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.

Who is Leonard Cohen? As the chapters in the volume demonstrate, this remains a question despite his enormous following. That Cohen remains a mystery may be surprising, given that in many respects he was remarkably unchanged over the course of his career. His appearance, for example, changed little, his well-tailored suits and short hair apparent in 1967 and 2009. The themes and concerns of his songs – sex, love, death, religion – are also consistent from start to finish. While his voice deepened as he aged, his singing style remained largely the same. Moreover, a strong part of Leonard’s appeal was that we as his audience felt that he was baring his soul to us. There is an intimacy in his self-presentation that made us feel that we knew him. And yet, more than Dylan or anyone else in popular music, he remains a mystery because he doesn’t fit any of the usual categories.

It remains a conviction, that when Allan Clarke, infatuated by all things David Bowie, looks in the mirror, he sees Ziggy Stardust looking back. Over many years, as Bowie’s look changed, so did Clarkey’s alter-ego. The Cross the Line documentary made by BBC Northern Ireland in 1980 offers an insight into his thinking around. Clarkey’s unshakeable belief that he is somehow hardwired into the Bowie psyche. In addition, his photogenic persona and strong stage presence, coupled with his highoctane performance came to be synonymous with the visceral musical signature of the band. So if manic, force-of-nature unpredictability with a fluid take on reality were prerequisites for a frontman, he had them in spades.

By August 1985, the author personally had a full-page spread in Melody Maker, a piece that ran with the headline ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Staff photographer Andy Catlin shot some moody close-up portraits of the author me with a beard, creating a general mood of troubled intellectual or ‘poet warrior’, and journalist Barry McIlheney wrote the article. The author was vocal about how Sinn Féin/IRA were the common enemy of all Irish citizens, north and south of the border, and about how the Provos had targeted the southern state for insurrection and political change once Northern Ireland had been subjugated. This resulted in his parents being targeted, which reminded the author of how a thug, the son of a well-known paramilitary figure, bounced up and down on the bonnet and roof of his first car with an intention to lure a squad of young RUC officers for a confrontation.

By 1983, things were reaching a crescendo and the end of a self-imposed hiatus. One of the many unsung heroes of the period, Davy Simms, had broadcast a studio session featuring four songs and essentially provided the author’s band with the masters for a subsequent release. TC had been making steady progress in his job as a Housing Officer at the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Both Clarkey and Forgie were in settled relationships and holding down a succession of unskilled jobs. Ruefrex had just made a tentative deal with One by One Records, a new Northern Irish label, and they were due in the studio imminently. Distribution problems in Great Britain hindered the release, the prevailing feeling in the music press being that this was a noble attempt to implant contemporary folk quality inside hard rock dialects.

As 1977 progressed, word was starting to seep across the Irish Sea that something cataclysmic might be stirring in London. It wasn’t just a new kind of music or some fresh bands; it was a groundswell of discontent with the established order; it was a new movement, a new dispensation. The author believes the unique set of circumstances was the reason why punk rock meant more to youth in Belfast than in any other city in Britain or Ireland. By 1977 and following bruising scrapes with the law and the school authorities, the author and his gang friends had retired the Debs. To fill the vacuum left by the Debs, a new collective began to shape up, one that looked to drums, bass and guitar rather than boots, blades and belts. Kenny Anderson, Ivan Kelly and Barry Greene might sound like a firm of solicitors or undertakers.

Stiff Little Fingers, Roofwrecks arch-rivals, were moving on apace. Collectives and allegiances had already formed in the Belfast punk scene, and schisms were starting to appear. Revisionist musicologists and sociologists have often cited the apparently non-sectarian Belfast punk scene of the late 70s/early 80s as representing an alternative youth/cultural environment that transcended ethno-religious divisions. The film Good Vibrations (2013) tells the story of the Belfast impresario and his record store and the influence he had on youth culture at that time. The author’s punk band’s relationship with Terri Hooley and the Good Vibrations record shop and label was doomed to failure from the get-go. Hooley gave Ruefrex little or no credit or recognition for their successes. As they improved and tightened as a unit, the band’s name began to seem inappropriate. However, English journalists, American musicologists and Japanese archivists all later came to embrace it enthusiastically.

It is true that Cohen is more known for his songs than for his albums. There is nothing in his oeuvre that has the reputation of Sergeant Pepper’s, Exile on Main Street, or Blood on the Tracks. For much of Cohen’s career, his best-selling albums were compilations. Yet Cohen’s albums define his career more clearly than does his songwriting. From 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen through the posthumous Thanks for the Dance (2019), Cohen released fifteen studio albums of new material. They are arguably his most important artistic legacy, representing a different kind of art from the songs. Each album is a cooperative effort, involving at a minimum a producer, musicians, and backup vocalists. While the songs are available to be recorded and performed by anyone in a potentially infinite number of versions, the albums themselves are finished works of art, where the selection and arrangement of the tracks combine to produce something more than the sum of the parts. This chapter analyzes these works of art, while also discussing their cultural impact and historical significance.

Around 1984, Kissed Air, the band from Maghera, were well ensconced in the leafy suburbs of North London. While struggling to command attention for their own music, like so many Irish exiles who went to London before them, each of the members had secured both accommodation and gainful employment, holding down sometimes quite menial jobs. The Kissed Air crew and Gareth Ryan expressed an interest in paying for the pressing, i and distribution of ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. The author relates how he offered services as producer for Kissed Air’s second single, ‘Out of the Night’/‘Change of Attention,’ which added valuable studio craft to his steadily growing skill set. Kissed Air boys had been spending a lot of time socially with Cuthbertson who enjoyed the live music scene and quite fancied playing a role as indie record executive.