Leonard Cohen and my dad

My dad was born in 1943. I was born in 1971.

The amount of times my dad talked about music during my childhood could be counted on the fingers of one finger. That time he heard Eye Of The Tiger on the radio and said “I like that – that’ll be a number one”.

Car journeys were always accompanied by Radio 4. Gardeners’ Question Time, Just A Minute, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, that sort of thing. Don’t get me wrong, nothing wrong with Radio 4, but it meant I got through a lot of batteries in my Walkman.

Because it was the seventies & eighties, we obviously had Top Of The Pops on every Thursday night, and had our fingers hovering over the play and record buttons when the Top 40 was on the radio, but I don’t recall my dad showing the slightest interest in either.

Mum was slightly better, having Wogan on at breakfast time before school (and therefore educating me in The Beatles, Roy Orbison, The Everly Brothers, Joe Dolce etc), listening to music whilst doing housework, actually owning records… Mum had two record collections: the good stuff, and the stuff she would play. We often heard Perry Como, Tell Me On A Sunday, Tony Christie, Super Trouper; occasionally got Glenn Campbell, American Pie; but sadly never got anything from her stack of 60s 7” singles, Elvis’ Golden Records or A Hard Day’s Night.

Despite (or maybe because of) this, music played a great big part in my life, with Mum occasionally expressing an interest in what I was listening to while I was holed up in my room, but with Dad still seemingly oblivious.

I went off to university, I came back. I moved out, I moved back. I moved out again, and got married. I was in my thirties and in over three decades my dad had only liked the theme from Rocky 3.

Then, one day in 2004, I got a phone call from the old man asking “Matthew, do you have any Leonard Cohen records?”

To say I was surprised would be an understatement.

My folks had been on holiday to Spain, and in the bar they had frequented the barmaid had been playing some music which Dad liked. It turned out to be the new Leonard Cohen album Dear Heather.

Now, I didn’t own any Leonard Cohen at all at that point. In fact all I really knew of him was Jeff Buckley’s version of Hallelujah, and the I’m Your Fan covers compilation from the early 90s. That was a great CD, with contributions from favourites of mine such as Pixies, R.E.M., The House Of Love, and The Lilac Time, but I had never investigated Laughing Len’s originals.

So I put mp3s of Dear Heather on Dad’s laptop, along with some earlier albums I found for him, and left him to it. Before I knew it, Mum was complaining that Dad was “listening to that miserable nonsense” non-stop. Over the coming years I tried to introduce other music into Dad’s life which I thought might be a natural progression from Cohen’s work – those Johnny Cash American Recordings albums for example – but nothing else seemed to interest him.

In recent years he’s found an internet radio station that plays non-stop 50s hits which he’s added to his listening habits, and had progressed from Radio 4 to Radio Wales, but there’s always Leonard Cohen.

The other week I sent him a link to a preview stream of Cohen’s new, and as it turns out final, album You Want It Darker. He didn’t like it – it was TOO Len. Too dark for Dad to enjoy. Having listened to Dear Heather and You Want It Darker whist writing this, I can see that the difference is rather stark. Obviously Cohen was an old man when this latest one was recorded, and (I suppose much like Bowie’s Black Star) the album can now be seen as a goodbye of sorts. A man in his eighties facing up to his own mortality - as he says in the title track “I’m ready lord”. In light of yesterday’s events, I wonder whether Dad will go back and listen to it again. I hope he does – it sounds like a really good album to me – but then I’m 45, and Dad is 73. Maybe I’m further removed from the subject matter.

I hope that discovering Dear Heather in that Spanish bar has led Dad to appreciate what music means to me, and to so many other people. Maybe he’s known all along, but it’s good to know he found a way into it himself.