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.

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.