Leonard Cohen - Thanks For The Dance

The poet’s intimate musical postscript.

- Richard Williams

UNLIKE most people, or so it seemed from the film’s reviews, I emerged from a cinema showing Nick Broomfield’s Marianne & Leonard: Words Of Love earlier this year feeling rather less fond of Leonard Cohen than when I’d gone in. It was hard to ignore the fate of Marianne Ihlen’s son by a first husband, the novelist Axel Jensen, who had left her by the time she met Cohen on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960. Axel Jr, still just a baby when their affair began, was promptly sent back to Norway to be looked after by his grandmother. Later she brought him back to the community of artists on Hydra, and then took him with her when she pursued the Canadian poet to New York even as their relationship petered out towards the end of the decade. Axel Jr has spent much of his life as collateral damage, in and out of institutions, coping with psychiatric problems. Apparently Cohen often sent Marianne money to help them keep going until she met her second husband, an oil-rig engineer. As someone in the film says about children raised on Hydra, often it did not turn out well for them.

So the unexpected arrival of a new album under the name​ of Cohen, who died in November 2016 aged 82, might help to dispel the fumes lingering from Broomfield’s portrait of elegant but heedless self-indulgence. It restores the memory of an artist who, throughout his long career, made music that reconciled the gratified desires of the flesh with the austerity of a spiritual odyssey.

Cohen’s death occurred a couple of weeks after the release of his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, which promptly flew up the charts around the world. Produced with scrupulous intelligence and the lightest of touches by his son Adam, it offered a fitting last word. On the epic title track, amid the sounds of funeral rites, he seemed to be saying goodbye to the world.