It was weird, but satisfying, to see that Leonard Cohen, having allegedly been shafted financially by his former manager, must have coined it in from royalties from the X-Factor version - the umpteenth - of Hallelujah. I've admired Lennie's original for more than 20 years, and his performances of the song live in Rotterdam in 2008 and Lille in 2010 brought the house down.
Interesting too that Bryan Appleyard claimed that Hallelujah is really about misery, failure and loneliness, i.e. de facto a song in the minor key (I use "minor key" metaphorically here - Hallelujah is actually written in C major). As people who know me will testify, tagging people/art/places...whatever...by relative major or minor key dominance is one of my favourite bar-stool psychoanalytical pastimes, and a theme to which I shall return in this blog.
Yet Appleyard was too sniffy about how Hallelujah was treated on the X-Factor, as Alexandra Burke's rendering was thoughtful and soulful, if not entirely authentic. To paraphrase another great Cohen song, she was 100 floors above the other contestants in the tower of song. Rightly, there was no chance of Alexandra leaving that time around.