12. Leonard CohenI’m Your Man

I remember ages ago someone saying to me, ‘I’ll give you a tip, if you’re going to cover Leonard Cohen go with I’m Your Man because the recordings are so naff that you can only make it sound better.’ And then I heard it and I was like what? This is perfection! You can’t make these songs sound better. I think it’s great. He’s using a Casiotone or something, there are programmed drum beats and organ sounds, and there are those funny female vocals, they’re sickly cheesy and they’re brilliant. He sounds particularly sleazy in this environment and it’s one of those albums where you enter another world where you’re in some seedy, red velvet Vegas haunt. Like the Fat White Family, it has that instant kind of cool as fuck thing to it. And ‘Tower Of Song’ is perfect. 

It’s that kind of atmosphere he conjures up on that album – he transports you somewhere. He did a famous residency in Vegas at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace or somewhere like that, and Vegas suited him so well. I would have loved to have seen him play that album in somewhere as sordid and conflicted as Vegas. I’ve heard a lot of people say "I went to Vegas… once".