Cohen, with Suzanne
The name of this website ('Bard on the wire") is a homage to Cohen's famous song Bird on the Wire. Here's my tribute to the Canadian
folksinger, who die in
Standing on Purfleet Quay by the statue of George Vancouver
(born Lynn June 1757) and his painfully achieved coastal chart of North West
America feels like the perfect place to remember Canadian folk singer Leonard
Cohen. It's all there. Cohen's use of water to convey the spiritual depths
beneath urban experience ("Now Suzanne takes your hand/ And she leads you
to the river/ She is wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters");
that sense of a great outside world washing up
in the silt in every harbour ("heroes in the seaweed… children in
the morning"); the spirit's life as a sea-adventure ("And Jesus was a
sailor/ When He walked upon the water,") sudden epiphanies penetrating the
clouds. ("And the sun pours down like honey/On Our Lady of the
harbour.")
Countless bedsit dwellers all at sea in the 1970s tuned in
to Cohen's life-buoy psalms. I always scorned the parrotry that he made
'wrist-slashing' music. It was the chirpy cheep cheeps that depressed me.
His lyrics were as deep as his voice later became. "I
was born to this, I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice'
he joked as he plumbed ever-lower registers in the autumn of his life. More
like the rust-gold on an old sinking battleship.
Cohen faced the realities of love and mortality like some prophet
off an Old Testament mountain, applying the scriptures once sung by his rabbi grandfather
to illuminate real life. "Dance me to your beauty like a burning
violin" was more Song of Solomon than Tin Pan Alley; "Hallelujah"
as much actual gospel as gospel music.
He brought ancient wisdom to the relationships, gender and
social politics of our day, gave them eternal context. He inhabited the world of popular music for
more than six decades avoiding the empty noise of its shallower vessels. He
once quoted the Bible on a passport
application "If I forget thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my
mouth."
He may not have had a secret chart for the 'smoky' life of
the spirit but in his 20 album new-old
testament, he has left one for the rest of us. Like Vancouver he charted a complex and
enriching map.
"Doin different -
39 new ballads from the East of England" by Gareth Calway (Poppyland
publishing) is on sale in Waterstones, True's Yard and Hanse House.
A song from the loneliest room
A song from the loneliest room
A view of the studio albums, worst to best. (very unfair on 'Recent Songs' in my opinion and omitting the unmissable 'Live Songs' altogether, with its otherwise unavailable rough and ready gems like 'Queen Victoria', but really well informed and thoughtful.)
