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‘I heard there was a secret chord, that David played and it pleased the Lord,� begins Leonard Cohen’s much-loved song ‘Hallelujah�, the seam around which this new documentary ‘Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song� holds together. So like that chord, one can wonder if the popular ‘hymn� pleased the true Lord of song too.

This September, I settled into the velvet ambiance of a little theatre in England with a cup full of pick-n-mix to enjoy both the sugary and matinee treats. As well as the biographical elements, the story of the song was fascinating indeed. The album on which it was first recorded, ‘Various Positions� in 1984, was, incredibly, refused release in the USA. Columbia records gave the work and its producer John Lissauer such a damning vote of zero confidence that they both seemed consigned to obscurity.

Yet the song was later picked up and sung by Bob Dylan, John Cale and Rufus Wainwright. It was given a jet-boosting by Jeff Buckley and then the Shrek film version (without the ‘naughty bits� as co-director Vicky Jenson explains) before becoming the supersonic standard of TV talent show spectaculars and taking on a life of its own. A trajectory with ‘a fourth, a fifth, a minor fall, and a major lift� indeed.

With its religious and sexual imagery drawn from the Bible’s accounts of King David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, it mixes the sacred and the profane in a hymn of sorts, though not of ‘somebody who's seen the light�. Cohen, a spiritual seeker, did not seem to find David’s Lord for himself.

It was when Mr Cohen went to the bank’s ATM, and realised his business manager had stolen all his earnings, that he was compelled to go back out on the road once more in 2008, by now in his early-seventies, with a band of superb musicians. On the opening night, we see his undoubted charm as he sings in tones that sink down deep as a cavern: ‘I was born like this/ I had no choice/ I was born with the gift of a golden voice.� Sell out tours, where the bookings kept coming, lasted for five years. They were the swansong of his life.

The story that I liked, though, was of how a quality piece of writing (150 to 180 song verses that still remained a work in progress) could so easily have been lost in the archives of time as a record label reject. Yet it found unanticipated champions that brought it an incredible level of public attention decades later. It points up just how many more of the fine works of others may have fallen the same anonymous way, but also to the tantalising possibility of just what can, and might yet, happen to a writer’s buried gems. Hallelujah!















Pic, Rama. Cohen in 2008

Recommended reading:
The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of "Hallelujah"

Recommended watching:
Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah (Live In London)


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