It's been 40 years since Leonard Cohen released his first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen. To celebrate this anniversary Sony BMG are re-releasing his début and the two infinitely more bitter follow ups, Songs From A Room and Songs of Love and Hate. There are even rumours that Cohen may actually release some new material later this year.
The rehabilitation of Cohen has been a long time coming, Even in the Sixties he was regarded by the love and peace generation as way too introspective and angry. Punk rockers, ever keen for cleansing year zero, ignored the misanthropy and nihilism and dismissed him as an all too gloomy bedsit troubadour and purveyor of the despised folk, Paul Weller famously describing his songs as 'music to slit your wrists to.' Joy Division's Ian Curtis' endorsement of the singer hardly helped.
To a degree all the criticisms of his work are accurate. Cohen whose voice was so deep and penumbral it almost seemed to emanate from a tomb wrote about religion, love, sex and death. His third album, the magnificent and stately Songs of Love and Hate, added a cello (never the most cheery of instruments) and the eerie sound of children's voices to the mix. Cohen himself, unlike others who have been described as enigmatic (Bowie for instance) said simply and fallaciously that the songs were just a way of meeting pretty, neurotic girls.
This fan site, a full 800 pages of it, features all his lyrics, poems and extracts from his largely incomprehensible novels. It is a timely reminder of a man whose influence can be heard in everything from Nick Cave, through Marylin Manson to Coldplay.
