As the Canadian doomster releases another album at the age of 70, Robert Sandall in the Telegraph lists his Lennie top twelve. I don’t have any particular argument with his choices, but was amused by his take on the lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat”:
“And what can I tell you? My brother would kill you, what can I possibly say?/I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad that you stood in my way.”
My brother would kill you?? This throws a whole new light on the song: the Cohen brothers at the centre of the Montreal Mafia… (It should be, “my brother, my killer..”)
And “First We Take Manhattan” – Sandall sees this as some kind of political allegory:
Although we don’t tend to think of Cohen as a political songwriter, he likes to keep a wandering eye on world events and at times he has made noises which in retrospect can sound sort of prophetic. The year before the Berlin Wall came down, he recorded this, a synth-heavy, ostensibly anti-New York anthem with a dramatic pay-off about the putative overthrow of the capital of old East Germany. Not the sort of message you could ever put on a T-shirt, obviously, but a real tease, given Cohen’s middle-European ancestry.
I always saw it as above all a piss-take of the whole rock-star-as-messiah thing, particularly David Bowie. But I suppose there’s room for different interpretations.
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