorous regime of the monk: the early rise, the chanting before dawn and the hours spent motionless in the meditation hall. In winter, when meditation can last for days, monks roam around on the look-out for those who have succumbed to asleep. The remainder of the time is given to keeping the retreat tidy – to ‘maintenance, painting, repairing pipes and making candles’. Among Cohen’s duties at the retreat was cooking for his master. For his part, Roshi had the job of naming his followers.

‘He named me “Jikan” after one of his teachers that he liked very much. I was thankful for that but I never quite figured out what it meant. He doesn’t speak English very well, Old Roshi. He’d say it meant “normal silence; ordinary silence”.’

‘Much of the time, Roshi and I were two buddies drinking. He likes sake, I tried to convert him to French wine, but he was very resistant. But we both agree about Cognac and Scotch.’

While Roshi maintained much of the discipline of a Japanese Zen monastery, some elements of the retreat, including the booze marathons, were tailored to the varied life of LA. Women were allowed. Cohen was permitted to wake up half an hour before everyone else, at 2.30am, to brew coffee and have a few cigarettes.

‘I always consider myself an extremely bad monk – a sloppy monk, compared to some of the very admirable people up there. Real monks. I have been associated with that community for more than 30 years. It’s an existence where the emphasis is on the ordinary. But it’s the least-easy place to lose track of time in. During the day, you hear bells and they tell you to go somewhere – that’s the nature of those places. They are kind of hospitals for the broken-hearted and for people who have forgotten how to walk and talk. It wasn’t just touring that left me feeling this way. I often do.’

Yet the routine, laden with drink as it was, began to gnaw away at some of the self-obsession and analysis that had dogged his past 50 years in the spotlight.

‘In one of these dreary Zen meditation halls,’ he explains, ‘it is a Zen practice to invite you to sit motionless for long hours, with an officer patrolling the meditation hall to strike you with a stick several times on each shoulder if you nod off. If you sit there long enough, you run through all the alternative ways the events in your life could have turned out. After a while, the activity of thinking, that interior chatter, begins to subside from time to time. And what rushes in, in the same way that light rushes into a room when you switch on the light, is another kind of mood that overtakes you.

‘Also, I read somewhere that as you get older the brain cells associated with anxiety begin to die. So, I might have saved myself the rigours of monastic life if I had just waited until it happened.’

Cohen is a master of polite evasion. He will parry a difficult question with a quip amusing enough to make you forget what you asked. He is most touchy and evasive when it comes to women. And, for the first time in years, a man who built a reputation and image out of womanising is single. Is there a correlation between his singledom and happiness?

‘To be accurate, I would not want to be as deliberate as that. But I never discuss my mistresses or my tailors,’ he says. Despite the overwhelming evidence of his past, Cohen insists on talking only about his platonic relationships with women – with his producer, Sharon Robertson, and engineer, Leanne Ungar. And then, his eyebrows raised in the hope I will share his astonishment, he declares how history has misjudged his image as a cad.

‘I’m not involved with anybody. I read with some amusement my reputation as a ladies’ man. My friends are amused by that, too, because they know my life. Even when I was younger I was never aware of it, to tell the truth, so I could not take advantage of it. But for someone who has that sort of reputation and has spent so many nights alone, it has a special bitter amusement attached to it.

‘You know,’ he adds, ‘that reputation has not served me well. There are women whom I have wanted to meet who have declined any interest in my company simply because of my reputation, simply because they did not want to be a name on a list.’


Today, Cohen, who once roomed with Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and romanced Rebecca de Mornay and the Velvet Underground vamp Nico (at separate times), maintains the dull regime of an eccentric LA pensioner. Each morning he gets up and puts on a suit, even if he’s doing the laundry that day. Then he makes coffee for Lorca (his second child by Suzanne), who lives in the flat below his. When he was recording the record at home, his producer and engineer would arrive at midday. They would work, then he would make what they refer to as ‘the meanest tuna salad sandwich in North America’. Dull.

But his slippers aside, there is little in the appearance of Cohen to suggest his fire has gone out. His eyes remain mischievous. Instead, he insists, life is eventless through choice. With relish, he confesses: ‘I don’t get out much’. It is little surprise that after half a century of depression, drugs and danger ous women, the domesticity of tuna salad sandwiches appeals.

Leonard Cohen was born to affluent middle-class Jewish parents in 1934 in Montreal, and considers his childhood ‘very decent’, with ‘none of the trauma that I hear associated with other people’s childhoods’. His father died when he was nine, leaving Cohen a considerable inheritance. Weeks after burying him, the young Leonard took one of his father’s bow ties and a scrap of paper with a few lines of verse on it. He wrapped the paper in the tie and buried it in the garden.

‘It was just a singular gesture,’ he recalls dismissively, when I mention how his biographers have suggested this was the first act of the ‘artist within’. ‘I don’t know why I did that.’

At 15, he started playing the guitar, collecting folk songs and writing them. At 17, he moved to Montreal’s McGill University, where he excelled in English, and two years later he formed his first band, the Buckskin Boys. This was Cohen and two friends wearing their father’s buckskin jackets and fake ponytails, playing square dances at church halls. ‘I guess [my attraction to music] comes from not being able to do anything else very well. I found I had some gift for it and, with these little songs I wrote, I could impress myself and others – including girls. That’s the hormonal rage that cannot be ignored.’

Cohen was held in check at first by the quiet Jewish enclave around him. But after graduating from McGill in 1956, and publishing a book of poems dedicated to his late father, he found a place on a postgraduate course at Columbia University, in the thriving heart of New York’s Manhattan. Within months, his ‘rage’ had established itself in the city, Cohen spinning in and out of three different romances – with a fellow student, a care worker at a nearby children’s summer camp, and the same camp’s nurse.

He was also becoming a prolific poet. But soon Cohen sought a retreat from city life, and moved to the Aegean island Hydra – the first Mount Baldy of his life. He used part of his inheritance to buy a house among a small community of Western writers. He wooed Marianne, the girlfriend of Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen, and with her on his arm, Hydra became a haven where he cherished the detachment of an expatriate.

‘Two years ago, I went there for the first time in decades,’ he recalls. ‘I was able to finish a great number of these songs that I had begun up Mount Baldy. It really is a tranquil place. When I went, there was an English lord who spoke fluent Greek. He said: “I have one word of advice for you. Don’t learn Greek.” I think he meant preserve your tourist status and it will remain a tranquil place.’ But Cohen was never much good at holding himself back. He came back to LA knowing basic Greek.

In October 1966 Cohen threw himself again at New York, with his Hydra lover still in tow. It was the time of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and The Beatles’ Help! Liz Taylor won an Oscar for her role in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the number of US troops in Vietnam doubled to 380,000. The 60s were passing the point of no return, and Cohen found himself at its cultural epicentre, amid the debauchery and experimentation of the notorious Chelsea Hotel in New York.

‘It was dangerous to accept a potato chip at a cocktail party then,’ he grins. ‘I speak literally. It could be sprinkled with acid. I went to somebody’s room who was having a cocktail party, had a few chips, and four days later was still trying to find my room.’

He found himself part of one of the most creative, eclectic hotel corridors imaginable. The poet Allen Ginsberg – whom he describes as ‘the sweetest man’ – dropped in, as did Beat writer Jack Kerouac. Warhol hung around. But the sense of momentum and historical import of what was happening around him was not apparent. People were just doing their thing. ‘I knew that the singers I liked were very good. Dylan, Baez, Collins, Mitchell – I knew them all and thought they were good at an extremely high level. What their fate would be in the world didn’t even enter my mind.’

Cohen’s own future took off one night in 1967 when he supported Judy Collins, the 60s folk singer, at an anti-Vietnam war concert at New York Town Hall. When he took the stage, his guitar was out of tune, his voice froze to a whimper and he ran to the wings with stage fright. He was terrified. But both Collins and the chanting crowd persuaded him to take the microphone again. As soon as he did, they loved him. He was signed to Columbia records by a maverick talent scout, John Hammond, the A&R man who had taken similar ‘risks’ on unknowns Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan. Cohen’s debut album, 68s Songs of Leonard Cohen, was soon on the shelves. It left few doubts as to Cohen’s main inspiration – women – containing, perhaps a little uncharitably, a song about his long-suffering love from Hydra, ‘So Long Marianne’, but beginning with an ode to a newer flame, Suzanne.

The 32-year-old Cohen liked variety. He befriended Lou Reed, who introduced him to the decade’s most enigmatic blonde, Nico. And his frustrated attempts to snare her would also prove inspiration for a song called ‘Take This Longing’. ‘She was great,’ he recalls. ‘The first time I saw her she was singing in a little club in the East Village, called the Dom. It had been decorated by Warhol with aluminium foil all over the walls. She had this beautiful deep monotone and I just drew closer and closer to her. And, erm, she was not remotely interested in me. But we became great friends over the years, although there were many more attractive men that she had her eye on. I remember going to one of Jim Morrison’s first concerts in America. It was very early on in their career, and I went with her. She asked me to leave without her because she wanted to stay behind. But I was a tough old bird by then. I was used to it.’

As the novelty of New York wore off, Cohen’s career fell into a comfortable pattern of record releases and tours. The year after, Suzanne gave birth to their son, Adam, Cohen sought to broaden his horizons and briefly flew to Tel Aviv to lend his hand in the Yom Kippur war between Israel and Egypt. His plan – a stint in the Israeli army – soon fell by the wayside, and he was seconded to entertain the troops instead. He eventually fled to Ethiopia.

The bad times continued, Cohen returning to Zen Buddhism and serious periods of fasting. At 41, his career as a youthful folk icon was drawing to an end. He had begun as an independently wealthy young Jew, who moved to the Big Apple and wrote poems. By this stage in his career he was worn out emotionally and creatively. Evidently his depression was not the passing fad of an aesthete born into privilege, but rooted in something more fundamental that had been apparent since his father’s death.

Over the next 12 years, Cohen tried to keep his mind on Buddhism and away from drink and drugs. By 1977, he hit a low. It was then that a vulnerable Cohen unwisely attempted his first co-written record, called Death of a Ladies’ Man in keeping with his Lothario image. Even more unwisely, he chose to team up with legendary but eccentric – and, in these sessions, armed – Phil Spector.

‘The time we worked together, one to one, was very pleasant,’ he begins, diplomatically. ‘Except for the climate. He insisted on having the air conditioning set to 40 F all day. I have no idea why he did that. He must have been suffering as much as I was.’

‘He is a very hospitable man,’ Cohen continues. ‘It was when other people were around in the recording studio that he seemed to move into his Mr Hyde period. One day he had a bottle of wine in one hand and a 35mm pistol in the other. He put his arm around my shoulder, pressed the muzzle into my neck and said, “Leonard, I love you.” At which point I said: “I hope you really do, Phil.”‘

Eventually, Spector’s entourage began to take over the sessions, and without a private army of his own to impose his way, Cohen lost control and interest. ‘I was in one of those moments where I really couldn’t order my personal life either. It was a time of great chaos and distress. Had I been in better shape myself I probably could have navigated the session a little better. Although Phil’s an expert in karate, I might have taken him…’

It took eight years for Cohen to find his form again. In 1985 came Various Positions, with one of his most rapturously bleak songs, ‘Hallelujah’. Za-Zen was beginning to steer him away from his addictions and help him reignite an ailing sense of humour. Three years later came ‘I’m Your Man’. Its dry wit and nagging hooks proved the perfect antidote to the decade’s extravagance, as did Cohen’s persona. At the time, the record industry was awash with scandals about radio stations taking bribes to play singles. When Cohen released the single ‘Ain’t No Cure For Love’, he posted two dollars to his record company promoters, in the hope it would help.

There was a playful humour throughout ‘I’m Your Man’, which helped secure the record’s rise up the charts. It became something of a trademark for him in the 80s. The acerbic wit was still there, but with fewer tunes, on 1992’s big-selling The Future . But why the absence of jokes on this new record?

‘There’s a couple of jokes,’ he insists. ‘There’s the lyric: “I don’t trust inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go”.’ He grins peevishly.

Yet in the new album, Ten New Songs, Cohen seems to have reinvented himself. Gone is the anxiety of the last 50 years, and the one-liners of the past decade. In its place is contentment and a much more considered set of worries.

On the album’s opener, ‘My Secret Life’, Cohen sounds as if he has found a life of ease and fufilment. The song does not make it clear whether this ‘life’ was up Mount Baldy, or is at home with his daughter in LA, or even a mix of the two. But Cohen purrs over a very civilised backing track. It is almost upbeat.

‘There’s a sense of relaxation in the tunes that comes through, there’s a kind of pulse, an invitation to get into it – a groove. A lot of people have danced to it,’ he insists, before correcting himself. ‘Erm, well, actually, one person. And she was erm, an executive of Sony in France, and she’s a trained dancer.’

But the bugbears remain, perhaps not as all-consuming as before. There’s a withering look at America today, as in the closing ‘Land of Plenty’, where he hopes the downtown streetlights will ’shine on the truth some day’. And on occasion, Cohen sounds a little aged, a little fragile, as in the sobering lyric ‘the night is getting colder’. Is he at last feeling mortal?

‘I don’t think much about [death], but in a certain stage in your life it becomes very clear that your time is not unlimited. Tennessee Williams said: “Life is a fairly well-written play, except for the third act.” I’m maybe at the third act, where you have the benefit of the experience of the first two acts. But how it ends is nobody’s business and is generally accompanied by some disagreeable circumstances.’

Perhaps Cohen, more at ease and relaxed with a world that used to puzzle and frustrate him to distraction, has decided to enjoy his days all the more now he realises they may not be endless. He shakes his head, as if unable to believe the reformed, cheery Cohen could write about mortality.

‘Did I really do that? On this last one? That must have slipped by my optimism filter.’

· Ten New Songs , by Leonard Cohen, is released tomorrow.