I wasn’t wearing it very much toward the end.” It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York City sometime during the early seventies. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. In the liner notes of 1975 best of Leonard Cohen record, the poet puts the record straight on whose coat it actually was: “I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. I still do, of course.” Cave has never shied away from a ‘warts and all’ approach to his art, and it’s clearly influenced by Cohen. I thought that was all very impressive at the time. He had a tendency to air his linen in public in a way. “It just had that effect on me and it really kinda changed the way I looked at things. Whether it is or not, I don’t really know.

It just seemed to be so open and kind of honest in some way. He added: “This song to me just seemed like a true kind of confessional song. I started to that myself and became kind of infatuated with the lyric at that point. She’d listen to Songs of Love and Hate over and over again. “She used to play Leonard Cohen in her room with burning candles and all that sort of stuff. “I lived in Wangaratta and I had a friend called Anne Baumgarten, she was quite a morbid kind of creature,” explains the equally morbid creature, Cave, who has never been afraid to show his darker side. “I remember listening to this song when I must have been 11 or 12,” he said. Speaking with ABC’s Richard Kingsmill in 1994, the singer revealed the impact Leonard Cohen’s 1971 album track ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ had on him as a kid.

Seeing him evolve from a young boy in Wangaratta into the current daddy of rock and roll would likely have never happened if it wasn’t for one song. However, it would be one song in particular that would change the Cave’s life.

Leonard cohen nick cave