Cohen was not, like many devotees of the scene in the 1950s and early 1960s, a folk purist. Bob Dylan seemed to be the figure who gave Cohen the idea of becoming a singer-songwriter, and the Dylan that influenced him had already adopted rock & roll. While musically Cohen’s early albums are not rock & roll, he found himself from quite early on in the culture of rock. His early musical contacts included Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and others who lived in or came through New York. His record company packaged his albums and sent him out to tour behind them as rock stars did. And by the middle of his career the influence of rock music on his recordings became apparent, not only in his incorporation of rock riffs and song forms, but also in instrumentation, including drums, electric guitars, and synthesizers, and in arrangements that feature rock-inspired backing vocals. This chapter explores rock’s influence on Cohen and Cohen’s influence on rock, the latter demonstrated by the rock musicians who have covered his songs or made reference to him in their lyrics.

The Harp Bar in Hill Street, Belfast, was a dingy, heavily fortified pub in a dimly lit, narrow, cobblestone street in a run-down part of the city. Frequented by dockers, horse racing punters and winos, it was an unlikely venue to establish itself as the mecca for punk in the city. The Harp was seedy and offered a small bar on the ground floor, patronised by a varied clientele, and a performance space upstairs that became the number one live venue for the growing number of punk acts emerging at that time. Punk music and its followers were more likely to be indulged for the revenue they generated at the bar than for any high-minded aspiration to create a cross-community neutral space.

By 1974-5, North Belfast was well on its way to securing a moniker it shared with Cambodia’s tragedy and which it would remain known by throughout the worst years of the conflict and beyond – ‘the killing fields’. The madness of 1975 even invaded the apparent neutrality of the worlds of live music, show business and entertainment when the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) carried out a gun and bomb attack on the members of the Miami Showband. The Stormont power-sharing executive had floundered; tentative Provisional IRA ceasefires and truces were shortlived; Direct Rule was reinstated to fill the dangerous vacuum. The author relates that activities of the Debs gang were unpleasant and hostile for any unfortunate they alighted upon, their actions could be considered nothing more than juvenile. He also outlines how they unconsciously created their own kind of respite from the daily abhorrence of the adult world.

Leonard Cohen seemed to have remained largely the same throughout his career. This chapter calls that assumption into question by detailing three successive personas that Cohen adopted over the course of his career. The argument is not that Cohen’s persona changed radically, but rather that at different moments, different elements came to the fore. The first persona Boucher identifies, “The Poet of Rock & Roll,” fits nicely with the trajectory Glass describes. The second one, which itself has two aspects, the “Ladies’ Man” or “Depressive Lothario,” is associated with Cohen’s struggles in achieving critical and commercial success in the 1970s. It isn’t so much a rejection of the first persona as it is a specification of it, bringing out elements that had long been lurking. The final mask, the “High Priest of the Heart,” becomes dominant in the 1990s and remains so through the end of Cohen’s life. It relies in part on his becoming a Buddhist monk, a role seemingly at odds with that of a “Lothario,” but which also relies on continuities that go back as far as his early 1960s poetry.

Sarm West and Sarm East recording studios were established by Chris Blackwell of Island Records and later owned and run by husband-and-wife pair Jill Sinclair and Trevor Horn. Non-Island performers also recorded there, including Madonna, The Clash, Depeche Mode, Queen, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley the Wailers, Genesis and The Rolling Stones. Dave Robinson’s Stiff/Island connections meant that the authors had been lined up to record in Sarm West from 16 to 29 October 1985. Music history seeped through the pores of the place and the author’s head was spinning to be in such exalted company. The Music Works Studio was scheduled as a replacement, with an undertaking that they would return to Sarm West for the album mix from 4 to 8 November. By the end of their time in Music Works, the author and band had finished ten songs.

If Cohen’s first musical formation was folk, he joined it as its viability as a commercial music genre was already in decline. One of his first major gigs was to appear at the singer-songwriter afternoon of the Newport Folk festival, along with Joni Mitchell, an event that pointed away from the traditional folk music the festival had long favored. By 1970, singer-songwriters such as Mitchell and James Taylor were now reclassified as occupying a niche of their own, and Cohen fit that niche. Cohen’s autobiographical songs were actually closer to the confessional mode of the singer-songwriters than they were to traditional folk. Where folk had claimed to be public, political music, the singer-songwriters were singing about private struggles and mental anguish. The singer-songwriters were defined by the sense of direct address to the listener, seeming to reveal their very souls in the details of their misdeeds. Called “confessional” because of perceived similarities with the poetry of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton, singer-songwriter music is often self-therapeutic, but unlike the poetry it does not usually use self-exposure as cultural criticism. This chapter reads Cohen’s songs in relation to the singer-songwriter movement, exploring the similarities and differences between his recordings and those of other figures central to the formation. Cohen’s poetry, while not usually associated with the confessional movement, bears some similarity to it, and his songs sometimes invite a broadly cultural reading.

The EP of three songs appeared in the Good Vibrations catalogue as GOT-8, and was preceded in the series by Rudi, Victim, The Outcasts, The Undertones, Xdreamysts, Protex, and a compilation disc. The strongest song of the three was ‘One by One’; indeed, it was always intended as the featured track. The author relates how Sound Engineer Davy Smith largely earned a living recording radio jingles and Irish country-and-western songs at the Wizard Studios in Donegall Street, Belfast. The lyrics were a jumble of alliteration, suitably surreal to complement the essential oddness of the track. For kids in rural communities, away-day gigs by Belfast bands were a serious affair. The author’s band cornered Hooley for a release date of GOT-8, but he seemed to enjoy stringing them along and they became more frustrated with each other. Unsurprisingly, there was no imminent release of GOT-8.

By 1980, Stiff Little Fingers’ star was truly in the ascendent. They had a successful first album via Rough Trade Records under their belt and, as Northern Ireland’s sole ambassadors on the mainland, a place at the top table with the punk elite. So it was the stuff of dreams when Ruefrex were offered the support slot on their Irish tour featuring Dublin, Cork and Belfast. SLF would be assured of full houses all the way, so a captive audience was guaranteed. The Black Catholics band had a reputation for disrupting gigs and were in situ early that evening. The Black Catholics’ behaviour grew worse, and one of the gang, noticing that Clarkey had reverted from his manic, all-action style to stand still and deliver a love song, saw his chance and attempted to set fire to his trouser bottoms.

Authors such as Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway were among the most important celebrities of the earlier part of the twentieth century. Authors were later overshadowed by movie stars and then rock stars, who by the time Cohen began recording were at the top of the heap. This chapter will examine the transformation of Cohen from a literary figure who was already a celebrity in Canada into an international rock star. This unusual career path meant that Cohen would have a different sort of persona from those who were merely authors or popular musicians. His claim to the status of poet, for example, was different than that of Dylan or other songwriters who did not publish books of verse. His fame as a singer-songwriter gave the books he published later new meaning and a larger audience.

In this chapter, the author discusses his love affair that started with the press in 1986. A review by Muir MacKean of a Ruefrex gig at Jules, a secret nightclub in Belfast, spoke about Ruefrex as a powerful, mature that only needed a decent sound system to be heard as one of the most important bands in Britain. The front i profiles were down to the backing of the good people at Melody Maker magazine, which was prepared to dedicate a healthy amount of iage to reflect on the more nuanced political and cultural interpretations of (Northern) Irishness as represented by Ruefrex and others. The author relates how Bill Graham, a stalwart of old-school music journalism, had published an article whose title was controversial, making the author realize how the fourth estate could hinder, rather than help, one's best intentions.

The whole ‘legacy’ debate on how people deal with the past continues to torment, pulling in one direction the urge to (perhaps) forgive but not forget the awful inhumanity of the recent history, hauling in the other, the generational and pragmatic tug to simply move on. Powerful actors in this drama find uncomfortable narratives, retroactive and limiting. For the orthodox narratives surrounding Belfast punk are entirely problematic. Yet Good Vibrations and the standard bearers of Belfast punk rarely cite the band in any official or historical context. Occasionally, the self-appointed keepers of the Belfast punk flame are compelled to give Ruefrex their due. The Ruefrex song ‘The Perfect Crime’ features a prolonged overdriven guitar introduction, loaning itself to use as film incidental music. It had been employed in John T. Davis’s Shell Shock Rock in this way to great effect.

When Leonard Cohen died in 2016, he left a treasure trove of notebooks, recordings, manuscripts, and other materials that had previously been inaccessible to anyone but the artist himself. Unlike some other rock stars, Cohen has not been represented by bootleg recordings, and his written records have appeared only to the extent that he has sometimes published excerpts from them. Thus, the archives, when they are available to scholars and journalists, will be a significant boon to our understanding of the man and his creations. The concluding chapter of this volume both offers a survey of the Cohen archives – real and virtual – and provides some sense of how they might change our understanding of Cohen and his work.