LEONARD COHEN TRIBUTE: Cathal Coughlan recorded one of the definitive Cohen covers

“Various Positions was the first album of his I really got into. Frankly, anyone who’s got a problem with the arrangements has got their head up their arse. Basically, they just work, although it was obviously quite frustrating for the people in the studio with him. I understand that they wanted him to use proper instruments, and not those Casio keyboard rhythms. But really, that was a way of taking it all back to his voice and his message. You weren’t getting distracted by guitars or anything.
“I’d have been more into the later stuff. You can’t beat the consistency of something like I’m Your Man, where every song but one is a classic, and even that one is okay. I don’t think he had that consistency earlier on, because he was feeling his way through things. He was deeply confused and anguished as a human being, which can get in the way of work sometimes.
“When I was in Fatima Mansions, we were asked to take part in the tribute album, I’m Your Fan. I didn’t want to do anything recent. I thought those albums were too complete and there wasn’t enough empty space. So we went to Death Of A Ladies’ Man! It’s not a bad album, but it’s certainly his most incomplete and unrealised. It wears its pre-baby boomer American male quandaries a little too much on its sleeve. So we did ‘A Singer Must Die’ and ‘Paperthin Hotel’. 
“We just let rip, really. I’m not sure why we took that approach. Looking back, maybe we thought there was a certain amount of pomposity in the original recording. At the time, Cohen seemed to be associating himself with particular singers of the Cold War period, and perhaps that was a bit pretentious. But I mean, our approach was nothing like as full throttle as that adopted by some of the other people on that record. 
“There are some amazing stories about him. Before he became a musician, and was still a writer in Montreal, he was almost accidentally killed by the Scottish author Alexander Trocchi. I think Trocchi was being deported from the US, and he was passing through Montreal on his way back. He encountered Cohen through a literary connection, and cooked up some godawful chemical concoction that Cohen was compelled to try. I forget the exact story, but it nearly killed him!”

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