This is no trouper’s tale. In her autobiography, the folk singer Judy Collins recalls having to practically manhandle Cohen onstage at his debut American concert in 1967. “I can’t do it,” he said, “I would die from embarrassment.” Halfway through his opening number, Suzanne, Cohen got the jitters, unstrapped his guitar and walked off again. “I can’t do it, I can’t go back,” he told her. “But you will,” she said, and, willingly or otherwise, he has been doing so ever since.  Today, he is a relatively polished stage performer, trim and dapper, with the look of an ageing mob lawyer in his charcoal suit and fedora. The voice – once described as “deeper than a Siberian coalmine” – is now deeper still and roughened by age, but it arguably suits the material. When Cohen needs some vocal variation, he can call on others, as he did in recruiting Britain’s Webb Sisters for a world tour and his Live in London album.  What he hasn’t got much better at is explaining what these dark, reproachful, sometimes caustic songs are really about. Cohen likes to deflect such questions, either by using Yeats’s line about “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart” or arguing that the “sacred mechanisms” of songwriting simply don’t lend themselves to explanation. You can understand his reticence when something like Hallelujah, an oddball song on a flop album, ends up as a soundtrack to The X Factor.  Most fans agree that the repertoire’s central theme is disappointment. It isn’t hard to spot where it comes from. Cohen was born in Montreal, the son of middle-class, observant Jewish parents. He thinks his early years were happy, but, when he was nine, his father, Nathan, who ran a clothing store, died suddenly. The boy took solace in books and especially poetry, and after leaving McGill University set out to become a full-time poet.  The next big blow was discovering the difficulties of making such a career choice pay. His first poetry collections, and two early novels – The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers – sold poorly, although the latter would gain some fame when its core sex scene was voted the worst in the history of Canadian literature.  Growing disillusioned with the world of letters, he headed to New York with the vague idea of becoming a singer. There, he fell in with Andy Warhol’s Factory, a smacked-out salon of waifs, aesthetes and famous-for-15-seconds nobodies that fortunately numbered some talents, too – notably the Velvet Underground, filmmaker Paul Morrissey, and the poor, doomed model-cum-muse Edie Sedgwick. Cohen could see the difference and understood what it would take to succeed.  The odds remained against him. He was already in his early thirties, and pop promoters tended to ask: “Aren’t you a little old for this game?” He wasn’t good-looking, couldn’t sing very well and had no obvious charisma. The breakthrough came when Judy Collins, whom he had met in a club, agreed to record his composition, Suzanne. In 1967, The Songs of Leonard Cohen was released, keying perfectly into the fashionable singer-poet genre established by Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. Unsettling, literate and beautifully phrased, the record made Cohen a star.  All these years later, he remains one. Each attempt to retire has been thwarted. For several years in the Nineties, he vanished into a Zen monastery in California, but emerged in 2000 claiming that he had beaten depression and was keen to work again. He soon changed his mind, but in 2005 discovered that more than  $5 million in earnings had vanished from his bank accounts. He won a civil suit against his former manager Kelley Lynch, but failed to recover the money, and was forced to return to work. He has never married, listing matrimony as high among his phobias.  However few days he claims to have, they’ll be spent like last week’s – pleasing, teasing and worrying the fans. Success, he says, is survival, and he currently has both ends covered.
Even on the release of 'Old Ideas' &ndash; his 12th album &ndash; the 77-year-old   singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen remains happy to be sad, says William   Langley