Radio is big in LA, because so many people spend so much time in their cars. Listening to Jonesy’s Jukebox on Indie 103.1 the other day – possibly the weirdest radio show in the world – hosted by ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones, he’d just played Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and was speculating in his charmingly rambling way about who it might have been about (his guess was a hooker!). Well I know the truth, as I sat next to Sue at a dinner party in the South of France last year. A beautiful, elegant, and charming hostess, now in her 60’s, and as far from the image of a hooker as one could imagine, the song had come on as we were eating when she leaned over and whispered conspiratorially “this is about me you know”. She and Lenny had been sweethearts during their teens in Canada. He asked her father for her hand in marriage. Her father refused because Lenny was Jewish. The song is largely factual. She did indeed take him down to her place near the river where she fed him tea and oranges that came all the way from China. She did wear rags and feathers, a boa in fact, from a Salvation Army counter. She’s not sure whether she was half crazy but conceded she might have been. Their young love was crushed by her father’s refusal, and their paths diverged. But not before they’d touched each other’s perfect bodies with their minds.