"Somewhere in the world, possibly hanging unassumingly in a wardrobe, or bathetically stowed away, unrecognised, in a dank basement or dusty attic, a famous blue raincoat might be found. It once belonged to Leonard Cohen, and in the early 1970s it was stolen from the New York apartment belonging to the songwriter’s lover, Marianne Ihlen.
While Cohen was never reunited with his Burberry coat, it was immortalised as the central image in one of his most beloved and enigmatic songs. Released on the 1971 album Songs of Love and Hate, “Famous Blue Raincoat”offers up perhaps the clearest synthesis of Cohen the poet-novelist and Cohen the singer-songwriter, as he relays a vividly characterised tale of adultery, regret and loneliness in just five minutes.
Delivered in Cohen’s warm, recitative style, the song takes the form of a letter (partly composed in an unusual poetic metre called amphibrach) addressed to an unnamed man who, we learn, once unsuccessfully tried to prise away Jane, the wife of the writer (a fictionalised version of the singer himself). But this is no ordinary torrid love-triangle narrative, filled with wounded egos, bitterness, blame and recriminations. Trust Leonard Cohen to come up with something altogether more subtle, spare, and quietly devastating.
Despite his personal reservations about the track, Cohen continued to play it throughout his long career. Perhaps he kept returning to it in the hope that with each performance he’d come closer to finally discovering some clarity within the song. Or maybe he simply never stopped missing his stolen, famous blue raincoat.
Cohen provided little elucidation, possibly so as to not attenuate the song’s open, inscrutable nature, but mainly because he didn’t really have the answers himself. In an interview in 1994, he admitted: “It was a song I've never been satisfied with. I've always felt that there was something about the song that was unclear.”
Don's Tunes
From ‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Photo Credit: Peter Mazel/Rex
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