Directory of Lost Causes

For one reason or another, I had occasion to look up this recently. It's quite possibly the best title sequence for any television series ever. I can remember the whole room being charged when this sequence came on the television. I wonder if it is possible to find any title sequence made in the last twenty years to equal it for drama. But back in the seventies and even the eighties, there were, indeed, title sequences to rival this, as shown by this, this and this. Somewhere something has gone very wrong with people's taste. There seems to be no discernment any more. Not only that, there's no imagination. No sense of adventure. The adventure that should be in the blood of youth seems trammelled entirely by neurotic desires to be slick - something like a premature middle-age, with each person now carrying a committee of accountants and executives in their own head.



I mean, compare the old and new Doctor Who opening sequences. How could anyone honestly prefer the newer one? Surely such a preference can only be dictated by a sort of insecurity, a lack of self-esteem surrounding money and peer-approval. The second sequence probably had more money spent on it, so it's a safer bet that if you pretend to prefer it you won't look like a skanky loser - an attitude that is the perfect fusion of all that is worst in adolescence and middle-age.



Anyway, I've just been - purely in order to ease my general tension a little before getting back to duties - looking through some pop music videos, and I was so thrilled whilst watching this one, from Lene Lovich (and this can't be pure nostalgia, because I'm not even sure I knew the song at the time), that I came to a sudden melancholy conviction that pop music really is dead; it is finally and irrevocably something that is in the hands of the accountants, and all the silly, daring playfulness has fled from it.



Ah well, I don't intend to pontificate much over this matter. You may disagree with me, and it's not really a matter that can be decided rationally. The heart of the individual must judge here.

What I will do is attempt what I should have done some time ago - to revive my memories of the Leonard Cohen show that I attended last month. Now, there are a number of people in the world of music about whom I have come to feel regret that I have never seen them perform live, and probably never will. These include the abovementioned Lene Lovich, Tama, Kate Bush, Thomas Dolby and The Smiths. One person whom I never expected to be able to see live, but whom I can now say that I have, is Leonard Cohen, and all thanks to the fact that his accountant apparently stole all his money while he was meditating in some monastery somewhere, so that he was forced, in his early-mid-seventies, to go out into the world once more and be troubadour. So, accountants are good for something, after all.

I'm too tired and too harassed to wax eloquent over the occasion of the Cardiff Cohen gig, which I think I attended on the 8th of November, though I may be wrong. (Or was it the 18th?) Anyway, whenever he was in Cardiff. Look it up, if you like. (The 8th - I was right.) I'll just try and give you some idea of how it was for me. Also, I took a few fugitive photographs, which are not very good, but which I might post later, anyway.



I can't actually remember the opening song, would you believe? I'll have to see later if anyone's put a setlist online. If this were Morrissey, someone would definitely have put the setlist online by now, but perhaps Cohen fans are more sedate. I thought that I knew Cohen's back catalogue quite well, but this gig proved that the gaps in my knowledge are extensive. At least half of the material was either new to me, or only very vaguely known. The reason for this was, quite simply, that most of the songs played were drawn from the latter half of Cohen's career. You might think that this would put a dampener on the evening for me, and I would have preferred a few more of my favourites, I suppose, but I was also interested to discover new material in this way.

The overall mood of this gig was quite different to anything I've been to before. Perhaps this can be most clearly described in terms of Cohen's band. He actually had a small chorus of female backing singers (three in all). Now, I quite expected something like this, but I think this might be a first as a gig experience for me. Altogether he was backed by something like a nine or ten-piece band. As far as gigs are concerned, I am more used to a band consisting of lead guitar, bass guitar, possibly rhythm guitar, drums, possibly synthesisers, and vocals. This is, I suppose, the rock'n'roll and indie pop formula, and it is one that largely relies on volume, physicality and adrenalin. The Cohen formula seemed quite different to me. Thinking about it now, there was absolutely no ringing of my ears when me and my friend left the gig. My ears had not been placed in danger at all. The music was not to be appreciated through its bass vibrations, but simply through the musicianship. That musicianship was clearly quite considerable, but never seemed, to me, to assume much of a foreground shape. It was very much a backdrop to the man with the smoky voice.

The man himself appeared much shorter than I had expected. And he seemed likeable in a Japanese, your-humble-servant sort of way, his bowing seeming somehow quite sincere (I don't know how this works, but it's true). Someone asked me a while back if he tipped his hat after each song. I don't know if he did it every single time, but he did do it several times. Of the songs unfamiliar to me that particularly caught me interest, were The Future and In My Secret Life. This, a little like a Morrissey gig, was one in which the lyrics mattered. I remember particularly, for instance, Cohen singing, "Destroy another foetus now/You don't like children anyhow", and, "The dealer wants you thinking/That it's either black or white/Thank God it's not that simple/In my secret life." The words seemed to take on new resonance as they were sung live, as if they were comments on very recent developments in the world, and in me, too.

Incidentally, for most of the gig, Cohen kept to his smoky, croaky older voice. My friend had speculated on whether he would actually try and sing, as he once did on his earlier recorded material. He did actually approach that younger, almost-singing voice with some of the songs towards the end of the gig.

The gig lasted two hours or so, with an interval in which my friend and I got some rum from the bar. I'll see what songs I can remember being sung. If I don't know the titles, I'll have to just give it a miss. I'm Your Man, Take This Waltz, Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye, Who By Fire, First We Take Manhattan, In My Secret Life, The Future, Famous Blue Raincoat, The Partisan, Bird on a Wire, Democracy, I Tried to Leave You, That Don't Make It Junk, If It Be Your Will, Suzanne, Dance Me to The End of Love, Ain't No Cure For Love, Tower of Song and Jazz Police. I might have missed out one or two. It's even possible I've added a couple.

Songs that stood out for me were The Partisan, Democracy, Famous Blue Raincoat and the others mentioned above, although I generally had the feeling that the gig was getting better as it went along.



Cohen spoke to the audience a little. I don't remember that much of it. I remember he said something to the effect that he'd heard Cardiff was a hard-drinking town, and that he'd had his own troubles there, and this was a song about how he'd dealt with them, before going into That Don't Make It Junk with the opening lines, "I fought against the bottle/But I had to do it drunk". I also remember a remark that made me laugh about how he had spent long periods taking medication or trying out spiritual practices, but had to give up both because, "cheerfulness kept breaking through".

The song that received perhaps the greatest response (which might be surprising to citizens of the USA) was the song Democracy, now most definitely given a new context by recent events:

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the war against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Footage from the actual gig below:



Though I feel cautious in my hopes about real change here, I think the world has really had enough of the kind of international behaviour that has been so disastrously destructive of hope for so long. It was clear that everyone in the venue wanted to hope, myself included. There was a real feeling of uplift here that lasted for the rest of the gig.

Cohen did, if I remember correctly, three encores (not three songs, since each encore was two or more songs long). Before each of the encores he skipped off and on stage like a gambolling lamb, in a way quite surprising and endearing for one his age. The last of the encores began with the song, I Tried to Leave You: "I tried to leave you/I can't deny it/I closed the book on you/At least a hundred times". It was a very charming moment of rapport with the audience, acknowledged with applause. Of course, the reference was not merely to the fact this was an encore, but the fact that this entire tour was a kind of encore forced on Cohen after he had expected to retire from such things. This rapport and applause was reprised at the very end of the song with the final line: "And here's a man still working for your smile."

This was not quite the last song. Cohen reminded us before we left how lucky we were not to be involved in some of the terrible things happening now in the world, and ended in a brief, prayer-like song, the title of which I don't recall. To be honest, I felt quite choked up.

It was a good night.

I was going to pontificate, actually, about how Cohen has managed to age so well in the music business because he is first and foremost a writer, but I don't really feel the need to do so now.