‘By 18 I was having sex to the music of Brian Eno’: Tim Booth’s honest playlist

The James frontman fell for Leonard Cohen as a child and would do Val Doonican at karaoke. But which singer taught him that ‘music could be medicine’? The first song I fell in love with My older sister, Penny, played me So Long, Marianne by Leonard Cohen when I was eight, like some kind of initiation, to say: “Now this is a real poet.” It felt like contraband and so different to all the pop flotsam I had heard in my otherwise white, suburban upbringing, and gave me a taste of adult romanti...

By As told to Rich Pelley