This will make men of a certain age feel bloody old. Marianne Ihlen, her on the back cover of Songs from a Room, died today aged 81…..eighty freakin one!
https://untossedcoin.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/songs-room-backcover.jpg?w=418
Musings on the byways of popular culture
Lodestone of Wrongness says
I’m off for a walk – I may be some time..
H.P. Saucecraft says
Ai-yai-yaiii …
Everything about that album is perfect. Including (as we thought back then) the life he led to be able to make it. A man needs a muse. That simplicity was devastating. Still is.
deramdaze says
That’s right up there with inspiring “Something.”
The b-side of “Suzanne.”
That’s “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne” on the SAME 45…and it wasn’t a hit!
Johnny Concheroo says
Playing this LP in grey, rainy London there was something wonderfully exotic and unattainable about that cover picture. Leonard writing songs in his sunny Greek villa with a beautiful girl clad only in a towel in the background.
Sid Williams says
OK, seems I´m too incompetent to post photos but theres a link to a moving version of SLM on Cohencentric website, albeit recorded in 1993. http://cohencentric.com/
Echo all the above comments, the simplicity and exotic nature of the cover was a heady mixture when seen through the eyes of a young man just facing up to the drudgery of impending adulthood in suburban England, Remember kids, no internet or Google street view in them days, we just looked at pictures and let our imagination do the rest.
Mousey says
No wish to doubt the authority of your post, but how do you know? Doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the internets using the obvious (to me) Googles
Artery says
No it’s true. Confirmed by Jarrko on the LC Files site.
Very sad. That back cover of Songs From A Room is the greatest LP back cover of all time. Rest in Peace Marianne.
H.P. Saucecraft says
There’s a very interesting interview with Marianne here (weirdly, on an ebay listing page):
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LEONARD-COHEN-songs-from-a-room-CS-9767-LP-1979-USA-/390221769287
You have to scroll down quite a way. Some more pictures of her and The Room, too.
Artery says
That’s a lovely interview. There’s a lot of emotion there, intensely recalled after so many years. I wonder how Leonard feels today.? Well, sad I’m sure, but I imagine his recollections may well be just as intense.
Gatz says
A rather moving piece in The Guardian on Leonard Cohen’s final communication with his old muse https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/aug/07/so-long-marianne-leonard-cohen-writes-to-muse-just-before-her-death