Afternoon:
14°c
It’s Day’s night, and no one is going to spoil her story
The Evening Standard demands an end to the practice of burying children and babies in mass paupers’ graves
More...
Off the record: Leonard Cohen gets the X factor
Evening Standard 28.11.08
Fine tuning: X Factor’s Diana Vickers is the hot favourite to record the show-winner’s single, Hallelujah
Cohen for gold: a number-one single would cap a successful year for Leonard
Look here too
Those of a precious disposition should look away now. The song that the winner of this year's X Factor will release as a single — which effectively means the song chosen by Simon Cowell for this year's Christmas number-one slot — has been named. It's Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.
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
Related articles
Reader views (9)
Diana Vickers was being set up and groomed by Cowell from the start. It was only after she was recognised as a highly strung teenager who could not cope or do as she was told that he dumped her.
Take alook at Amanda Jennson, winner of Swedens 2007 Pop Idol X factor show, and tell me who Diana was being groomed to copy !
- Colin M, barking
I first heard LC some while back when i was 17, and this prompted me to see him perform live at the IOW festival 1970.
A couple of weeks ago i thought that Simon C's protege Leona Lewis's version of Hallelujah might simply be sublime and bring the tears to my eyes - alas wrong X-factor season!
- Ron F, Southampton, Hampshire
Leonard Cohen will be turning in his grave and he's not dead. Yet.
- Dan S, Wandsworth, London, London, England.
Jon Bon Jovi to my mind does simply the most incredible cover of Hallelujah which has the power to send goosebumps up the necks of 80.000 plus crowds, as big a fan as I am of the X factor - hallelujah is a classic and should be left as a classic and not reinvented in the way that it will inevitably be by the X factor producers -stop the carnage!!!
- Emma, Ireland
Not sure why Cale's version wasn't used on the DC but I believe it is something to do with links between Wainright's record company and Lucas Films, who made Shrek.
Cale's version appears on a Leonard Cohen tribute album, 'I'm Your Fan', but can also be found on his own live album, 'Fragments of a Rainy Season'.
- Chris B, Romford, Essex
"The version in the movie Shrek is by John Cale, however, the version that appears on the movie soundtrack (cd) is that of Rufus Wainwright"
Wow! You've made my week! I remember my brother asking my after he'd seen the film who it was that sung Hallelujah, and, having seen the movie, I informed him it was John Cale. But I was subjected to his ridicule soon after when having bought the soundtrack he informed me that it was Rufus Wainwright. I look forward to a sustained bout of triumphalism later when I see him!
- Jools, ireland
The version in the movie Shrek is by John Cale, however, the version that appears on the movie soundtrack (cd) is that of Rufus Wainwright.
- Chris B, Romford, Essex
This is one of the most beautiful songs every written, even more so when sung by Jeff Buckley.
I cant even begin to imagine the horror of what will be the X-Factor version.
- Sam, London, UK
My favourite version of Hallelujah is by the Canadian Allison Crowe. It's such a beautiful and powerful song and she's amazing. So nice, too, to see Leonard Cohen enjoying such broad popularity.
- Dean M., Victoria, Canada
