The busker – Your Local Music Man – at the strategic pedestrianised T junction, where the shoppers from Morrisons wandering up George Street past the hulk of the State and the stalls selling funnel cakes, ersatz perfumes at £10 for a bag of three, and hunks of meat in plastic bags, interweave with those meandering along the High Street, is playing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do ya?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing “Hallelujah”
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I love this song. If only because you’ve got to admire the chutzpah of a man who can rhyme “Hallelujah”, with “do ya”. I realise, as I try to sing along (quietly) that that is the only line I can remember, apart from the chorus (which is a bit hard to forget). I notice a woman walking with her partner in the opposite direction who is also singing along quietly, almost under her breath; meaning that the busker has at least two private duets going on that he is probably unaware of.

An alternative title for this blog could have been “Loneliness of the long distance busker”: to try to capture the peculiarity of playing music to sparse streets and individuals who drift by without stopping. Only the buskers themselves are present for the whole performance. Everyone else picks up whisps and fragments, more present when you’re close and you know the song, gradually fading into the distance and past if you tune out, or when you turn a corner or get further away. A momentary intrusion, usually welcome, into constant internal monologues, derailing trains of thought in hopefully fruitful ways into wistful memories, or the communion with others that you get from singing along, even when no one else is doing it.

I realsie, also, that I’d done a mondegreen on the first line. The actual lyric is “secret chord” which, given the way that Cohen’s songs are so often drenched in religious poetry, I had always heard as “sacred”. I suppose this is the revenge of the light side to all those Faustian musical deals with the devil you get in crossroads blues and, indeed, School of Rock.