Hallelujah producer: Working with Leonard Cohen

Melancholic, moving, witty. Leonard Cohen's music and lyrics stirred the emotions as few other singers have. Even before his death one of his compositions - Hallelujah - had been covered no fewer than 500 times.

It was, though, a song which his record company loathed when it was first recorded. The producer who worked with Cohen on Hallelujah, as well as a series of albums in the 1970s and 1980s, was John Lissauer. He told the Today programme the record company thought "it was un-releasable".