There’s a video on YouTube of Leonard Cohen reciting his poem “A Thousand Kisses Deep” live in London, in 2008. He speaks softly, almost purring in that deep, bitter chocolate voice and starts:
"You came to me this morning and you handled me like meat… You’d have to be a man to know how good that feels, how sweet"The line gets a huge laugh. And that’s the first thing that people who never appreciated Leonard Cohen—who dismissed him with endless clichéd accusations of being some depressing, whiny moaner—never understood. Right up until his death at the age of 82, announced on Thursday, he was hilariously funny, as witty as Cole Porter or Noel Coward, with a bone-dry mordant delivery and perfect comic timing.
There was always a moment in his shows when he would sing “Tower of Song,” from his 1988 album I’m Your Man. It begins with a couplet either Porter or Coward would have appreciated:
"Well my friends are gone and my hair is grey, I ache in the places where I used to play"
But the key moment is the opening of the third verse:
"I was born like this, I had no choice I was born with the gift of a golden voice"
An enormous cheer would erupt at that, and a laugh, too, because of course Cohen was mocking his own failings as a conventional crooner. But the joke is also as close as he ever comes to a boast because his voice, which was admittedly thin and even reedy when he began his singing career in the mid-Sixties, was mellowed and deepened by many years and countless cigarettes into a thing of beauty.
And a tool of seduction, too. Cohen was a ladies’ man, a romancer, a practised connoisseur of love and sex. He took the subject seriously and paid great attention to the women who were the objects of his affections.
The way in which Cohen loved, if it was not clear from all his songs on the subject, was made evident in the letter he sent earlier this year to his former lover and muse Marianne Ihlen, for whom the glorious "So Long Marianne" was written, as she lay dying from leukemia…
"Well Marianne it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road."
—Leonard Cohen
Many men say they love women, but those were the words of a man who truly meant it. His songs, particularly in concert, were a constant interweaving of his basso profundo with the responses of his female backing singers. There was a sense of genuine connection, which Cohen constantly reinforced, between the male and female voices, acting out the constant drama of man and woman in his songs.The lines that follow the opening stanza of “A Thousand Kisses Deep” run:
"My mirrored twin, my next of kin, I’d know you in my sleep And who but you would take me in, a thousand kisses deep I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat You see I’m just another snowman, standing in the rain and sleet"
I happened to be there, that night at the O2, and having disarmed his audience with laughter, Cohen seduced them with those words that were at once poetic, romantic and very obviously sexual. The effect was mesmeric. The sound of ten thousand enraptured, wide-eyed women exuding a simultaneous sigh of longing—a late middle-aged equivalent of a teenybopper's scream—wafted across the arena.
Since this had followed hard on the heels of the much more straightforward come-on “I’m Your Man”...
"If you want a boxer, I will step into the ring for you And if you want a doctor I'll examine every inch of you"
...one realised that not a single man in the crowd could have competed with the 73-year-old man in the smart grey suit and the dapper trilby.
But one might, perhaps, learn from him.
Leonard Cohen had true style, as befitted the son of a prosperous clothing store owner. He possessed a very Canadian civility, both towards his audiences and his musicians: he insisted, almost to a fault, on paying due tribute to every solo in every song.
Above all, he made his life count to the very end. In this he was helped by what seemed to be a disaster. In 2005, Cohen sued his former manager and close friend Kelley Lynch, having discovered that she had defrauded him of his life savings, amounting to more than $5m.
He won the case, was awarded $9m in damages, but Lynch did not, or could not pay up.
Suddenly in dire financial straits. Cohen was forced to go back on the road. His 2008 tour began with a series of dates in small theatres and arts centres in provincial Canada. Then word got out that the shows were astonishing musical tours de force, lasting well over two hours, filled with wonderful songs performed as perfectly as any admirer of his work could wish.
The tour came to Europe. Cohen played a triumphant set on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury. He shifted from small theatres to massive auditoria, castles, athletics stadia. Suddenly, in his seventies, Leonard Cohen was one of the hottest tickets on the planet.
Of course it was wonderful to hear the old stuff again. Songs of Leonard Cohen was, along with Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, my go-to record in times of teenage heartbreak. And I’m Your Man was as close as music came to subtlety and intellectual sophistication in the yuppie years of the Eighties. But Cohen’s new stuff was, though less familiar, equally good.
He enjoyed a late-life creative renaissance over the past 15 years that continued right up to the moment of his death. Just like another great loss this year, David Bowie, Cohen left us with a last musical testament, in the form of his album You Want It Darker. And, like Bowie, he went out on a wave of ecstatic reviews.
Leonard Cohen was, in short, a well-dressed intellectual, with a razor wit, a golden voice, an appreciation of life’s depths and its absurdities alike, and a winning way with the opposite sex.
What man wouldn’t settle for that?
