MUSIC > Leonard Cohen: A troubadour at Charles's court

The lugubrious Canadian singer, beloved in bedsit land, is back on the scene with a film and a book. And now he even has royal approval.

The revelation that Leonard Cohen can number Prince Charles among his fervent fans, as the prince reveals in a TV interview involving himself, his two sons and presenters Ant and Dec, comes as a surprise. Charles's musical interests have previously oscillated between the Three Degrees, with whom he danced on stage as a bachelor, and Gustav Holst, whose 'Jupiter' he chose for his first wedding. Altogether different is the image of our future king nodding along to 'Ain't no Cure for Love' or trudging after Diana's cortege with 'Hey, That's no Way to Say Goodbye' running through his head.
Yet here's Charles on screen recommending Cohen to his sons as 'wonderful... I mean the orchestration is fantastic and the words, the lyrics and everything. He's a remarkable man and he has this incredibly laid-back, gravelly voice. It's terrific stuff'.

Clearly the words of a devotee and, given Cohen's reputation as the arch bard of miserabilism and his fascination with assorted religions, the easy conclusion is that Charles's appreciation marks the meeting of two gloomy, self-pitying male minds. In Cohen's case, at least, the reality is more complex. He is, by his own admission, a life-long depressive who has tried numerous cures for his melancholia, among them therapy, yoga, religion and drugs ('recreational, obsessional and pharmaceutical'), though the remedies to which he has repeatedly turned are red wine, beautiful women and poetry. At 71, he's an aficionado of all three.

Yet the charges of despondency and doom-mongering that are usually levelled at Cohen, or 'Laughing Len' as one writer dubbed him, are lazy and unjust, and at odds with both the wit of his songs and his personal charms. Far from being a self-regarding introvert, Cohen is a worldly figure with a winning line in stoical, self-deprecating humour. 'My friends are gone, my hair is grey, I ache in the places that I used to play,' comes the opening line in 'Tower of Song', which goes on to send up the famously limited range of his lugubrious vocals with the quip: 'I was born with the gift of a golden voice.'

Cohen's gifts are many - he's made 15 albums and written 10 poetry books. And he can draw and paint moderately well. But a golden voice is not among his talents. Indeed, his funereal baritone has always been a major turn-off for many listeners, and one reason he has, as he complains 'been filed under gloom'. Accepting an award in 1992, he remarked: 'Only in Canada could someone with a voice like mine win vocalist of the year.'

The drollery and artistry of Cohen's writing - he's a meticulous worker prone to fiddle with lyrics for years on end - helped keep his career alive once the first flush of his success faded in the mid-Seventies, by which time his early albums, stuffed with songs like 'Suzanne', 'So Long, Marianne' and 'Bird on a Wire', had become fixtures in bedsits around the globe.

Cohen was 33 by the time he cut his debut album in 1967, having spent his twenties pursuing the literary ambitions of his youth, living on a bequest from his father who had died when Leonard was just nine. A $2,000 literary award delivered the funds for a European jaunt, but his books didn't add up to a living. Returning to America, Cohen switched to music - as a teenager he'd played in a country band and besides, 'guitars impress girls' - and was introduced to Dylan's producer, John Hammond, by Judy Collins.

The quality of his songs and Hammond's clever production won him cult status, but by the early Seventies, his appeal was wearing thin. His artistic reputation went into decline, not helped by records such as 1977's Death of a Ladies' Man which was made with a disturbed, gun-waving Phil Spector and which Cohen himself described as 'catastrophic'.

He didn't fully recover his artistic poise or critical standing until 1988's I'm Your Man, which delivered his strongest set of songs since the early days, set to inventive backings that included synthesisers and orchestras and recast Cohen's persona as a sophisticated but cynical roue. His subsequent album, 1992's The Future, consolidated his status as grand old man of song with his most political songs to date, among them the dystopic title track and the caustic 'Democracy', which painted an unflattering portrait of the US - 'I love the country but I can't stand the scene' - though as so often in Cohen's work, the song's underlying themes are compassion and salvation.

By then, a new generation of musicians had discovered the riches of the Cohen catalogue, perhaps helped by the inclusion of three songs from The Future on the soundtrack of Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. He found himself name-checked in a Kurt Cobain song. Cover versions, which had been commonplace from the start, proliferated, along with tribute albums. REM did 'First We Take Manhattan' and Jeff Buckley made a celebrated job of the mournful 'Hallelujah', a song covered by Johnny Cash and John Cale among many others. More recently, Madeline Peyroux has remade 'Dance Me to the End of Love' into a slinky jazz croon for an audience that was probably unaware of Cohen's original. Classic songwriting never goes out of fashion.

That, presumably, was part of the point Prince Charles was making. Charles's praise for Cohen comes at a useful moment for the singer, who has been forced into feverish activity to raise funds after his manager of 17 years, Kelley Lynch, was found to have filched more than $5m from his bank account, leaving a meagre $150,000 for the 71-year-old singer's pension fund. Though a Californian court found in Cohen's favour in march this year, Lynch has so far shown scant interest in repaying what she stole.

Cohen's sense of betrayal was doubtless exacerbated by the fact that he and Lynch were lovers some 15 years ago. Given that Cohen spent five years in the 1990s as a Zen monk, ensconced in an austere, icy retreat atop Mount Baldy ('The only place in California with a winter,' as one wag put it), Lynch had ample time to ransack her client's account, though it took several years after his return from monastic exile for Cohen to discover the theft.

Cohen's financial loss may prove to be his fans' gain as his normally slow output quickens into what he calls 'incessant work' to generate revenue. His first book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, published in 1956, has just been reissued, and next month sees the arrival of I'm Your Man, a long-planned film documentary. Last week, he issued an autobiographical volume of poems and drawings, Book of Longing, and to support it played a short set at a Toronto bookshop to 3,000 people, his first public appearance in more than a decade.

Alongside him was his current partner, Anjani Thomas, whose newly released album, Blue Alert, was produced and co-written with Cohen. To compensate for his vocal limitations, he has always used female backing singers, promoting their role on his last two albums, 2001's Ten New Songs and 2004's Dear Heather, to pretty much replace his own disintegrating whisper of a voice. Now, it seems, he has to sing by proxy.

Hawaii-born Thomas is the latest in a dauntingly long line of lovers, creative partners and muses. Women have always played a central role in Cohen's life, not least in the creative process. He has, for example, worked with soul musician and arranger Sharon Robinson since 1988, while Anjani Thomas made her first appearance on the 1984 album, Various Positions

Alternately, women have played the part of muse. 'So Long Marianne' was addressed to Marianne Jensen, a Norwegian beauty with whom Cohen lived an idyllic existence on the Greek island of Hydra in the mid Sixties, where he wrote many of the songs that made him famous. 'Suzanne' was inspired by the wife of a sculptor friend, Suzanne Verdal (hence Cohen only 'touched her perfect body' with 'his mind') and 'The Sisters of Mercy' was composed after he granted two bedraggled sisters refuge in his hotel room, writing the song as they slept in his bed. 'Chelsea Hotel' charts an abrupt, less platonic encounter with Janis Joplin.

It's tempting to trace Cohen's female fixations back to his family life, where his poetry-loving mother, Masha, was an abiding influence, not least because of the early death of his father, a well-off haberdasher. His family tree also includes several rabbis - his great-grandfather founded Montreal's first synagogue - and Judaism remains a central theme of his work, though Christianity features strongly, too, an influence sometimes attributed to an Irish Catholic nanny. Despite his Zen training, he insists he's 'not looking for a new religion, I'm happy with the old one'.

Add good looks, intelligence, a tendency to priapic behaviour and depression and you have the Leonard Cohen that, against the odds, is still being celebrated at an age when most of his peers are either gone, forgotten or have long since hung up their rock'n'oll shoes. If you want an example of how to grow old gracefully, and keep the creative juices flowing as you do so, he's your man.

The Cohen Lowdown

Born Leonard Norman Cohen, 21 September 1934, in Montreal to middle- class Jewish parents. He has two children, Adam (b 1972) and Lorca (b 1974), by artist Suzanne Elrod.

Best of times Idyllic years on the Greek island of Hydra in the early Sixties, living simply with Norwegian Marianne Jensen, for whom he wrote 'So Long Marianne'. Later, as a celebrated fiftysomething lover of fine wine and women.

Worst of times Producer Phil Spector pressing a pistol to his neck during the 1977 recording of Death of a Ladies' Man. In 2004, discovering his manager of 17 years (and former lover) had skimmed his account of more than $5m, which he is unlikely ever to recover.

What he says 'To never have had to have written one word that I didn't want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work has been an enormous privilege.'

What others say 'You are a refugee/ From a wealthy family/ You gave up all the golden factories/ To see who in the world you might be' - Joni Mitchell describing an attempted liaison with Cohen on 'Rainy Night House'. 'Part wolf and part angel' - Anjelica Houston.