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.

The development of the visual economy of popular music has both helped to define the social meanings of popular music and positioned the consumption of that music firmly within the discourse and ideology of entertainment. This chapter takes issue with the approach and tenor of much of the writing about music video and MTV. The author refutes any suggestion that music videos and music television channels which exploit and promote them are in any sense 'pointless'. Whilst acknowledging those differences which mark out music video from earlier cultural forms such as the classical Hollywood musical, the chapter suggests that music video and music television 'make sense' when they are seen as part of a larger continuity, a process of aesthetic, ideological, technological and industrial convergence between popular music and the screen which has been underway throughout the century.

Around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States, American popular music had dominated the entertainment industry. For the first twenty years of the new century, the American music industry had been dominated by Tin Pan Alley. This chapter examines the development of the technologies of sound recording in early cinema and analyses its successful application within a restructured American film industry through an examination of the 1927 film The Jazz Singer. Actually, the development of sound cinema ended something of the silent cinema industry's insularity, as Hollywood, the theatrical industry, radio and the music industry came to recognize the mutual economic interests they shared. The Jazz Singer is significant in a number of ways. At one level, it represented the transformation of sound cinema technology into a fully social technology, into something that was to become part of people's everyday experience.