Leonard Cohen may have been dark but he brought colour into my life - Richard Godwin

The legendary singer painted such morbid pictures but for so many fans he gave comfort and guidance
Philosophical: Leonard Cohen had been dealing with his own mortality for years
Evening Standard
Richard Godwin11 November 2016
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It's been a bad year — as gratuitous in its cruelties as a bad horror film. A succession of liars and haters sneer triumphant; a succession of poets and lovers died or departed. “I’ve seen the future, baby, and it’s murder,” as Leonard Cohen sang in more innocent times. And then he left us too.

Cohen’s death at 82 was announced yesterday in Los Angeles. A statement appeared on his Facebook page, the existence of which would surely have prompted a beatific smile from him: “It is with profound sorrow we report that legendary poet, songwriter and artist Leonard Cohen has passed away.”

It comes as less of a surprise than the deaths of David Bowie or Prince. Like Bowie, Cohen had recently issued an album — the authentic late-phase masterpiece You Want It Darker — that deals explicitly with his own mortality, but he was rather more up front about it. Earlier this year he learned that his old muse, Marianne Ihlen, was dying and in a letter said: “I think I will follow you very soon.” And just last month he told The New Yorker editor David Remnick “I am ready to die” in the course of a remarkable profile also featuring a lengthy tribute from the laconic Bob Dylan, who considers him his nearest rival.

But then again, Cohen has been dealing explicitly with his own mortality from the cradle. Born in a well-to-do Jewish suburb of Montreal, he had youthful ambitions to be either an illusionist or a rabbi. Before he had released a note himself, Judy Collins had covered his most morbid song, Dress Rehearsal Rag. And the fact that his Zen Buddhist mentor, Joshu Sasaki Roshi, lived to be 107, did raise the hopes.

The tributes make it clear: Cohen just cut deeper and darker and differently. He recorded his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, in 1967, when he was 34 and already a poet and novelist of international reputation (my mother recalls her own mother confiscating his novel, Beautiful Losers, for its lewd language). As such, there are many critics who persist in the strange snobbery that his songs are really poetry, as if removing the canvas ever made a painting make more sense.

Leonard Cohen - in pictures

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And pop music is a funny thing. Elvis Presley is pop. Zayn Malik is pop. Lana Del Rey is pop. But Leonard Cohen is also pop. “I always loved rock’n’roll,” he said. “I remember the first time I heard Presley, how relieved and grateful I was that all this stuff he and all of us had been feeling for so long had finally found a particular form of expression.” Sex, death and transcendence; even if Cohen alternated a harbourside romance with Jesus watching from his lonely wooden tower, he was dealing with the same conditions. And while derided by cynics at many points (the NME mocked him as “Laughing Len” throughout the Seventies), he did achieve authentic pop success. Even Hallelujah’s latter-day re-invention as a vehicle for talent-show contestants couldn’t dim its effect — and in 2008 Cohen had the Christmas No 1.

He also had charm and a graciousness. One cherishable story: leafing through The Los Angeles Times in the mid-Eighties, he spied a personal ad from a woman asking for a lover “With the soul of Leonard Cohen and the animal magnetism of Iggy Pop”. Cohen phoned Iggy Pop and proposed that the pair of them compose the lady a joint response.

And he was kind. His son Adam — who crafted the sympathetic arrangements on You Want It Darker — has paid tribute to the efforts he made to be around, even if his efforts as a ladies’ man didn’t always make that straightforward. At one point he brought a trailer and parked it near Adam’s childhood home in France, where he was banned. “A lot was imparted by that. From Los Angeles to the South of France was no small journey.”

And that generosity, that sparkle, it’s there, in the starkest pictures that he paints with his rasping monochrome baritone (now sub-bass) and the rippling, finger-picking style so difficult to replicate. These songs took time — more than a decade of blackened pages and 60 rejected verses went into Hallelujah — and teach that you can always go deeper.

I can think of no artist of any genre who has coloured so many moments of my life. My parents have clashing musical taste but thankfully found common ground in Leonard Cohen. Sisters of Mercy is one of the earliest songs I can remember and still has the quality of a nursery rhyme. As a teenager I despaired to Avalanche. When I fell in love, it was to Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. When I realised how my love could hurt, I excused myself by way of L Cohen: “All I’ve ever learned from love is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you”. I have friendships founded on mutual Leonard Cohen love. And when my son won’t sleep, I sing him Suzanne or Famous Blue Raincoat or Seems So Long Ago, Nancy. I don’t mean to impose. They’re just the songs closest to hand. Though the poor boy’s middle name is Leonard, I’m afraid. And he has developed his own peculiar fixation with that sub-atomic voice (“Is Leonard Cohen a dog? Are we going to Leonard Cohen’s house?” Will Leonard Cohen eat me?”)

I heard of Cohen’s death in a gas station on the road to San Francisco, where I am heading for the weekend. My wife had had to bail halfway, flying back to LA to comfort a friend in distress; I had to continue with our son in the back. It had been a mad, emotional week and I was in pieces. But no one seeps into the cracks like Cohen. I played You Want It Darker and it guided us through somehow.

Forgive me if that’s a little personal. I know many readers will have their own Leonard Cohens, their own moments where he gave them comfort, bound them with love as graceful and green as a stem, as it were. I think of that refrain from Anthem that has become the guiding light for the despondent and the dependent: “There is a crack, a crack, in everything… That’s how the light gets in”. Or those last lines of Treaty suggesting that the end, too, will be full of contradiction but that we can but try to reach the good parts of one another.

“It’s over now the water and the wine / We were broken then but now we’re borderline / And I wish there was a treaty, I wish there was a treaty, between your love and mine.”

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