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Nina Simone covered Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne, which began life as a poem before being recorded by a multitude of artists.

When I was in my teens, living in Gloucester Road with my friend Ben and his hippy mum Gretchen, we would dread her digging out her Leonard Cohen record.

This was the song we feared the most. We joked that it was sung by a man who sounded not so much romantic and lovelorn as depressed and suicidal.

It was, we agreed, one long miserable yawn of a tune. We would try to sing along, grimacing and pretending to slit our wrists. Because we were young and foolish.

Then, in the late Eighties, Laughing Lenny as we (and probably everyone else) knew him, reinvented himself with a new style of music on an album called I’m Your Man.

A whole new generation got into his music – not just your friends’ mums and dads – and I went to see him at the Royal Albert Hall where he was not only brilliant, but also extremely funny, telling dry anecdotes between songs that had the audience in stitches.

Who knew!

Suzanne, it turns out, was first published in 1966 as a poem, about Cohen’s friendship with a real-life Suzanne, and became his first single when he released his debut album, Songs Of Leonard Cohen, the following year.

By then it had already been recorded by a folk group called The Stormy Clovers, by folk legend Judy Collins, and by English actor and singer (and Olympic skier) Noel Harrison. Theres’s also a marvellous duet between Cohen and Collins:

It had also been covered by a young Bruce Springsteen in his first band, The Castiles, and went on to be recorded in 1973 by Roberta Flack.

There were also hit versions in Italian, by Fabrizio De Andre, and Dutch, by Herman Van Veen. And it was “borrowed” so closely by R.E.M. for their song Hope (on the album Up) that they even gave Cohen a songwriting credit

This, though, is my favourite version, by Nina Simone at the start of her career in 1969. 

Here she is, singing live in Rome, translating Lenny’s misery into a gloriously upbeat version, sung from the point of view of the titular Suzanne rather than the male gaze of the original.