Sean O’Hagan, Microdisney co-founder and the author’s new flatmate, was an unlikely member of an ostensibly (post) punk rock band, for his influences were The Beach Boys, The Band and Van Dyke Parks. Sean made the author realise that other musicians like Sean were trying to cultivate a public profile themselves. In essence, there was an unspoken resentment, a belief that they had paid their dues and deserved the author’s new-found success more than he did. The author and his band depended on their fellow housemates for the backline - amps, PA, drums, and so on. Cuthbertson fronted the money required and Jonty, the bass player from Kissed Air, made the phone calls and did the legwork. Neil, Jonty and the author became the Ruefrex management team. There was mounting interest from several major labels but they were all reserving judgement, until they could catch the live act for themselves.

The poet who seems to have had the largest role in determining Cohen’s decision to practice that art was the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, whom Cohen first read as teenager. Cohen’s song “Take This Waltz” is a translation of one of Lorca’s poems, and Cohen named his daughter Lorca. Another influence was the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Rumi, whom Cohen called “probably the greatest ascetic religious poet – in the same league as King David.” When Cohen studied briefly at Columbia University, he encountered the Beat movement, which influenced him in a number of ways, though it had little impact on the form of his poems. His writing always had a broad range of reference, from the Bible and ancient mythologies to modernism and postmodernism. His novel Beautiful Losers is reckoned a manifestation of international postmodernism, and, if Cohen’s first literary contexts were Montreal and Canada, his songs and records have had a large international audience. This chapter moves Cohen from a Canadian to a more global context, exploring the cosmopolitan origins of his work.

Leonard Cohen was born into a prominent and observant Jewish family. His maternal grandfather was a rabbi who lived with the family in his retirement and at whose knee Cohen studied. Cohen felt some estrangement from the Jewish community in which he was raised, as The Favourite Game suggests when it describes its protagonist as “suspect” among certain commercial Jews, and yet with Gentiles he “often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.” Despite his unwillingness to be the good Jewish son who follows his father into the family business and temple, Cohen always identified as Jewish. He was reluctant to talk about the religious aspects of his work, but it is hard to think of another popular songwriter who drew so explicitly on the Jewish tradition. The use he made of tradition was often not explicitly religious, transforming Biblical stories and images for secular purposes, while religious concerns often are expressed in modern, seemingly secular contexts. Several of Cohen’s songs, such as “If It Be Your Will” and “Who by Fire,” draw extensively from Jewish prayers. This chapter explores the influence of Judaism on Cohen’s work, and the expression that work gives to the experience of Judaism.

Leonard Cohen has been the subject of at least five video documentaries about his life and work, beginning as early as 1965, with Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, and continuing up to the present with Marianne and Leonard: Words of Love (2019). These different narratives of Cohen’s life give us conflicting perspectives, and this chapter explores how they respond to different cultural moments and how they construct differing images of Cohen’s life and work.

Unlike with Judaism and Buddhism, Cohen did not participate in the Christian religion, but he was raised in a predominantly Christian city and nation. Just as Cohen found no conflict between his Zen and his Judaism, he does not experience his Judaism as an obstacle to his appreciation of Christianity. His work frequently draws on Christian imagery, especially the figure of Jesus, and texts, especially the book of Revelation. “Suzanne,” the first song of his to be recorded, has an entire verse built around the story of Jesus walking on the water. “The Butcher” is about Jesus’s sacrifice as the Lamb of God, while “Last Year’s Man” refers to Revelation in the line, “Babylon the bride.” And since Christianity is rooted in the Hebrew Bible, Cohen’s references to these texts are also relevant to Christianity. This chapter explores Cohen’s use of Christianity in his work and discuss the ways in which it reflects on this religious tradition.

It was becoming clear that Stiff Records were fatally holed below the waterline and taking on water at an alarming rate. Debtors could be held at arm’s-length no longer, rumours of bankruptcy abounded and some said Dave Robinson, who was working on a follow-up single to ‘The Wild Colonial Boy,’ had his bags already packed. The author relates how he grabbed the chance when Flicknife Records, started in 1980 and had The Velvet Underground’s Nico and the legendary Hawkwind on their roster, expressed interest. Spanning hard rock, progressive rock and psychedelic rock, Hawkwind were retrospectively considered an influential proto-punk band. Originally to be entitled Playing Cards with Dead Men, the project centred around the extent of human suffering that existed behind the statistics and news stories heard on TV and radio. ‘Playing Adult Games’ was another old song that dealt with how paramilitary gangs recruited from the young and vulnerable.

When Cohen started to write songs, the musical formation of which he was first a part was the folk scene. Cohen reports that socialist folk singers in Montreal first got him interested in songs. When he decided to pursue a career as a singer and songwriter, he went to New York, because it was the hub of North American folk music. He hung out and performed at such folk venues as the Bitter End, and his songs were first recorded by such folk singers as Judy Collins. Cohen’s earliest songs display the influence of this scene, as did his preferred style of performance, accompanying himself on an acoustic guitar. His unhappiness with the way some of the songs on his first album were produced seems to have stemmed from their not sounding like folk. And yet the lyrics of Cohen’s songs have little in common with those typical of a genre that claimed to reflect the people rather than the individual. This chapter considers how folk molded Cohen’s work, and where his work pushed the boundaries of the genre.

One might argue that Cohen expressed the world through sex – or vice versa. Some of his most memorable songs (“Marianne,” for example) use individual paramours as prisms that refract larger experience. His lyrics, while not explicit in the sense that some rock or rap songs are, often evoke the power and pleasure of sex. Both of his novels are more about sex than anything else, and his drawings feature female nudes. Cohen has asserted that he finds no tension between sex and spirituality, and songs like “Hallelujah” insist upon their deep imbrication with each other. He has been called, and called himself, a “ladies’ man,” but he also dismisses the assertion that he has been especially successful with women. In the era of #MeToo, one might think that Cohen would have come in for more condemnation, but his genuine interest in women and a lack of guilt about sex perhaps combined to forestall this. This chapter explores the uses and the meaning of sex and sexuality in Cohen’s work.

By 1988, any remaining flirtations with ’the music biz‘ seemed limited to writing for the music mags – an occasional review of a gig or a critique of a band’s new release. These were sometimes put in the author’s way by Barry McIlheney, Stuart Bailie or other kind gentlemen of the press. All thoughts were now turning to Belfast. Neil Cuthbertson, the South African owner of Kasper Records, and Sophie Richardson, the sister of TV comedian and director Peter Richardson, were to be betrothed. Perhaps because his side of the church would be woefully under-represented compared to the bride’s, Neil had been generous when issuing his invitations. The Richardsons hailed from the south-west of England. At a get together at the Richardsons’ home, the author enjoyed the sound of laughter from the children of family and guests. One could not imagine a more archetypal portrait of England’s green and pleasant land.

“Canadians are desperate for a Keats,” proclaimed the narrator of The Favourite Game, and Cohen himself seems to have been the poet designated to fill that role. The poets Louis Dudek and Irving Layton were his first mentors, and he was celebrated specifically for his contributions to Canadian literature. One could argue that Cohen was a member of a renaissance of Canadian literature that began in the second half of the twentieth century, and would include near-contemporaries Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, both of whom began their careers as poets. Moreover, Cohen’s songs should be read in relation to the other Canadian songwriters whose careers were contemporary and sometimes intersected, especially Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. These songs are also a contribution to that literature, and this chapter reads Cohen’s songs in that context, and to understand his importance to Canadian literature.

John Hepburn Forgie was an enigma. Forgie first came to the author and his band’s attention through Ivan Kelly, who had been prompting them to invite him to rehearsals. At that time he worked as a clerk in Rediffusion television rentals, leasing coin operated TV sets to hard-up punters. Soft spoken and styling himself as the odd, alternative, introvert of the band, he welcomed teasing at his expense and happily embraced the pseudonym ‘Lousy Body’ before settling on ‘ArtRat’, which he emblazoned on his first guitar. Unlike Jake Burns, who self-consciously swopped his glasses for contacts, Forgie wore his thick-lensed specs as a perverse badge of honour. He looked the part, with his high cheekbones, sallow complexion and mop of spiky jet-black hair, and was, for the author and his band, the last piece of the puzzle.

This chapter discusses the development of a commercial popular music tradition within what became known as Tin Pan Alley and its relationship with a maturing film industry. It undertakes specific analysis of a number of classical Hollywood musicals from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s and examines its role in the construction of the ideology of entertainment. When Hollywood needed songs and music, it drew inevitably upon existing popular entertainment traditions and personnel, upon musical luminaries such as Irving Berlin and George Gershwin, as well as lesser talents such as Bert Kalmar and Harry Rubin, who had worked as a song-plugger for Harry Cohn's music company. It was argued earlier that the successful development of the musical genre and its popularity with audiences throughout the 1930s and 1940s depended on the formal, thematic and ideological fusion of spectacle and narrative, and on the management of the tensions which result.