‘It’s wonderful to be gathered here on just the other side of intimacy. So I’m so pleased that you’re here. I know that some of you have undergone financial and geographical inconveniences. We’re honoured to play for you tonight.’ Leonard Cohen is now 74 years old and in the middle of a world tour, playing almost three hours a night. Live in London has just been released on CD and DVD: 24 classic songs recorded in concert last July, performed by 10 amazing musicians and vocalists. It’s been the only thing I can listen to for a week now.

For me, the music of Leonard Cohen has an almost mystical quality. Decades ago I told myself that he’s someone I should listen to more closely, but it took me a while. Today, I listen to him almost every day, yet the more I listen, the more elusive he becomes. What inspired these songs of love, sex, spirituality, carnality, optimism and destruction? Sure, I could solve the mystery by reading a biography or two, but some things are best left unknown and I prefer to bring my own interpretations to his work.

Pick any Leonard Cohen song and you’ll find at least five quotable lines: ‘I’m guided by a signal in the heavens. I’m guided by this birthmark on my skin. I’m guided by the beauty of our weapons. First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.’ ‘Like a baby, stillborn, like a beast with his horn, I have torn everyone who reached out for me.’ ‘So many hearts I find, broke like yours and mine, torn by what we have done and can’t undo. I just want to hold you, won’t you let me hold you, like Bernadette would do.’ ‘Now you can say that I’ve grown bitter but of this you may be sure, the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor, and there’s a mighty judgment coming. But I may be wrong, you see, you hear these funny voices in the tower of song.’ ‘Your faith was strong but you needed proof, you saw her bathing on the roof, her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you. She tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne and she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew the hallelujah.’

Who else writes songs like these? And once you’ve heard these songs, how can you dare to go out there and write a song yourself, knowing that it’s just not going to be in the same league?

Cohen first came to prominence in the late 1960s. He was one of a handful of artists on Columbia Records whose records had a unique sound and look to them. Columbia was the last major label to embrace rock music, as head of A&R ‘Sing Along With’ Mitch Miller, who left in 1965, hated it and passed on both Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. But Columbia did have folk music and singer-songwriters, including Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and Laura Nyro, so Cohen fitted from that aspect, but he was unique in almost every other way.

Already famous in his native Canada, a published poet and novelist, he didn’t record his first album until he was 33 years old. It’s amazing that he even got to make a record at all, because, let’s face it, calling his singing voice an acquired taste is an understatement. Yet from the beginning, his songs were so amazing that his talent could not be denied. Cohen is one of those rare songwriters whose lyrics can be read as poetry, analyzed and debated over endlessly.

From the moment he arrived on the scene, other artists fell over each other to cover his songs. That first album alone, Songs of Leonard Cohen (the title putting the emphasis firmly on Cohen as a songwriter and not a crooner), gave the world So Long Marianne, Sisters of Mercy and Suzanne, possibly his most covered composition. Songs From a Room in 1969 upped the ante further with Bird on the Wire, while 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate included Famous Blue Raincoat and Dress Rehearsal Rag.

The sound of those first three albums was also unique. Perhaps because Cohen’s own baritone voice was so unusual, those first three, produced by legendary producers John Simon and Bob Johnston, surrounded him with intricately arranged music that drew from folk, cabaret and world influences. His later albums would go for a more mainstream sound with one truly bizarre transgression, 1977’s Death of a Ladies’ Man, produced by Phil “Wall of Sound” Spector of all people. Those sessions didn’t go well – Spector reportedly threatened Cohen with a crossbow and eventually locked him out of the studio. Perhaps a part of the mystery of his appeal is that in 42 years he’s only released 11 studio albums, just 106 songs, each one presumably laboured over, written and rewritten until they were dropped, like bombs, on the world. Cohen claims he’s written over 80 verses for Hallelujah alone.

If Cohen is best known for versions of his songs sung by others, today’s generation knows him best as the writer of Hallelujah, which originally appeared on his 1984 album Various Positions. John Cale was possibly the first to cover it, in 1991, and about 200 others have followed Cale, most famously Jeff Buckley in 1994, but it’s even been sung on American Idol.

So now we have Live in London, his third live collection, and it’s superior in every way to those earlier live records. There are no new songs here and nothing has been radically revised or revisited but the arrangements and performances are impeccable and approach definitive versions of these famous songs.

Nothing is flashy about the video: no fast editing or camerawork, no fancy light show or rear projections on the stage, no documentary footage or bonus features. Cohen, 73 years old when this was filmed, doesn’t look a day over 68. His between-song stage comments seem to have been as carefully thought out as his
lyrics. ‘It’s been a long time since I stood on a stage in London. It was about, about 14 or 15 years ago – I was 60 years old, just a kid with a crazy dream. Since then I’ve taken a lot of Prozac, Paxil, Wellbutrin, Efexsor, Ritalin, Focalin. I’ve also studied deeply the philosophies and religions but cheerfulness kept breaking through.”

And cheerfulness keeps breaking through in this concert, from the audience’s wild applause for every song to the huge smile on Cohen’s face. He has this slightly bemused look at times, kind of like an old man being presented with his first great-grandchild, almost as if he’s saying, ‘Is this for me?’ Is it that his five years locked away in a Buddhist monastery made him a happier man and a better performer? That’s not for me to say, but it may be an example for me to follow.