The Future                The Future

The following article, review and photograph are from Rock CD, December 1992.

Heavy Cohen By Cliff Jones Wrinkled, grey, humourous and urbane, wearing a crumpled suit and a huge pair of coke bottle specs that magnify his lacquered brown eyeballs to an impressive size, Leonard Cohen retains a charm all his own. An instantly recognisable deep gruff voice rasps and rattles through the room, bringing a mumbling world weary sense of emptiness with it. Despite rumours to the contrary Leonard Cohen is still the miserable old sod you've come to know. With his new album, the message is, for once, simple. We've lost it, destroyed the very fabric of our existence. Fucked up bigtime. The apocalyptic flood, a tempest of our own making, is here. Hold on and hope you stay afloat; it's going to be a rough old ride. "I'm not Nostradamus but anyone can see that things are getting difficult here. There's similar threads running through all my work from the very start right through to this album. As early as '79 I was talking about the real feeling a lot of people have deep inside that this is the end. These are the final dark days, the flood's on its way. "All our psychic landmarks are gone and the whole psychic landscape is being washed away. The essential centrality has been eroded to the point where it's all breaking apart. We no longer have any sense of who we are, where we belong or what we should be doing. Most of us feel it and we're all more than a little freaked out!" Downer, Len. While it's true that much of his work since the mid '70s has been taken up with his own bleak prophesies concerning man's destiny and the effects of this psychic tempest primarily on himself, Cohen is aware that The Future, his latest LP, even by his standards, is far more urgent in its message than his previous work. There's a certain frustration to the record, a spite aimed at those who've picked a cause to sing about but are seemingly blind to the real situation around them. For Cohen everyone is ignoring the imminent. Today's eco-rhetoric is at best misguided, at worst irrelevant. "If it's any comfort to everyone I've been breaking apart for 50 years, it's an ongoing process, but I don't think any of my songs are, or ever were for that matter, on the same level as some ridiculous hippy song about love and peace. To cite a modern example, songs about the rainforests irritate me. My work is still from the point of view of how the world touches me. Yes my songs are strong, about the code of survival, but they're certainly not on the same level as the sort of Communist propaganda that passes for modern concern. These songs about save the rainforests and clean up the oceans are trite. They don't smell of anything. They have no real sentiment or substance to them, no body or life. To me it's official art, it's sanctioned art, it's acceptable art and the truth is it don't matter a diddly fuck to anyone! "Of course you can't be like Scrooge and say 'Oh they're trying to save the rainforests, fuck them, oh they're trying to bring back family values, fuck them also.' You gotta affirm everyone's efforts no matter how pointless they may seem. I say in the first song on the album 'Gimme crack and anal sex, take the only tree that's left and stuff it up the hole in your culture.' That's where the real problem is and we choose to ignore it and invent causes to distract ourselves." With songs like "Democracy" and "Anthem" Cohen appears to be venting his spleen on Western civilisation's familiar whipping boys. As usual, closer examination reveals it to be the same old Len Cohen with the same primary concern, himself, and the same impenetrable doom-laden sanctity, in operation. His is selfish poetry set to music, as he'd be the first to agree. "Listen, I don't have to have any real point of view except my own. I'm a poet not a politician. I don't have to garner votes or win elections. I don't even have to be consistent. My songs are about issues that appear to be widespread but are in fact all funnelled down into songs about how I call survive amid the desolation. It's about me. How am I going to make it through? How call I fortify those close to me? Look, there's this flood I've been talking about for 20 years now, and it's wiped away everything moral, spiritual, political, every damn thing. All I'm asking is, 'What is the appropriate behaviour in these circumstances?' When you're hanging onto a piece of orange crate and people are floating away and going under all around you, are you really gonna give a fuck about the conservative/liberal divide? No! Are you really gonna talk about Communist vs Capitalist? No! Are you really gonna waste time debating She-ite vs Sunni? Only if you're stupid! And as for the rainforests, is that really what's important? I think not. We're missing the point. It's here, now so why are we still sitting around pretending we're all having a leisurely pot of tea. We Are Not! We've all got our heads up our arses pretending it's not there! "Is this the time to do something to protect yourself? Well it is for me. Your rainforest is nothing but an alibi, buddy!" It seems age has refused to mellow this man - if anything he is more insistent, the message more intense than ever. Cohen remains untroubled. That people perceive him as a crank, a depressing crank at that, comes as no surprise. Like the man who walks down Oxford Street with a sandwich board proclaiming Repent For The End Is Nigh and has done so everyday for the last 20 years, Cohen overdramatises for effect. Through all the apparent despair a master of black humour is at work mischievously seeding the bleakest lines with irony and guilt inducing chuckles. "I am one of the greatest comics of my generation without doubt." He laughs, wheezing and croaking, his face falling into itself like he'd just reinvented himself as Laughing Len, top comedian and ersatz entertainer. "I take a bum rap about being humourless, depressed and dour. My role isn't to depress but merely point out my position. I'm always amused by people who think I'm under a permanent cloud of gloom and doom. I'm probably one of the few writers who put jokes in his songs and get away with it. I put lines in that relieve things, dispel the tension hur, hur. There's more jokes in my songs than in The Lady In Red or any of those rainforest songs that's for sure. "Things are different for me now. The songs I wrote back in the '60s were songs about love, loss, pain and guilt just like all my work but it was centred on a past, a situation that wasn't as bad as it's gotten now. Different maybe but not as bad. If anything I shouldn't be smiling at all, things aren't looking good, but I do. What else is there?" A past that's inspired thousands since to take up the pen or the guitar began during the early '50s beat boom; an impressionable teenager fascinated by the apparent attraction poetry has for the opposite sex, Cohen decided it was a poet's life for him. Soon a leading light in the Montreal poetry scene, he published two anthologies of his teenage work and a novel, The Favourite Game, before settling down to write his first controversial work Flowers for Hitler. Poor sales convinced him to find a more viable way of supporting himself. After a well received but financially unrewarding second novel, Beautiful Losers, Cohen is spotted performing at the Newport folk festival and is signed to CBS. The Songs Of Leonard Cohen, released in 1967, became the essential soundtrack for angst ridden teenagers everywhere. Twenty five years on does Cohen hold any affection for his early work? "Looking coldly and savagely at your own work, as you have to when putting an anthology or compilation together, you have to really think what's good and what's crap. Was I any good? I think there's stuff I did when I was 15 that was pretty good. I forget the stuff that didn't work, conveniently, but as an example: in the first book I did, when I was about 20, there's stuff like 'I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their names women give themselves to him / If I am still beside your body while silence blossoms like a tumour on your lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside your door.' Not bad for a youngster eh? Sometimes I think it was all downhill from there. You see I've never thought that the young aren't wise. There is a specific wisdom that belongs to the younger man, just like there's a specific wisdom to the 58 year-old man. There are ages to life, and there's a genius to every age." A string of successful albums followed Songs From A Room (1969), Songs Of Love And Hate (1971) as well as sell out performances at The Royal Albert Hall and The Isle Of Wight festival. Then the slide from favour began; 1974's soft rock New Skin For The Old Ceremony spelt the end of his initial run of success. Retiring to the Greek Island of Hydra it was three years before Cohen made another record. His voice as a poet was lost, and a collaboration with legendary madcap producer Phil Spector on the album Death Of A Ladies Man (1977) was, according to Cohen, a disaster. Spector, then at the peak of his paranoiac state, had armed guards in the studio to "help" Len deliver the goods. "During that middle period I don't think I lost it so much as people had had enough of me. As for Phil, you know I wish I'd worked with Phil this year instead of then. I think I'd have been better prepared to negotiate with him under those hazardous conditions hur, hur (wheeze wheeze). I was kinda wiped out and Phil was frankly round the bend, mad as a hatter. It was a weird combination. There were a lot of guns around. He liked them and so did I but it was mayhem! "Right now Phil's good and strong and so am I. I'd like to get back with him and try something new. He's an undoubted genius but I don't like Death Of A Ladies Man at all. It has a certain... well, put it this way, it gets better over the years. It has a place in my work as a whole but when it came out I was angry 'cause I thought we'd blown a load of good songs, they were all first takes. I didn't even have the imagination at the time to medicate myself and escape from the situation. I was horrifically sober for most of it and that made it far worse. I lost control of the record and of myself, my relationships were all over the place and the album was the symptom of a man falling apart. Sometimes you just lose your grip. Things don't work and it all fucks up. Fundamentally my sense of who I was was undergoing a complete revision but I was still putting on the mask and walking out of the door every morning trying to be Leonard Cohen, the poet who makes records. I lost my mind. Insanity in its milder forms makes you lose perspective so you don't reflect 'gee I'm losing my mind here,' instead the room tilts, you fall to your knees and pray you'll make it to the next moment of your life. You don't have the luxury of perspective with insanity." After a self imposed period of recovery he returned in 1985 with an album, Various Positions, that suggested he'd recaptured his voice. With 1988's I'm Your Man Leonard Cohen was back in full stride, with his best album in over a decade. "I think you continually lie low then decide to get up and do something again. All the while you're trying to give the appearance of someone who's utterly normal but really things move from hopelessness to euphoria and back. It can be a major thing just trying to find your glasses so you can see where you happen to be in the morning. I'm Your Man was a good record, I felt back on top of it again then." Last year's tribute album I'm Your Fan featured many of today's innovative rock acts including Nick Cave, The Pixies, R.E.M. and Lloyd Cole who tackled classics like "Chelsea Hotel" and "First We Take Manhattan," did much to renew interest in Cohen. More importantly perhaps it spurred the man himself into returning with a new album. "Rather than me trying to get back to the fray it seems the fray is ready to have me back. With any kinda guy who's doing serious work you don't let up, you keep going and sometimes you're in favour and other times nobody gives a damn. Once you get over the initial ripping of the thin skin you pretty well go and continue 'til you drop. It's not with any indifference that I acknowledge the greeting of the fray. I'm happy to be back in the market place, I gotta pay bills. But it doesn't necessarily determine the capacity or willingness to keep the thing going. I'm not Leonard Cohen for the money. "What do I think to the record? Gratitude - and it isn't just the royalties. You gotta be able to juggle the two things in life; caring and not giving a damn. It doesn't matter in the great scheme of things that someone covers a Leonard Cohen song, on the other hand, I'm extremely grateful when anyone covers one of my songs. My critical facilities get suspended cause I'm genuinely pleased that anyone would want to sing one of my songs. If they get it together I'm really tickled. I sent every one of those guys on the record a letter saying how pleased I was and thanking them. When you're hanging onto your orange crate it don't mean coonshit but other times when it's just a question of getting through the day it's really comforting. The royalties are too, I have people to support, more and more of them it seems." After 58 years of soulsearching does Cohen consider he's become a martyr to his own depressing cause; a victim of the Leonard Cohen fable of gloom? "I never thought of myself as a martyr. If you're one of those people who lives their life on a winning streak all the time then you deal with the circumstances as they seem to you. "To be honest, I feel I've spent most of life not on a winning streak so I relate to things based on that notion. You're still alive, you're still supporting those you're contracted to support and so as you get older your notion of what a winning streak is changes. You settle for less. "One is very privileged to survive but it's a real and continuing challenge. When I say survive I mean stay so you're not a zombie. "It was never death that worried me, it was that certain kind of numbness you can fall victim to that was the real worry. There are moments when you feel yourself dying, not physically, but spiritually. You feel yourself saying or making those compromises you always maintained you wouldn't. It's these traitorous agreements that anaesthetise you and pull you under. It's always going down, it never stops and you gotta be aware or else you go down with it." As if by way of an apology Cohen, grey man incarnate, creased and lined by life but basically still intact, adds with a wicked smile "Gee, I hope your readers don't get too depressed. This is more than a little heavy for this time of day." You can take what Leonard Cohen says any way you choose but you can't help but wonder. There's certainly an indefinable smugness about him, as if he knows something we don't. He rises, shuffles towards the door and adds grinning, "Believe me, I've seen the future and you don't want to be heading there." Review: The Future, Leonard Cohen The critical rehabilitation of the man they used to call Captain Mandrax is one of rock's more unexpected twists in recent years. Through the seventies and the eighties, our Len was hugely popular among recently jilted lovers and manic depressives in student halls of residence, while anyone else with a weakness for his lugubrious charms kept mum about it. Then came 1988's I'm Your Man, where synthesised drum patterns elbowed out his traditional acoustic arrangements and, suddenly, Cohen was all the flaming rage. A recent tribute album, I'm Your Fan, featuring the likes of Nick Cave, Jimmy Jewel, Pixies and John Cale, served to pour a jug of paraffin on a reputation that was already burning like billio. This excellent new album continues the stylistic experiments inaugurated with I'm Your Man, with only a few nods to the jaundice folkiness that made him so popular with hypochondriacs and raving paranoiacs in the first place. Likewise, his lyrical concerns have broadened beyond familiar themes of seduction and betrayal, with numerous forays into the political amphitheatre and committed stabs into the belly of the cynical, hard-boiled nineties. "Waiting For A Miracle," "Anthem" and "Light As The Breeze" wouldn't sound out of place on albums like Songs From A Room and Various Positions were it not for the slightly eerie syncopated backbeats and state-of-the-art (i.e. posh) production. The gospel-flavoured "Be For Real" succeeds in spite of Cohen sounding like a cross between The Honey Monster and Fozzy Bear. The searing mutant blues of "Closing Time" owes more to Tom Waits than just the title. At its best though, particularly the gorgeous lilting melodies of the title track and the blistering bar-room blues of "Always," this album cements Cohen's reputation as wry nineties ironist and all-round spokesman for the human condition. Little short of a bloody marvel. A Rating of Four (4) Points out of Five (5).

For their kind and generous support, many thanks to Kelley Lynch, Mr. Leonard Cohen and Dick "The Hummingbird" Straub.

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