Independent.ie"The Return of the Man with the Golden Voice"
This year began with the rather bizarre phenomenon of there being three versions of the same song in the Top 40. What was even stranger was that the song in question was not the latest hit by Miley, Britney or Whitney -- but Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.
The previous spring, the bard of Montreal's bittersweet hymn to the destructive/redemptive qualities of love had been catapulted to Number One on the iTunes chart after contestant Jason Castro covered it on American Idol. The show's Svengali, Simon Cowell, repeated the trick on this side of the pond when he chose it as the signature tune of the X Factor final in December.
Now, Cowell has propagated many crimes against pop music and good taste in his time as the smarmy schlockmeister-in-chief of Saturday night TV entertainment, but getting a puppy-faced teenage boy to pummel this majestic song to within an inch of its life has to rank as one of his most shameful escapades.
Aside from the boy, Quigg, obviously being out of his depth, the references to the kinky S&M games on the roof just sounded weird coming from the mouth of a frizzy-haired schoolboy barely out of short pants.
Alexandra Burke's version was not a whole lot better, consisting of the Londoner showing off her ability to use every octave on the scale when singing a single word.
It was enough to make the Leonard Cohen purists out there reach for their Simon Cowell voodoo dolls. Their online campaign to get Jeff Buckley's stately, solemn 1994 version to the top of the charts instead of Ms Burke's was their attempt to stick their collective pin in, and become SiCo killers.
There have been many other wretched covers of the song over the years, not least Bono's self-conscious spoken-word version on the
Tower Of Song tribute album, which strips away all the mystery (and melody).
Gavin Friday and Mary Margaret O'Hara's duet at the Hal Willner Came So Far For Beauty tribute concert in Dublin in 2006 was another attempt to rewire the song that went horribly wrong.
Other singer/songwriters, from our own Emmet Tinley to Cohen's fellow Canucks kd lang and Rufus Wainwright, have sung far more faithful versions that stick to the template originally laid down by John Cale on the
I'm Your Fan tribute album from the early 1990s, and later immortalised by Jeff Buckley. I remember sitting in the cinema open-mouthed upon hearing Cale's version soundtracking a film about a talking cartoon mule (er, Shrek). Shurely some pishtake?
John Cale writes in his autobiography
What's Welsh For Zen? -- incidentally, one the finest music tomes I've ever read -- about how he wrote to the song's author looking for the lyrics. Cohen wrote back, including a whole set of alternative verses not used on his original version (which appeared on 1984's
Various Positions album).
Cale preferred the unused lyrics -- and so musical history was made. In the meantime, the song has become a standard of the repertoire of buskers and denizens of open-mic nights -- and seemed destined to be laid low by overexposure, in one corner by over-earnest copycats, and in the other by Cowell-style cheese-churners.
How delighted, then, were we to see Leonard Cohen himself reclaim ownership of the song when he released his
Live In London CD and DVD last March. On it, he and his amazing band perform an astonishingly dignified and deeply moving version that returns it to hallowed ground.
The live album version was recorded just weeks after his three epochal outdoor concerts in Kilmainham in May 2008, when grown men and women were so overcome by his version of Hallelujah that they openly wept.
Reports from America suggest a similar awed reaction from the crowd at the Coachella Music Festival in Indio, California, in April.
Many of us thought that we would never get another chance to see this giant of music in the flesh again -- after all, what other 74-year-old would persevere with the hard slog of another world tour so soon after his last one? So when it was announced that he would play four nights at the O2 Arena [in Dublin], we reacted with as much disbelief as glee.
The word is that the quality of Leonard Cohen's 2009 live show shows no sign of flagging: a reporter for a local Wellington paper wrote of his gig in New Zealand in January: "It is hard work having to put this concert into words, so I'll just say something I have never said in a review before and will never say again: this was the best show I have ever seen."
To which we all say: hallelujah!
Live In London is out now on Columbia/Sony. Leonard Cohen plays the O2 [in Dublin] on July 19, 20, 22 and 23.