At the end, Leonard Cohen was not just a great artist but an exemplary presence, a person of warmth and humour and gentility. Having catalogued humanity’s sins, he recognised that there had to be a crack in everything for the light to shine through. On the way, he was robbed of his money and, temporarily, of the spiritual refuge that, as an old man, he must have believed he deserved – so he went on the road again, a slight, birdlike figure who could still command a stage, an artist whose moral strength seemed unfathomable. Like his countryman, Glenn Gould, returning just before he died to make a stunning and utterly new interpretation of the work that made his reputation (Bach’s Goldberg Variations), Cohen revisited the old songs. While the process was usually gentle and sometimes only audible to the most dedicated listeners, he added a new warmth, a hint of antique gold that, as he tipped his hat and walked off-stage, nobody could doubt he had earned.
And yet, for all that, he never forgot the essential story that he had come to tell: a narrative of bewildered love and genuine loss that, even while it shredded the listener’s heart, also satisfied some marrow-deep, perverse need to settle for nothing but the authentic. For Cohen, as for the great European poets he so admired, everything in life that was authentic was a single entity, a fabric of mixed emotions and contradictions that could not be reconciled in a pretty lie. His key song is “Famous Blue Raincoat”, perhaps the most beautiful song of friendship and rivalry ever written. Though he explored similar ground in his novels (Beautiful Losers and The Favourite Game, both of which are due for some serious re-evaluation), this is the song that has haunted me ever since I first heard it, in 1971. I still remember the moment when, home from the one record shop in my steel-milling home-town in the Midlands, light years away from “the music on Clinton Street”, I put Songs of Love and Hate on the turntable and one great song after another – masterpieces every one – tumbled into my more or less innocent head. “Avalanche.” “Last Year’s Man.” “Dress Rehearsal Rag.” “Diamonds in the Mine.” Flip the record over. “Love Calls You by Your Name.” “Famous Blue Raincoat. “Let’s Sing Another Song, Boys” and, finally “Joan of Arc”. Was there ever an album so consistently fine, or so doggedly honest?
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