Leonard Cohen - I'm Your Man

Hearing this Leonard Cohen stuff, after listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers it was like ‘this sounds like bullshit!’, I didn’t understand the layers of intellect that had gone into making that record, and the large element of humour. My dad is into Leonard Cohen, I remember hearing the older stuff, then my sister was getting into it because she was becoming very literary. I was basically absorbing Leonard Cohen but I wasn’t crazy about it. I remember hearing ‘The Story Of Isaac’ as a child and thinking ‘god, this is fully intense, it’s so bare’. I remember hearing I’m Your Man it and at first finding it a really odd, unenjoyable experience, but now I realise that it’s a very curious idea, this industrial Leonard Cohen record, it’s really cool! ‘First We Take Manhattan’, imagine being a musician and being able to put a song like that out.

tQ: He’s not an easy artist to ‘get’ as a teenager…

That’s the hilarious thing about ‘Hallelujah’, how intentionally simple it sounds, how it’s this incredible piece of songwriting which the people who covered it didn’t understand; this beautiful song made to sound really pedestrian. You realise how entertaining it must have been for him to write that.