I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best (11/11/16)

In 1988 J & I were on holiday, only our second ever, in Menorca. I had an ear infection, deaf in one ear for a few days and whinging endlessly. We decided that eardrops would be a sensible idea and sought out a chemists. Headed to a small mall not far from the hotel. As we entered, through my one good ear, I could hear a familiar sounding synth pulse.

I stood, listened, thought. "They are, aren't they? They're playing 'I'm Your Man'". And they were. The album, only recently released (as I recall, I'm really not checking this stuff) was a 'comeback' of sorts, a new approach for the man who had long been dubbed 'laughing Len' in tribute to his supposed, and completely erroneous, grim, dark, depressive work. The acoustic guitars that had been the poet's stock in trade since he first reinvented himself as a singer/songwriter were replaced with a new approach, an approach which built itself on keyboards and drum machines, built itself on the technical as much as the human. It was a reinvention, a rebirth, a reshaping and there were longtime fans ('longtime' then being fewer years than have passed since that album's release) who weren't convinced at first. They're convinced now.

It's the album of First We Take Manhattan, I Can't Forget, Everybody Knows and the magnificent, timeless, witty, Tower of Song. 'My friends are gone and my hair is grey, I ache in the places where I used to play'; it's the late period return, it is, as most of these things seem to be nowadays, the work of a man who is younger than I currently am. It contains the best of all Leonard Cohen jokes - 'I was born like this, I had no choice, I was born with the gift of a golden voice' - it also contains the oddest Leonard Cohen moment - the brief interpolation of the Star Trek theme tune in the middle of the already fairly strange 'Jazz Police'. If the idea that Leonard Cohen was nothing but darkness and despair held any weight, then this would have been the album that gave the lie to it.

And we were hearing this in the middle of an air conditioned Balearic shopping mall in a blazing July; a place that you would think the province of Whitney Houston albums. A beautiful, wonderful incongruity.

It's not how I discovered Leonard Cohen; it would be a decent story if that was my introduction but it wasn't. I was already listening to Leonard, we had a tape of his Greatest Hits album with us, we were listening to it on a nightly basis. We were listening to it because it was soft and gentle and wistful and sad but hopeful and mostly because it was filled with love. Absolutely filled with it.

I knew of Leonard Cohen before I heard him. I knew of the reputation, had heard that he made 'music to slash your wrists to' as one particularly dismissive and dull critic once put it, had heard him mentioned in The Young Ones (the TV series, not the Cliff Richard film, though how bizarre would that have been), used as a punchline by Neil the Hippy.

I remember Mr Milner, our English teacher, being asked - somewhere in third or fourth year - what sort of music he listened to. And, while the class was listening to The Specials and Public Image and Madness and all that the late seventies held, he answered, "Leonard Cohen". He was asked if he was a hippy; "Yes, I suppose that I am."

I saw interviews with Ian McCulloch where he talked about Len and how great he was. And you listen to the people whose work you enjoy and you hear them talk about what they listen to and you check it out - I became a Scott Walker fan because Cope talked about him all the time - and I meant to check him out but somehow never quite got round to it.

1986. A job with Revolver Records. And the joy of working in a record shop is that, back then, you could play what you wanted. And the first thing I wanted to hear was Leonard Cohen (and more Dylan and Van Morrison and all the greats). Is it for everyone? Of course it's not, it's far too good to be for everyone. Sorry, that's snobbish but there you go. Some people will be better off thinking that Hallelujah is an Alexandra Burke song rather than having to deal with the endless depths of a long thought out, endlessly changing, meditation on the intertwined necessities of music, religion, love and sex. Which kind of sums up Len's life's work.

Hallelujah isn't on that first Greatest Hits; it was a fairly unremarked upon song until John Cale's rearrangement of it on the I'm Your Fan tribute that followed the comeback. What is on it though is this - Suzanne, Take This Longing, So Long Marianne, Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye, Famous Blue Raincoat, Chelsea Hotel #2. It's literate - its the work of a man who was a published poet and author long before he was a singer.

I was ready for it. Ready for the album that converted my generation to this genius - and genius is the only word for him, when they gave Dylan, deservedly, the Nobel Prize for literature based on the quality of his lyrics, they could have easily given it to Leonard. I was a Scott Walker fan, a Joy Division fan, I was ready for the dark heart, the dark heart was what I looked for in music. I got that and I got the beauty. And I got the playful nature and the warmth and the very human heart.

I was there through The Future's penetrating gaze on the horrors of early 90s American politics and mourn the fact that Leonard will no longer be here to cast his thoughts on the terrors that Trump will inflict. We need our poets, our singers, our commentators, our wise men, now more than ever. I watched the retirement, the embrace of a spartan buddhist lifestyle, the retreat from the needs of the world and when his ex-manager/ex-lover (Len, the poet, one of the greatest ladies men of all time, the proof we all needed that beautiful women would embrace the less than conventionally attractive if they had the soul - "we are ugly but we have the music") spirited away Len's life's work's savings, I saw the next comeback.

I saw him live. Once, just the once. Part of me wanted to see him again and again and again and part of me felt that once was right, felt that 'that' once was so perfect, so right, so bloody immaculate that a second time could never compete.

Liverpool Echo Arena. Concrete and harshness and not the sort of place that you expect epiphany and Leonard turned it to the intimate, turned it to the personal. A 74 year old man, at the time, he bounded on stage and performed for two hours solid before bounding off stage again; a spring in his step, a spritely figure, a singer whose voice had deepened and richened with age, a man whose art was growing deeper with the repetition of the live arena, growing with the larger rooms while becoming more intensely delicate.

All I wanted was Famous Blue Raincoat with its tale of a lover passing over his loved to another, a tale of being able to accept the possibility of betrayal and its attention to small detail; "It's four in the morning, the end of December, I'm writing you now just to see if you're better." "The last time we saw you, you looked so much older, your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder." I got it. And nearly wept at how perfect it was. Same as I did when Bowie played Quicksand at the Royal Court. Small moments of songs that mean the world.

Leonard Cohen's music has been there for me for thirty years, something that I have returned to over and over again in those moments when you don't want the aggression of the world, when you don't want the brash, the brazen, the loud, when you simply want the stillness and the peace and the quiet and the solitude and the sense that somebody is talking directly to you and knows more about life than you do and can teach you something, is willing to teach you something and that, no matter how dark it gets, there will be a twinkle in his eye as he tells you his story because he knows that everything survives. It doesn't matter how damaged things look because "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."

And now he's gone. And it wasn't a shock. Shortly before Marianne, his long time ago muse, passed away, not that long ago, Leonard wrote her a letter, professing his eternal love and saying that he would be joining her before too long. When his son (and producer of his last album), Adam, wrote a few days ago of the simple joy of spending his time with his father smoking medical marijuana it was like a preparation. There was a world in that statement. Apt, as there was a world in all of Leonard's statements, in every line, in every single wonderfully well chosen word. It wasn't a shock but it was a heartbreak, another heartbreak in this year of so many.

It seems, at times, as though the long dark night of the soul that 2016 is turning into is here simply to strip away every moment of beauty that we have ever known, to take away all the genius and the wit and the warmth and leave us to the mercy of small men and their small minds; to deprive us of Bowie and Prince and Cohen and leave us with Trump and Farage; to take away the compassion and love and leave us with the hate and suspicion.

Today, I'm taking refuge in the music and the fact that there is still work to do; that those who we have lost were here to make the world a better place and those left are doing their damnedest to turn it into a grubby, nasty, petty minded, smaller, more bitter place. It's the responsibility of those who believe that it should be better than this to ensure that they tell the stories and write the songs that create the moments of escape and inspiration, that they, that we, all of us that believe that it can be better than this, carry on proving that, creating that better world.

We lose the people, we lose the flesh; we don't lose their souls, we don't lose their work. Use it as a light to a better road.

"There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn't matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah.

RIP Len.