Confession: I’m an avid fan of James Delingpole. I look forward to every one of his podcasts from “down the rabbit-hole”, even the ones that seem to visit the wilder shores of conspiracy theory. People often make the mistake of thinking that because James has invited a particular person onto the “Delingpod” he necessarily believes everything his interlocuter says. Rather, he asks questions then listens with an air of credulity which he must do in order to draw out the candid best from his guests. In so doing he leaves us to make up our own minds. That I like.
However, one thing James does seem to be adamant about is that the entertainment industry, all of it - film, television and music, is controlled by the Dark Side through an interconnected web of agents, sponsors and managers. It serves the purposes of the globalist ‘Predator Class’, as he calls them, either as ‘bread and circuses’ to distract us from what is really occurring or as vehicles to tell us subliminally (or not so subliminally) what they have lined up for us. This is on the basis that, if we’re told in advance what they are going to do to us and we don’t object, we have given our permission. We will have invited The Vampire in. Qui Tacet Consentire Videtur.
According to Delingpole, the deal seems to be that talented individuals are offered a contract with generous financial and promotional backing to ensure they are a success but first they must agree ‘terms’ which amount to a Faustian pact. Those who baulk at it are ‘binned’ while those who go along with it may be called upon to support or promote some pretty unspeakable things. The Satanic performance of two humans, Sam Smith and Kim Petras, at the Grammys in 2023, gave more than hint of the truth of it.
Before I retired, I had a commuting drive of well over an hour at each end of the day. Bored out of my skull with listening to radio channels, I loaded up a USB memory stick with music. I have fairly catholic tastes, so my selections covered some 1960s pop, jazz, C&W, shows, Celtic folk, Welsh male voice choirs, French chansons (Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour), big band and classical orchestral music. I chose some of the artists because I had never really listened to them before. The best way into them, I decided, was to download ‘best of’ compilations. So it was that I found myself listening repetitively to The Best of the poet/novelist/singer/song-writer Leonard Cohen and liking what I heard. So much so that I downloaded several more of his albums including a couple of his last live performances.
Now, I know he was jocularly referred to as ‘Laughing Lenny’ because a lot of his songs, particularly in the work he did towards the end of his life, were, shall we say, a bit on the gloomy side. However, what stood out for me was the sheer quality of the musicians he had gathered around him to perform his oeuvre. His keyboard players, guitarists, acoustic string player, saxophonist, trumpeter, fiddler and drummer were all straight out of the top drawer. So too were his female backing singers, though it must be said that to call them backing singers does not do them justice. They were central to his performances. Leonard Cohen was a man renowned for his love of women. Two of his most successful songs were to women whom he had known, Suzanne and Marianne. It would be more accurate to call the female vocalists whom he chose accompanying singers or collaborators, and they were most definitely not in the background. Cohen was a man whose voice became deeper and more gravelly with advancing years (cigarettes and alcohol may have played a part) and a man who, truth be told, couldn’t really sing all that well. It could be said that they carried him and most of his songs would have been thin gruel without them; they gave Cohen’s songs depth and an undeniable sexiness and sensuality.
The first woman to significantly boost Cohen’s career was Judy Collins. Cohen, already an esteemed yet commercially struggling novelist and poet (aren’t they all? – cf. Dylan Thomas) in his early 30s, visited New York to pitch his songs. Cohen famously played and sang Suzanne to Collins, saying beforehand “I don’t really know if this is a song”. Afterwards, Collins reputedly said, “Not only is it a song, Leonard, but I’m going to record it tomorrow”. Collins was taken by the richness of his voice and the depth of his lyrics; she played a pivotal part in persuading him of his own prowess as a singer. In return, he encouraged her to begin writing her own songs.
His next collaborator was Jennifer Warnes, then he had Anjani Thomas, Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen. But probably the best female vocalist who co-operated with him and the best female vocalist whom I had never heard of is Sharon Robinson. She co-wrote several of his songs and featured in the line-up of the band along with the Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie, during his gruelling 2008-2013 World tour and final European tour in 2014.
Leonard Cohen certainly had fame, fortune, misfortune and fame again late in life but whether he had ever had to do anything compromising to earn it is not knowable. What seems clear, though, from some of his lyrics is that he had something to tell us, whether it was to warn us of what was to come or simply to pass on His Masters’ Message. I’m not going to try to answer that or go into a detailed interpretation. There are many on-line sources which pull apart the intended meanings of his lyrics and those who wish to do a deep dive can find them and go there. I’m just laying out some of his verses which suggest that he was a perspicacious man, living and working ahead of his time. He really didn’t like what he saw of the way the world worked, and he didn’t like what he believed was being set up to come down the tracks.
A rebellious or revolutionary mindset is presented in his well-known work First We Take Manhattan for which Jennifer Warnes seems to take much of the credit; it was she who first recorded it. It is suggestive of the song of a man with vengeance on his mind with the personal root of the grudge revealed in both the opening and in a later verse:
They sentenced me to 20 years of boredom
For trying to change the system from within
I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
I don't like your fashion business, mister
And I don't like these drugs that keep you thin
I don't like what happened to my sister
First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin
Here’s a 1988 performance at Austin City limits with Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla accompanying Cohen.
He was working with Sharon Robinson in the 1980s and together they came up with Everybody Knows (1988), a bleak and pessimistic song which alludes to the end of life as we know it. Everything is fixed, everyone knows it is and it can’t be changed. It opens thus:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everything is owned and controlled by the rich and powerful who are bad actors and habitual liars. Despite knowing that, there is still a sense of betrayal and a longing for small pleasures.
Everybody knows that the boat is leaking
Everybody knows that the captain lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of chocolates
And a long-stem rose
Everybody knows
The line ‘Like their father or their dog just died’ was personal for Cohen, describing his own grief when both happened to him in quick succession at an early age; here he used it as a yardstick to measure the depths of despair of others. It goes on in a later verse:
And everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
That verse could have been written for the Covid years and beyond, could it not? The pestilence is out, the Garden of Eden is over, and you are being watched, especially in the lost privacy of your own bedroom. A similar sentiment comes through in a verse of Tower of Song, written about the same time.
Now you can say that I've grown bitter but of this you may be sure
The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor
And there's a mighty judgement coming, but I may be wrong
You see, you hear these funny voices
In the Tower of Song
Here is a 2008 performance of Everybody Knows with female vocalists Sharon Robinson and Hattie and Charley Webb.
Probably his most apocalyptic work was his album The Future (1992) which has several notable tracks: The Future, Waiting for The Miracle, Anthem and Democracy. Recorded during his years with Julie Christensen and Perla Batalla, it opens with The Future:
Give me back my broken night
My mirrored room, my secret life
It's lonely here
There's no one left to torture
Give me absolute control
Over every living soul
And lie beside me, baby
That's an order
If this isn’t an allusion to the desire of the globalist class, I don’t know what is, given what we know about the packs of high-class prostitutes who make their way to Davos each year to service the ubermensch during the gatherings of the World Economic Forum. There are references to drugs and anal sex, then the prophecy for which he clearly sees the ending of the Cold War as an event leading to the probable unleashing of something far worse. Therefore, bring back the certainty of a bilateral world, of a common external enemy which united us and restrained the worst among us. We need the clear dividing line between good and evil because everything is too fluid now.
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
I've seen the future, brother
It is murder
And how does he know this? Well, it’s in scripture, in the age-old battle between Good and Evil and the initial but temporary triumph of the Satanists:
You don't know me from the wind
You never will, you never did
I'm the little Jew
Who wrote the Bible
I've seen the nations rise and fall
I've heard their stories, heard them all
But love's the only engine of survival
Your servant here, he has been told
To say it clear, to say it cold
It's over, it ain't going
Any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future
It is murder
And finally, the stark choice which he saw facing us, a return to Cold War with the threat of nuclear annihilation being preferable to the globalists’ Malthusian misanthropy and lust for control:
Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another foetus now
We don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder
The Future from Live in London.
There are chinks of light to be seen amidst all the darkness, however. A more optimistic attitude, even if still critical, comes through in the next two songs, Democracy and Anthem. In the former, for which he is reputed to have written 80 verses he foresees proper democracy at last arriving in the USA instead of the sham which has had to be endured during the Cold War years.
It's coming through a hole in the air,
From those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
That this ain't exactly real
Or it's real, but it ain't exactly there
It's coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don't pretend to understand at all
It's coming to America first
The cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
And the machinery for change
And it's here they got the spiritual thirst
And one of the last verses speaks to a desire to opt out of society because he doesn’t like the zeitgeist despite loving the country. The hopeless little screen when this was written would have been a television set. Today it is, of course, a smart phone.
I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen
Here’s a 1993 performance of Democracy
But a new dawn breaks in Anthem. The morning chorus starts, urging a renewal. Stop mourning the passing of our former world or fretting about the coming New Order. War is inevitable and continual but, let the bells ring, don’t worry about your dues, and eventually cracks will appear in every constructed narrative, just as they are now. Light will flood in, and we will see all things clearly. Ye shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.
The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what has passed away
Or what is yet to be
Ah, the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
Bought and sold, and bought again
The dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
And yet there is still the suspicion that the guilty ones may get away with their monstrous crimes.
I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
They're going to hear from me
Here's a performance of Anthem also in London in 2008
What Is Coming is a poem written in March 2003 just before the invasion of Iraq was launched on the false pretext of there being weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein’s control. Is it prophetic? As 2024 rolls towards its end with the American-fomented war in Ukraine and the one-sided Israeli war in Gaza continuing with American backing, we may be about to find out.
what is coming
ten million people
in the street
cannot stop
what is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
or refrain from doing
will bring us
to the same place
the place we don't know
your anger against the war
your horror of death
your calm strategies
your bold plans
to rearrange
the middle east
to overthrow the dollar
to establish
the 4th Reich
to live forever
to silence the Jews
to order the cosmos
to tidy up your life
to improve religion
they count for nothing
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren't going to like
what comes after
America 
On that cheerful note, let’s finish the way he used to finish his final concerts. First with Closing Time then, as an encore, I tried to Leave Yourecorded at Live in London in 2008. Sharon Robinson and the Webb sisters feature again as band members individually display their virtuosity.
So, was he a prophet? I’m inclined to think he was.
Leonard Norman Cohen
Born Montreal September 21st 1934, Died Los Angeles November 7th 2016
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