..weird, but satisfying, to know that Leonard Cohen, having allegedly been shafted financially by his former manager, is going to coin it in from royalties from the new X-Factor version - the umpteenth - of Hallelujah. I've shivered to Lennie's original version for more than 20 years, and the performance I saw him give of the song live in Rotterdam last month brought the house down.
Interesting too that Bryan Appleyard should claim 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 is too sniffy about how Hallelujah was treated on the X-Factor, as Alexandra Burke's rendering was thoughtful, soulful and authentic. She fully deserves the stardom coming her way; 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 this time around.