The One by One EP had been picking up favourable attention. The twin bastions of ‘cool’ had been stormed and breached. John Peel had played it on his show and Gavin Martin had written a feature about us in the New Musical Express. And in 1980, BBC Northern Ireland broadcast Cross the Line, its gritty Ken Loach-esque social documentary about Ruefrex. The musical performances were rough and ready, genuinely live with no opportunity to clean up a dodgy ‘One by One’ guitar solo in any post-production remix. Nevertheless, the documentary was well received and provided another tangible staging post on the journey. Meanwhile, two invitations opened up the tantalising prospect of going on the road properly for the first time and, Ruefrex assumed, all the hijinks of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll that went along with that.

In 1969, Franco Zeffirelli invited Cohen to Italy to discuss scoring his film Brother Sun, Sister Moon. The collaboration did not advance, but in 1971 German director Rainer Fassbinder used Cohen’s songs for Beware the Holy Whore. A few years later, Robert Altman chose to use four songs from Cohen’s first album for the soundtrack of McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), for which Cohen also wrote some new material that Altman did not use. Since then, Cohen’s songs have been used in over 300 films and TV episodes. Roger Young’s Kiss the Sky (1998) includes eight Cohen songs on the soundtrack, and the film echoes themes that run throughout Cohen’s work. Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) was inspired by Cohen’s song. “Hallelujah” has been used prominently in numerous films and television episodes, including Shrek, The West Wing, and Saturday Night Live. Cohen was also directly involved in the production of several films, including I Am a Hotel (1983), which features the surreal interactions of several sets of lovers at a hotel. This chapter explores the relationship of Cohen’s music and lyrics to these films and assess their role in his career.

When the author first met Shane MacGowan, there was little evidence of the individual who would become the beloved icon of Irish culture we know today, lauded for his songwriting abilities and artistic contributions to the canon. He always found him personable and self-effacing. While the other band members might gather in rowdy communion, when in his cups Shane liked nothing better than to find a quieter corner to settle in alone with his drink. Within a day of the Melody Maker magazine going on sale, the author received word that Frank Murray had removed us from the support slot on the American tour. It had come to something when a band from the Loyalist Shankill Road could so offend the musical wing of Irish nationalism by pointing out that the author and his band were more Irish than they were.

When his manager stole most of his wealth, Cohen was forced to go back out on the road at the age of seventy-three. The result was the beginning of a triumphant last chapter in his storied career. While rockers in the 1960s often proclaimed that they couldn’t imagine themselves continuing into their fifties or sixties, many have continued well beyond that. The Rolling Stones, of whom the youngest remaining member is seventy-four, just completed a well-received tour of the United States. But the Stones and most other older performers do not present themselves as old. Mick Jagger continues to prance around the stage with almost as much energy as he exhibited in his twenties. Cohen, on the contrary, performed on these late tours honestly and gracefully as a septuagenarian. Some of this is consistent with the persona he has displayed since the 1960s, for example dressing in the style of the previous generation. But the new Cohen was not just conservatively dressed. He directly confronted the limitations of age in his stage patter, and his songs, which had always taken account of death, now took on a new resonance, as it was apparent that the singer’s days were numbered. Where other old rockers seem to assume that they deserve the audience’s adoration, Cohen was humble and grateful for the renewed interest in his work. This chapter explores what it means for a rock star to present himself as an old man, a persona that challenges some of the fundamental assumptions about what a rock star is.

The author relates that he had taken to spending more and more time at the Brixton high-rise flat of Grimmo and Karen in the after hours. It was a small municipal flat on the 22nd floor that someone had somehow managed to get a grand piano up to. It overlooked the main Brixton railway junction, a jumble of intersecting tracks and signals. The furnishings were basic and the small kitchen less than sanitary. But the assembled bric-a-brac, reclaimed furniture, piano and the neon cityscape that stretched out below us gave the whole place something of a Blade Runner vibe. The author explains how his role as manager, led to him feeling the sting of the others’ resentment, as well as hurt and lonely.

For most of the period leading up to the recording of their first album, Flowers for All Occasions, and its subsequent promotion through tours and television appearances, only Forgie and the author lived in London. The buzz regarding their live performances was spreading thanks to a phalanx of stellar live reviews in the music and mainstream press. The author relates how Clarkey forgot or repeated verses of songs while drunkenly haranguing the audience, and TC too sozzled to jazz together, intent on bringing down the curtain once and for all. While the signing with Stiff and the album recording was duly scheduled, Clarkey became synonymous with the band’s image and started frontman's ego and the band collective. However, he did not see any difference between performing for these people a few hours earlier onstage and socialising with them afterward.

Unlike Bob Dylan, Cohen was never a protest singer. Indeed, it is difficult to find clearly articulated political positions anywhere in his work, and he frequently expressed the wish to not take sides. Yet Cohen has often referred to the songs of the Spanish Civil War and socialist folk singers as early influences. Cohen’s work does address political issues, and it can be read as articulating political positions regardless of the artist’s claims. Cohen often found himself in the middle of political strife, from Havana in the early years of Castro’s revolution to the Arab–Israeli conflicts. Songs like “First We Take Manhattan,” “Democracy,” and “Everybody Knows” offer political critique, even if they don’t endorse any program – and not choosing sides is also a political position. This chapter assesses the political valences and import of Cohen’s work and persona.

Cohen is perhaps best known and most lauded as a songwriter, yet when he began to write songs he had no formal musical training, and he could not read music. His career in music began with Judy Collins recording his songs, and it was revived several times by the success of later covers of them. Yet songwriting never came easily to Cohen, who often worked for years on songs, sometimes continuing even after he recorded them. Of “Hallelujah” he has said that he wrote maybe eighty verses before he felt that the song was finished, but he continued to tinker with it after the initial recording. Cohen reports that before he can discard a verse, “I have to write it. I have to work on it, and I have to polish it and bring it to as close to finished as I can.” This seems both a commitment to craft and something verging on obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it distinguishes Cohen from many other successful songwriters, who often say they toss off great lyrics in a few minutes.

The first invitation was for Ruefrex to take part in the Sense of Ireland Festival in London in 1980. It comprised over ninety events iing all things Irish – music, theatre, dance, literature, the visual arts, crafts, film, photography, architecture and archaeology. The festival’s finale, The Sounds of Ireland, was a musical extravaganza that purportedly included the best of the island’s punk and new wave bands, such as U2, the Virgin Prunes and The Atrix, and headlined (on St Patrick’s Day) by Rory Gallagher. Song writing alliances were forming and a degree of competition to produce something that would best the song that went before proved healthy and fruitful. TC, too, invested in an HH bass combo and decorated the body of his guitar with a logo taken from the i of Mott the Hoople’s The Hoople album.