1. Leonard CohenThe Future

It’s not necessarily my favourite Leonard Cohen record but it might be the one that most inspires me in what I do. The lyrics are so vulgar and over the top but very beautiful at the same time. I really like – and it’s one of the things that inspires me the most – how he can have these sentences in songs that get away with a lot and it’s meaningful but also hold a humour. There’s also a prophetical, almost scary, thing to it as well. The title song is one that I have been so jealous of that I couldn’t time travel back and steal from him. The Future took me a long time to get into after I got into Leonard Cohen and he himself took me a long time to get into. I didn’t like Nina Simone or Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or Neil Young, these names are ones I now cherish as my favourites but initially it was music I recognised as a kid that my intellectual middle class friends’ parents would listen to. I found these names to be kind of appalling but I grew up to it.

I don’t remember listening to Songs From A Room for the first time, I was at my friend’s house and I was talking about how I hated Leonard Cohen and he was like, ‘shut up you insolent so-and-so, sit down and listen to this, now’ and I was very drunk, we all were, it was very late at night. I remember being completely overrun with emotion and I’d never heard anything of such calibre. I woke up the next morning hungover and I had remembered that I had heard Leonard Cohen and that it was fantastic but not what it sounded like – it was kind of a blackout night. I downloaded the record and put it on my MP3 player and I walked to this industrial harbour place in Copenhagen and listened to the whole thing. By the time ‘The Partisan’ came on I remember being so shocked that I fell flat on my back to the ground and I just kept lying there for the rest of the duration of the album. From then on I was sold.

There’s no lyric writer I admire more than him. I was sad I never got to see him sing, there’s nobody else who’s hand I would have rather shaken. He died at a respectable age and he had a good run but of course I was sad and shocked when he died. I was at a bar after a Marching Church show and somebody said he’d died and I just said, ‘fuck off, that’s not funny’ and then somebody else came over and said it. I couldn’t really comprehend it and there was a jukebox in the bar that had some Leonard Cohen so we put on 30 songs by him. It was sad but an 82 year-old man with a respectable body of work and a life filled with lovers seems like a life well lived to me and I’m glad he managed to put out that last album, I thought that was a great end.