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Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Buddhist monk, composer of the immortal "Hallelujah" – Leonard Cohen is a legendary rock poet whose time has come all over again. In this interview published on 29 June 1974, NME 's Steve Turner talks to "Laughing Len" about joy, pain, heroism, and suicide.

Leonard Cohen doesn't give interviews. What he does do is to arrange for you to meet him in his hotel room where, over a period of up to two hours, he'll supply with you with carefully-worded statements on a number of matters.

He's a careful man is Cohen. Careful that nothing too shallow or pretentious is attributed to his output. After all, we are dealing with a man of letters here and not merely a singer/songwriter. Words are this man's business. He has a past which already consists of two novels, five volumes of poetry, thirty three recorded songs, and a play. And, what's more, the songs were the latest addition. Cohen is no rock star turned novelist, turned poet, turned playwright.

At four o' clock one Wenesday afternoon, I visit him Cohen his Chelsea hotel. His room is small, large cupboard size, and most of the space is taken up with two single beds. Cohen also seems small and an accurate reproduction of what I'd expected to see after eight years of sullen photographs. In person though he laughs. It's a short sharp schoolboy laugh full of suction and comes out of the left of his mouth. It's good to see that he laughs.

Most people have come to regard Leonard Cohen as the poet of despair. He knows this and when I ask him about it he plays games with definitions. "You're asking me to make an evaluation about something which I can't compare to someone else's," he replies when I ask whether he has a depressing outlook on things. "I only have my own window to look out of."

So I tell him about Janie, a friend twice removed, who used to suffer from acute depression and who used a darkened room and his albums to plunge her even deeper into despair, until the pain could become almost enjoyable. Then I ask him about the reports that he'd played in various mental hospitals in Canada.

"Yes, I have played for mental... audiences," he replies. I ask him what the attraction was and he pauses for at least twenty seconds before giving his reason. "It was the feeling that... experience of a lot of people in mental hospitals would especially qualify them to be a receptive audience for my work."

Well-worded, Leonard, I thought, but what exactly do you mean? The questions and answers go on for another five minutes without an explanation of any depth until I have to say: "You have a way of not really telling me what I want to know."

"Well I'll tell you something," rejoinders Cohen, "and this is the truth — I'm not trying to answer as accurately and as sufficiently as I can."

And then, as if by accident, he spills his reasons out. "In a sense when someone consents to go into a mental hospital or is committed he has already acknowledged a tremendous defeat," he says. "To put it another way, he has already made a choice. And it was my feeling that the elements to this choice, and the elements of this choice, and the elements of this defeat, corresponded with certain elements that produced my songs, and that there would be an empathy between the people who had this experience and the experience as documented in my songs."

It appears that in the Cohen scenario of life there are the defeated and there are the heroes. The defeated, the truly defeated, inhabit the mental hospitals and graveyards. They either commit themselves or choose to quit living. The heroes struggle on with the business of living in the face of the meaningless.

"I see tremendous heroism all around me," he says, "people getting up, doing their work and going to bed at night. When you use the word 'insanity' it seems to indicate that some people are beyond the pale, that they've stepped into an irredeemable world. But it is my experience of people who are called insane that they are not much different from us in this room, except that they've said 'Ah sh*t! I'm not going to continue to play these games any more. I'm going to quit. Do what you want with me.'

Cohen says that in the past he has considered suicide, but that he has always rejected it on the grounds of the effects upon those left living. "It's really an act of aggression against the people you leave behind," he says. "It's such a messy thing! You leave people with that taste for the rest of their lives. It's an act of such long and continuing implications that you have real control over. But I suspect that suicides really do care and really do understand the implications of their act — that it's not a thing that ends with themselves."

Finally I ask him whether Cohen finds a lot of joy in his life. He laughs a little to himself. "I don't know," he says. "I don't look at it in that way."

"I don't go around looking for joy. I don't go around looking for melancholy either. I don't have a program. I'm not on an archeological expedition."

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