New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Cohen’s fourth studio album, was released in 1974 and represented a move towards a more orchestrated sound even as the songs became, variously, more confessional (‘Chelsea Hotel #2’), more liturgical (‘Who By Fire’) and more enigmatic (‘Lover, Lover, Lover’). Cohen was now 40 and his fascination with the complementary and antagonistic nature of the carnal and the spiritual was never more obvious than in this album with its sleeve illustration depicting a sexual coupling on a celestial cloud. ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ told of a hotel bedroom encounter with Janis Joplin, and Cohen later came to regret ever making the late singer’s identity public; he simply saw it as a lapse of manners on his part. ‘Who By Fire’ is a hypnotic laundry list of different ways to die set to the Hebrew melody for the prayer Unetanneh Tokef sung at the noontime service of the High Holy Days. ‘Lover, Lover, Lover’ sets off a repetitive and maddeningly catchy lover’s plea to come back against howls of spiritual anxiety. Leonard Cohen, never one to flinch at the uncomfortable, was getting darker by the album even as his voice got deeper. At about this time his popularity started to wane, particularly among audiences who had not been born when he first arrived on the music scene, a man already in his early thirties.
Death Of A Ladies’ Man (1977) was an ill-judged bid to revive his commercial fortunes by means of a collaboration with producer Phil Spector, an episode that turned into a famous psychodrama. The result won Cohen the worst reviews of his career. In contrast Recent Songs (1979) steadied the ship even if it was never in danger of setting the album charts alight. With the sort of positive review unlikely to send record buyers flocking to the stores, The New York Times said that Cohen’s latest album supplied ‘an ideal musical idiom for his idiosyncrasies’.
By 1984 the prospect of a new Leonard Cohen album failed to enthuse even his own record label. Sony refused to put out Various Positions in the US on the grounds that it wasn’t good enough. The company president allegedly called Cohen, saying ‘Look, Leonard; we know you're great, but we don't know if you're any good’. Perhaps Cohen’s sudden fondness for a Casio keyboard instead of a Spanish guitar had something to do with executive ambivalence. In any case an independent label picked up the album and it sold respectably, making the top ten in Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia, and doing quite well in the UK. Ironically it contained what would become Leonard Cohen’s most recorded song of all – ‘Hallelujah’. Cohen wrote some 80 verses before paring ‘Hallelujah’ down to manageable size. His principal preoccupations – religion, sex and redemption – were all distilled into an elegant variation on the four-chord trick embellished with playful rhymes for the title word. It was already a truly great song well before John Cale, Jeff Buckley, Allison Crowe, Rufus Wainwright, Alexandra Burke and innumerable movies and TV shows featured it. Even Cohen himself has gently speculated that perhaps too many people sing it.
So Various Positions, that rejected seventh album, should have been the start of a revival in the fortunes and reputation of Leonard Cohen who had not recorded anything during the previous five years, working instead on other projects and visiting his children in the south of France. The album that Sony spurned became a curio despite being in the opinion of some people one of his best for years. As well as ‘Hallelujah’ it contained the deceptively jaunty tune ‘Heart With No Companion’ which begins ‘Now I greet you from the other side/ of sorrow and despair/ with a love so vast and so shattered, it will reach you everywhere’. You want it darker? ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’ sounds like a musical love letter to Hydra with its Greek hassapiko dance structure… except that Cohen says that its grain of inspiration was the Holocaust where executions somehow surpassed what already seemed to be unsurpassable horror when orchestras were deployed to accompany the proceedings.
Leonard Cohen’s rehabilitation was boosted when Jennifer Warnes, once one of his backup singers and now with a successful career of her own, seemed prepared to take the risk of putting out an entire album of Leonard Cohen songs. Cohen said he took her stated intention to do this simply as a gesture of friendship that would remain unrealized, but the album – officially called Famous Blue Raincoat but unofficially known as Jenny Sings Lenny – was made, released and raised his profile just before his own new album I’m Your Man came out in 1998. Now with a voice so deep it was almost sub-sonic, Leonard Cohen returned to form with an album featuring a synthpop sound recorded in Los Angeles and Montréal. His subject matter was now terrorism (‘First We Take Manhattan’), cynicism (‘Everybody Knows’) and the excesses of lovers’ promises (‘I’m Your Man’). Appropriately enough, looming over a fine collection of material was ‘Tower Of Song’, a laconic, comic and ironic assessment of those who feel called upon to make music… including himself. ‘I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice’ are lines that always got a laugh from live audiences. But no one laughed at the preceding ones: ‘I said to Hank Williams, how lonely does it
