Leonard Cohen was someone who appreciated the power of music, even the music one doesn’t necessarily like. He was interviewed for the Guardian by Mat Snow in 1988. In the conversation, Mat quoted Martin Amis’s description of Simon & Garfunkel’s music being not so much art as therapy, prompting this response from Cohen:
I think that’s a rather mean-spirited approach to a man’s work. Everything can be diminished from this point of view. If you don’t like something and think it’s cheap, unless you really have a great sense of responsibility for your culture, I think it’s best to keep it to yourself. That might be the song that gets someone through a dark hour. He wouldn’t say that about Bach. There’s something elitist and snotty about that kind of remark.”
Here’s the second of Alexis Petridis’s key Cohen songs: Famous Blue Raincoat.
Understandably, given that he was a poet long before he picked up the guitar – and that his words are so rich and rewarding – attention tends to focus on Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, which occasionally means that his skill as a writer of music tends to get overlooked. But he was a brilliant melodicist: all those talent show contestants belting out Hallelujah aren’t doing so because they’re enraptured by its references to the Book of Judges. Famous Blue Raincoat, form his stark, intense third album, 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate, is a perfect example: the dark, epistolary evocation of a love triangle is perfectly augmented by a tune rooted not in rock or pop or folk music, but in the French chanson tradition. The moment where the melody rises up on the line ‘Jane came by with a lock of your hair’ is one of the loveliest in Cohen’s catalogue. He clearly knew the song’s power. It was still unreleased when he chose it to end his set at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, perhaps the most famous and celebrated live performance of his career, during which he singlehandedly mesmerised a restless audience of half a million.”
And from another generation, my colleague Alexandra Topping recalls another appearance at a festival …
I remember the first time I heard Leonard Cohen. My dad was doing his tax return late at night when I got in, crouched over his desk, almost in the dark. I was just transfixed. What’s this, I asked? He looked at me like I was an imbecile: ‘This, megirl, is Leonard Cohen.’ He mocked, but lent me the CD Songs of Leonard Cohen. I played it on repeat for about two weeks solid.
Eight years after my dad died, me and my mum were lucky enough to go to Glastonbury at the same time. Leonard Cohen had been ripped off by his former manager and so had to tour again. We were lucky enough to wait in front of the Pyramid stage from the morning, taking it in turns to go for drinks and keeping our spot. When he came on stage, my mum turned into a young girl again. And as those songs of poetry and passion came forth, we clung on to each other, singing every word along with him, like the thousands of others around us. We cherished every word, every bow, every tip of the hat. We were so elated.
It is – and I’m sure it will remain – one of my most cherished memories. I feel so sad today, but so thankful that this artist helped me create these moments with my parents. RIP Leonard Cohen.
Here’s a lovely memory from the Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy of seeing Cohen at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970.
We’ll all have our memories and associations. I remember seeing him play at the Isle of Wight, August 1970. Shortly before dawn with 600,000 other people: a scene of vast, exhausted elation along ‘Devastation Hill’ (we’d had Miles Davis, the Who, Doors, Joni Mitchell, Hendrix, Joan Baez, etc) … Leonard Cohen recalled a time his father took him to the circus as a boy, where a clown had asked everyone in the audience to light a match – and he bade Devastation Hill to do just that: so that a sea of little flames illuminated the night, along the escarpment, far as the eye could see from among the grime, soiled sleeping bags and euphoria. Then he played: The Partisan, Suzanne, the lot.”
Alexis Petridis has been picking five key Leonard Cohen songs
We’re going to roll them out gradually. His first is Suzanne …
There’s a sense in which the contents of 1967’s The Songs Of Leonard Cohen attested to the fact that its author was already 33 years old when it was released. For all Cohen’s apparent inexperienced discomfort in the studio (and subsequent dismissal of its ‘overproduced’ arrangements, possibly influenced by the fact that, incredibly, it received a lukewarm critical response on release), it sounded more like a mature record than a neophyte’s debut; it came packed with tracks that would go on to become standards, covered by everyone from Beck to Nina Simone: Sisters of Mercy; Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye; So Long Marianne;, Suzanne. For decades, it seemed like the latter would always be Cohen’s most famous and definitive song. What’s striking about it now is how little over-familiarity has dulled its impact: its subtly infectious mood of small hours introspection, its understated depiction of the broiling emotions lurking beneath a platonic but charged relationship with someone else’s partner have never lost their potency.”
The story of Leonard Cohen and his muse, Marianne Ihlen, has been well told. Earlier this year, he wrote a letter to her, as she was dying. The reply is beautiful and moving.
