Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost

We’ll miss Leonard Cohen’s charm and mischief, and his dispatches from the Tower of Song, says Brendan O’Connor

THERE are memories tumbling out of the closet for so many of us this weekend. Because Leonard Cohen wasn’t someone you just picked up by osmosis, or picked up through the radio, though maybe in latter years, as Hallelujah becomes destroyed by X Factor winners and vocal histrionics, he was.

But in my time, you were introduced to Cohen. You had to meet the right people, and they would be surprised and then delighted that you were inexperienced. And they would watch you as they popped your cherry, exhorting you to listen, to really listen. There might be a joint, and typically there would be the cliched red wine.

A bit like Leonard himself, I came to his music relatively late in life. I remember two introductions, both in my late teens. Staying at the house of a friend’s older sister in Cambridge, and she had The Best of Leonard Cohen, which covered what was then regarded as his golden period up to 1975. Who knew in 1975 what was to come, for 40 more years?

I had never really listened to what I would have categorised as folk music back then. I was aware of Cohen but I would have lumped him in with Joni Mitchell and all these other people, 1960s/70s people. And then I listened, staying indoors on that sunny, summer weekend in Cambridge, listening again and again. And I had never heard anything quite like it.

He conjured stolen moments and those encounters with girls and women who left their mark on you, who gifted you something, who taught you something, who might make an impression in a night, or a few days, or a few years and who left you subtly changed. And he romanticised those moments and those encounters and imbued them with such meaning and beauty, and he taught you to be grateful. It was mindfulness before we knew what mindfulness was, this notion this guy had of dwelling in the eternity of those passing moments. And parting friends, and parting grateful.

I don’t know if I even made a connection between that Cohen and the one I was introduced to in a bedsit by two girls in college who took me home one night and played me Jennifer Warnes’s Famous Blue Raincoat and told me all about Cohen. And it was a Cohenesque 24 hours. I was young and tortured and they were nice girls who wanted to ease my torture, who seemed to enjoy staying up all night and into the next day to talk and drink and listen to music.

And then I found I’m Your Man. Unknown to me, as I was discovering this guy who seemed to have done his best work by the time I was a toddler, he had come back and was about to enter into a whole new phase. It should have been rubbish really. The 1960s/70s folksy guy in his 50s, releases album replacing instruments with at times cheesy 1980s synths and glossy production. But the songs, the songs. We could get into quoting sharp couplets here until the cows come home. And many others will do it. But from the bite of the first lines, uncharacteristically spat out, but in that mellow bass baritone that was only getting deeper: They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom/ for trying to change the system from within/ I’m coming back, I’m coming to reward them . . . First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. I still don’t know quite what he meant, but the essence of it made some sort of deep sense.

Most great artists, you will notice, do their best work in a decade of intense creativity that is often roughly around their 20s — look at David Bowie’s extraordinary 1970s’ output when he sometimes released two classic albums in a year. But here was Cohen, a guy who only really came to music in his 30s, now in his 50s, 20 years into his career, and he had produced one of his greatest albums. I’m Your Man was like Cohen’s Thriller, practically every song on it a potential hit single. Ain’t No Cure For Love, Everybody Knows, I’m Your Man, Take this Waltz, to a lesser extent Jazz Police, but then I Can’t Forget and Tower of Song. It was, in its own way, as consistent as that Best of collection of his earlier phase. And this was Cohen out of the bedsit and engaging with the world too. Listen to Everybody Knows now if you don’t know it. It is searing and apocalyptic and more relevant today than ever. Three decades before Occupy Wall Street, the one percent or Trump, he is singing how Everybody knows that the dice are loaded/ Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed/ Everybody knows the war is over/ Everybody knows the good guys lost/ Everybody knows the fight was fixed/ The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows.

These songs would pass into cliche and in a sense become demeaned. Oh how we laughed at his Dublin gigs when he sang that line from Tower of Song, I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice. But where the rub really lies in that song is when I asked Hank Williams how lonely does it get/ Hank Williams hasn’t answered yet. And in that line is conjured up the tragedy of the artist. It has set him apart. Has it just made everything into material? And that notion that he doesn’t do this by choice. He has been forced to a be a receptacle for truth, a channel for these songs and these insights and this wisdom, and in one sense, it has ruined any chance of a normal life, and it leaves him alone, struggling for five years to get Hallelujah right. And you feel sorry for all these poor song-smiths, tortured and chipping away at the coalface to give the rest of us these dispatches from the extreme end of feeling.

When he came down from the mountain, forsaking his life of silent contemplation as a Buddhist monk to walk among us, a wonderful thing happened for Leonard. He might have started the gigs for the money but he seemed to stay for the communion, for the mutual love and respect. “Thank you friends” was his constant delighted refrain. The respect really was mutual. Not just us thrilled to see him but him thrilled to see us. The word humbled is overused now, but he seemed humbled by it all. And in his dignity, his respect, his courteousness, his charm and his sense of mischief, he became in recent years somewhat of a model for people of how to live a good life, a priest, poet and philosopher for his ageing audience and a shining example of cool for newer recruits.

As always with these things, it was a mixed blessing for all of those who had enjoyed a distant but intimate relationship with Cohen down the years. He became mainstream, nowhere more than Ireland, where his visits are remembered by a certain type of person similarly to the Pope’s visit. In the wrong hands, like with people who are so fond of quoting the line about there being a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in, he almost became naff.

But he never could be naff. Because Cohen embodied in how he carried himself, a poise and a cool.

The world is a much poorer place without him. And we will not see his like again. You will read a lot this weekend about his final months. You will read the quotes from the New Yorker interview about how he was ready to die. And then about that press conference recently where he laughed that he would live forever. Do yourself a favour and look up that New Yorker interview and read it all, even the bit where he becomes angry at the writer and his friend for coming late one day.

It is a lesson in acceptance and resignation and joy in life and death. And then listen to his new album. And perhaps we realise now that the title track You Want It Darker was his Lazarus, his mischievous goodbye. Listen to I’m Your Man and marvel at how an album from 30 years ago can seem to address the world we live in right now. And then go back through all the richness of his earlier work, songs that are almost in our DNA.

His later work probably never reached the promise of I’m Your Man again but there are plenty of jewels in there too. And then could I recommend I’m Your Fan, a fantastic collection of people covering Cohen’s songs with respect and a healthy disrespect. And finally, despite what everyone says, give a listen to Death of a Ladies’ Man, dismissed by critics and fans alike as a glitch. It was produced by Phil Spector and is a sometimes painful marriage of Cohen and the wall of sound. Their relationship reached a low point when Spector held a gun to Cohen’s head. Spector then allegedly took the tapes away and according to Cohen mixed it under armed guard. Listen in particular to Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On, which sees Cohen dragged into some whorehouse boogie and reminds us that a bit of bawdiness is part of a life well lived too. Even under those circumstances, literally with a gun to his head, Cohen never lost the poise and the mordant humour.

Like Bowie recently, Cohen has as much to teach us in death as he had in life. And perhaps his greatest lesson was that they are both part of the same thing. He was ready to die but equally he knew he would live forever.

‘In recent years he became somewhat of a model for people of how to live a good life’