Off the record: Leonard Cohen gets the X factor

There are fans of the gloomy 74-year-old singer, not generally noted for their levity, for whom this will be the final cruelty. But if we choose not to imagine what kind of dance moves the boy band JLS might pull to lines about holy doves and baffled kings should they prevail in the final on 13 December, we can note that this is the high-water mark of Hallelujah's popularity. Somehow, this serious, spiritual song has become the anthem of our age.

The odds-on favourite to win ITV's talent show is Diana Vickers, 17, a child's rag doll from Blackburn, Lancashire, who sang Hallelujah in a furry little voice for her audition piece, which must have put the song in Cowell's mind. This has caused some of Vickers's rivals to suggest that its choice favours her, but no matter. Whoever wins will get the full weight of Cowell's PR artillery behind them and almost certainly give Cohen his first number one. It would make an unusual and lucrative climax to a year that has seen the financially-ruined Canadian singer welcomed back into the live fold.

It is not simply X Factor acolytes who will be pondering lines about tying your lover to the kitchen chair this Christmas. Katherine Jenkins, the pop classical singer, does a version on her latest album, Sacred Arias, giving the mums' market something to chew on too. The under-10s already have their own version, as the song was featured in the movie Shrek, sung by Rufus Wainwright, and this joins covers by Damien Rice, Jon Bon Jovi, kd lang, John Cale and Jeff Buckley. Somehow, the song that Cohen wrote in 1984 "on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor", has cornered every sector of the music market.

When Cohen, having taken a year to write it (oo-yah rhymes are hard to find), put out his low, drawling version on his 1985 album Various Positions, it caught the notice of his fans but few others. It was Buckley's elegiac cover on his 1994 album, Grace, which brought its elegant melody to wider attention and when Buckley tragically drowned in 1997, its poignancy only strengthened. The song is used on Hollywood soundtracks as an instant signifier of emotion, notable on Marissa's death in teen drama The OC. But did anyone really listen to the lyrics?

The opening lines, "Well I heard there was a secret chord/That David played and it pleased the Lord", draw on the Old Testament story of King David. We understand that the divine music he discovered is the very song we are listening to, as Cohen describes the song's chord progression ("Well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth..."). But the woman he is addressing doesn't care for music, apparently she is more interested in some game of sexual humiliation.

So, as he goes on to evoke a doomed affair, Cohen plays off the divine against the erotic, implying that sex usually wins and it's perhaps only in music that resolution can be found between the two.

Is this what drew Miss Vickers to the song? Perhaps. But what Cohen's masterpiece
certainly does speak to is a hunger for authenticity, which strikes a chord in these dark times, even with viewers of Saturday night TV.

When Miss Vickers first performed it, Simon Cowell, totally deaf to the fact that the girl has trouble pronouncing even the most basic of consonants, reserved his highest praise. "You've made the song your own," he said. No. No one has quite managed that.

NEW ON THE NET
*Not only are The Prodigy still with us but they have a new album, Invaders Must Die, due in March. Once you register, the clattering title track is available for free download at: theprodigy.com/

*Vampire Weekend's self-titled debut album will top many a poll of the year and these New Yorkers are far from humourless, hence the joyous version of Plastic Bertrand's Ca Plane Pour Moi, recorded in Paris earlier this month and available in all its daft ramshackle glory at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fTpduIIYLSc

*Next week belongs to Pendulum, the poppy drum 'n' bass Australian sextet who play two nights at Brixton Academy. They also do a mesmerising version of Coldplay's Violet Hill. It's on the home page of pendulum.com/
David Smyth returns next week