The last time we saw you, you looked so much older - your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder

Continuing my trip back through the 1971 album charts.

01/08/71 : Songs Of Love And Hate - Leonard Cohen

Our second visit with cheery old Lenny - I tend to like his songs without liking the way he sings them, but let's see what we've got here.

Well, if you like songs like "American Pie" or "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which go on for hours and have a million verses which make no sense at all, then boy have I got a treat for you here! Seven of the eight tracks are over five minutes long and I'm sure Leonard had some clue what some of the lyrics meant, but they're certainly not transparent on first listen. A whole album of it is certainly too much, particularly if you're going in blind - but yet... 

...it's got "Famous Blue Raincoat" and "Joan Of Arc" on it, both of which are very fine tracks (although I prefer Jennifer Warnes's versions of both - and before you call me a heathen, even Leonard has said he that he prefers some aspects of Jennifer's version of FBR) and there are a couple of others that I feel I could grow to love as well. Additionally, Leonard's voice doesn't annoy me too much on this and his guitar playing is nicely understated - so although the album as a whole is too much, it does at least feel like it hangs together as a whole album, which is maybe something we've not experienced so much this year (although I do have to give the proviso that we've already met a lot of the better albums from this year on the Rolling Stone list).

We're all the way down at #34 in the charts on his last week of an impressive sixteen week run with it having peaked at #4 in its first, second and fourth weeks - it spent its first five weeks in the top five. The top five this week were Hot Hits 6 (a new entry), The Moody Blues (another one!), Simon & Garfunkel, Paul & Linda McCartney (this is not a good album) and The Rolling Stones with the next highest new entry being TOTP Vol 18 (#6) - and I've actually got something interesting to tell you about the new entries this week.

We've had a dearth of new entries in recent weeks but this week they're everywhere - there are SEVENTEEN in the chart, most of which are particularly rubbish compilations. And this has happened because, for some reason, "they" decided to allow budget albums in the chart this week and boy did they flood in. It's fair to say they soon realised it wasn't a great decision because they went back on it early in '72, but it means we had five months of albums with dolly birds on the covers - of which Hot Hits 6 is a particularly fine example because she's apparently playing cricket in a bikini and cricket pads, which really doesn't look like the best idea ever...

Back to Leonard, Wikipedia tells us that it's his third album and "the album title is descriptive, outlining its main themes". It also tells us that a load of the songs had been around for a year or two and Leonard wasn't having the best of times - two years later in an NME interview he was pretty down about the whole thing calling it "over-produced and over elaborated...an experiment that failed", which certainly feels a bit harsh to me. And critically, it was received pretty well (although there were several comments that it was too intense) and there's a sizeable section on cover versions, which suggests it's well regarded by his musical colleagues - I never knew Tori Amos had also covered FBR (but it sounds exactly like you'd expect it to). Commercially, it got to #8 in Australia and #2 in the The Netherlands, but only #63 in Canada and #145 in the US.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a version for three quid, but you can spend up to £90 on a mint copy if you really feel the need. Which feels unnecessary, but I imagine this album holds many treasured memories for plenty - it feels like one which would have been discussed in depth long into the night on many occasions...

08/08/71 - An interesting idea, poorly executed