A kid with a crazy dream.
Jun. 19th, 2008 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
whathoI went to a Leonard Cohen concert last night at the opera house in Manchester. Going to a Leonard Cohen concert is like going to a Beatles reunion concert. As in a full one. It genuinely seems that unlikely. I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen for as long as I can remember, certainly consciously since I was about four years old. The first album he produced was the first album my father ever bought; mine was my own copy of I’m Your Man. My favourite song when I was eight years old was ‘Everybody Knows’, and then in 1998 I properly listened to them all for the first time as though I'd never heard them before in my life, and I did precisely that for the next eight hours, and then the next several years, and I listened to almost nothing but Leonard Cohen on my daily train commutes to university for four and half years. But one thing you rapidly get used to as a Leonard Cohen fan is the idea that you’re never going to see and hear him live. You’re lucky enough to buy a new album once every nine or so years. Thus, when I was queuing for the toilets at the back of the gallery with a Scottish woman who looked to be about my age and who was wearing on her face the expression I very much felt I was possessed of at the time, we turned to one another and broke the ice by talking about how stingy the management was with toilets up in the gods around these parts and then more or less descended into turn-by-turn exclamations of ‘Oh my god!’ and ‘They gave us tickets!’ and ‘I very much can’t believe it!’, then the cubicle door opened and we had to split the party.
I’m trying very hard not to use capslock. If I start, I shan’t be able to stop. It’s either 100% capslock or nothing.
Basically my brother and I ambled around Manchester in the rain looking for reasonably priced food and having little in the way of luck and really, on my part at least, trying not to think about anything much at all. At sixish they let us have the tickets, which was mostly the point at which I was assuming it’d all go horribly wrong. I handed them straight to my brother because I powerfully feared I’d inadvertently eat them with joy.
Leonard Cohen came out at seven thirty, which went a long way towards convincing us it was real, and we all stood up for the first of our twenty-seven or so standing ovations. The audience was lovely, essentially, mostly buzzing with gratitude and disbelief and listening so profoundly hard. I love that thing that’s happened in all (four) of the concerts I’ve been to where the audience claps rhythmically through an intro, like it’s meaning to keep time through the entire song, but very politely stops when the singing starts because really it’s quite rude to clap over someone else’s voice. But yes. I was right at the back of the gallery and we all leaned forward as one because it was one of those occasions on which inches very much mattered.
He wore a hat. It’s important you know this. Not as a plot point or anything, but because it was a beautiful hat and I’ve never seen anyone else wear a hat quite so divinely. At various points throughout the evening he doffed it – to take our applause or to point to a band-member or sometimes just because he takes off a hat very well and was justifiably smug about it. I expect. Then we sat down and he used his voice at us and we stopped believing it was real again. Oh god, his voice. His speaking voice is … well, it’s Leonard Cohen’s speaking voice, and it’s an absurd thing to be in the presence of. Singing-wise it was, at a rough guess, more or less 1990 – not as rounded as I’m Your Man but notably recovered since the volumised whisper of The Future. It still sounded mostly as though he was trying to cough up a sizeable knot of barbed wire, but obviously in an entirely beautiful way. It was as amazing as being in the same bit of air as Patrick Stewart’s marvellous assaults on the intervening particles, only better really for being that bit more unlikely. It was one of the most notable and wonderful and resonant and signature and intelligent and legendary singing voices in the world, and it was bouncing off the walls I was sitting inside and making my ribs vibrate.
He sang almost entirely everything I wanted him to sing, and he sang it with his entire body. He’d go off at one scheduled encore and I’d think ‘But he didn’t do “So Long, Marianne”’ or ‘I’ve a massive yen to hear “Closing Time”, and then he’d come back on and do precisely that. The world wanted me to do well that evening. Also the two seats in front of me were empty, which is sort of a long-term theatrical dream of mine that’s never actually happened. The encores were excellent though. They ran for about forty-five minutes and were about as brilliantly scripted as Kris Kristoffersen’s encores in which he sang all his goodbye songs. I did think ‘Sincerely, L. Cohen’ was too excellent a note not to end on, but the properly final song was ‘I Tried to Leave You’ and seemed more or less written for the purpose. He primarily covered his older music, as in The Future and all that came before it: all the brilliantly over-synthesised material that made me think I was deep in the middle of the eighties. He opened with ‘Dance Me To The End of Love’, which was all fairly unbelievable, and he did ‘Take This Waltz’ (as beautifully as the recorded version) and ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘Democracy’ and ‘Who By Fire?’ and just about everything else you could think of, and every time a stupidly familiar introduction kicked in I sort of squealed and writhed and clasped my hands in girlish glee. He did ‘Hallelujah’. ‘Hallelujah’ has been my official favourite song in the world ever since about 1999 and it occurred to me just before he launched into it, because apparently I’m prescient like that, that I wouldn’t actually get to hear my favourite singer-songwriter singing my favourite song in the same room as me because the live version isn’t the same as the recorded version. Then he sang the combined version, excising only verse three of the recorded song, which is I reckon as close to perfection as I could possibly have hoped for. Except that there was a Hammond organ solo in the middle, which made me think of Rimmer. I love Rimmer, but he was entirely appropriate at that moment. At any rate, I had to take my glasses off so I was watching it all with my naked eyes. Then I had to put them on again because I didn’t want to watch a vague blur. I have this weird issue with my glasses on occasions such as this. But anyway. I think the only notable omission was ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, though I can’t say I particularly felt its absence at the time. And ‘If It Be Your Will’, which he too graciously handed over to the Webb sisters. We did get to watch him watching them sing it. It was quite a powerful compensation.
When he wasn’t singing or taking his hat on and off, he was talking. He talked at us most magnificently all through the evening. He’s certainly a frustrated stand-up comedian … I hope Arthur Smith gets to see him. I think my favourite line was ‘I haven’t toured for thirteen years. I was sixty then. Just a kid with a crazy dream.’ He listed his antidepressants. He said he’d tried to throw himself into various religions and philosophies, but cheerfulness kept creeping through. We applauded his one-handed keyboard solo in ‘Tower of Song’. He said we were too kind. He said it was an honour to sing to us. Primarily, we swooned.
His band was almost as wonderful as he is. I love the three backing singers, one of whom was ‘collaborator’ Sharon Robinson, for all that they stole ‘If It Be Your Will’, because they do all have excellent voices and Leonard Cohen adores them and they do that little twisty sidestepping dance on every single song. I love the drummer quite powerfully. He got the biggest round of applause during the finale bit purely because he had drums, you know, and therefore did a drum solo, and there’s nothing quite so attention-grabbing as a drum solo. I particularly loved him during ‘Democracy’, ‘cause it’s a march. I love the man holding the hat, who might have been called Dean O’Sullivan but was probably called Dino something else. I love the Hammond organ man. I love Bob Metzger. I love the twelve-string guitarist and oud player like crazy, largely because Leonard Cohen loved him even more and took his hat off too him and got down on one knee and sang his love to him quite a lot. That was a really unexpected bonus. The slash. I think he sang the last verse of ‘Take This Waltz’ to him – the one he sings to the backing singers on the BBC documentary. And I love Roscoe Beck. He’s one of the names Leonard Cohen calls out on several live recordings I’ve heard, so he was very familiar to my brother and myself (Incidentally, it was great being with my brother because we could elbow one another during all the Leonard Cohen lyric in-jokes. I didn’t realise we had so many. He can’t possibly go off and get married. It’s absurd. Apologies for the interference.). The day after my family and I saw Willie Nelson in concert in Liverpool, we saw his harmonica player Mickey Rafael walking through the Cavern district, and weirdly that was more exclamation-inducing than anything that had happened the night before. It was the same sort of thing with Roscoe Beck – we said ‘That’s Roscoe Beck!’ to one another, though we never said the same thing about Leonard Cohen out loud. I suppose the latter’s just a touch less believable, but the former makes the whole thing a touch more so.
Bearing that last point in mind, I tried hard not to let it be too much an exercise in making myself aware and fully appreciative of precisely what was afoot, ‘cause that’s the sort of thing that can fairly ruin your Christmas – you don’t want to miss words because you’re too busy saying ‘That’s Leonard Cohen’ to yourself – but it was fairly difficult not to because, you know, Leonard Cohen was singing on the stage. And mostly that’s why I experienced unprecedented fury when the three men alongside me started singing. They were fine through the first half, but after the intermission they returned with beer and took to singing along very tunelessly indeed. I’ve seen recorded concerts with a lot of noisy and exuberantly vocal audience participation and I’m sure they’re grand in their own way, but this wasn’t one of them – this was 1,900 lifelong fans’ one and only entirely unexpected change to hear the man singing to them live, and mostly I think they wanted to devote their full attention to that. The bloke next to me was audibly chewing as well. I silenced him for three whole songs with a terrible glare that I think communicated something along the lines of ‘OH GOD YOU ARE UPSETTING ME SO PROFOUNDLY’, then an excellent man in front of me silenced all three of them for half a dozen more songs by turning around and saying ‘Can you not sing along, please?’. I wanted to kiss his lovely face. But they started again up shortly afterwards and from that point on nothing would stop them. I tried awful looks and stamping right next to the nearest one’s foot and clamping my hand very deliberately over the entire left side of my head. It made no odds and I was massively pleased when they left halfway through the encores. I don’t know if it’s a killjoyish thing to be thinking, but generally I look at it this way: if Leonard Cohen’s singing ‘I’m Your Man’ into your right ear, you don’t much want a half-cut tone-deaf pillock-face who isn’t Leonard Cohen simultaneously mangling it into your left.
There was also a heckling woman at the front of the gallery who got on my wick by the end. Her first heckle, ‘Oh yes you are’ in response to ‘But I’m not coming on’, was passable because it was panto-esque and there was very much a laughing response from the audience anyway in anticipation of the golden voice line, but after that it got a bit wearing. I don’t particularly get why she wanted to impinge on his consciousness as the irritating woman who won’t stop interrupting, but there we go. Aside from that it was perfect.
In my hotel room afterwards and again on the train home I listened to my MP3 player on shuffle. About a dozen songs in Leonard Cohen started singing to me, rather like he has done since I was born, very much giving the impression that he lives only untouchably on albums and not so much for three hours in a room with me and 1,899 other people. That’s why it was all a little bit special.
I’m trying very hard not to use capslock. If I start, I shan’t be able to stop. It’s either 100% capslock or nothing.
Basically my brother and I ambled around Manchester in the rain looking for reasonably priced food and having little in the way of luck and really, on my part at least, trying not to think about anything much at all. At sixish they let us have the tickets, which was mostly the point at which I was assuming it’d all go horribly wrong. I handed them straight to my brother because I powerfully feared I’d inadvertently eat them with joy.
Leonard Cohen came out at seven thirty, which went a long way towards convincing us it was real, and we all stood up for the first of our twenty-seven or so standing ovations. The audience was lovely, essentially, mostly buzzing with gratitude and disbelief and listening so profoundly hard. I love that thing that’s happened in all (four) of the concerts I’ve been to where the audience claps rhythmically through an intro, like it’s meaning to keep time through the entire song, but very politely stops when the singing starts because really it’s quite rude to clap over someone else’s voice. But yes. I was right at the back of the gallery and we all leaned forward as one because it was one of those occasions on which inches very much mattered.
He wore a hat. It’s important you know this. Not as a plot point or anything, but because it was a beautiful hat and I’ve never seen anyone else wear a hat quite so divinely. At various points throughout the evening he doffed it – to take our applause or to point to a band-member or sometimes just because he takes off a hat very well and was justifiably smug about it. I expect. Then we sat down and he used his voice at us and we stopped believing it was real again. Oh god, his voice. His speaking voice is … well, it’s Leonard Cohen’s speaking voice, and it’s an absurd thing to be in the presence of. Singing-wise it was, at a rough guess, more or less 1990 – not as rounded as I’m Your Man but notably recovered since the volumised whisper of The Future. It still sounded mostly as though he was trying to cough up a sizeable knot of barbed wire, but obviously in an entirely beautiful way. It was as amazing as being in the same bit of air as Patrick Stewart’s marvellous assaults on the intervening particles, only better really for being that bit more unlikely. It was one of the most notable and wonderful and resonant and signature and intelligent and legendary singing voices in the world, and it was bouncing off the walls I was sitting inside and making my ribs vibrate.
He sang almost entirely everything I wanted him to sing, and he sang it with his entire body. He’d go off at one scheduled encore and I’d think ‘But he didn’t do “So Long, Marianne”’ or ‘I’ve a massive yen to hear “Closing Time”, and then he’d come back on and do precisely that. The world wanted me to do well that evening. Also the two seats in front of me were empty, which is sort of a long-term theatrical dream of mine that’s never actually happened. The encores were excellent though. They ran for about forty-five minutes and were about as brilliantly scripted as Kris Kristoffersen’s encores in which he sang all his goodbye songs. I did think ‘Sincerely, L. Cohen’ was too excellent a note not to end on, but the properly final song was ‘I Tried to Leave You’ and seemed more or less written for the purpose. He primarily covered his older music, as in The Future and all that came before it: all the brilliantly over-synthesised material that made me think I was deep in the middle of the eighties. He opened with ‘Dance Me To The End of Love’, which was all fairly unbelievable, and he did ‘Take This Waltz’ (as beautifully as the recorded version) and ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘Democracy’ and ‘Who By Fire?’ and just about everything else you could think of, and every time a stupidly familiar introduction kicked in I sort of squealed and writhed and clasped my hands in girlish glee. He did ‘Hallelujah’. ‘Hallelujah’ has been my official favourite song in the world ever since about 1999 and it occurred to me just before he launched into it, because apparently I’m prescient like that, that I wouldn’t actually get to hear my favourite singer-songwriter singing my favourite song in the same room as me because the live version isn’t the same as the recorded version. Then he sang the combined version, excising only verse three of the recorded song, which is I reckon as close to perfection as I could possibly have hoped for. Except that there was a Hammond organ solo in the middle, which made me think of Rimmer. I love Rimmer, but he was entirely appropriate at that moment. At any rate, I had to take my glasses off so I was watching it all with my naked eyes. Then I had to put them on again because I didn’t want to watch a vague blur. I have this weird issue with my glasses on occasions such as this. But anyway. I think the only notable omission was ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, though I can’t say I particularly felt its absence at the time. And ‘If It Be Your Will’, which he too graciously handed over to the Webb sisters. We did get to watch him watching them sing it. It was quite a powerful compensation.
When he wasn’t singing or taking his hat on and off, he was talking. He talked at us most magnificently all through the evening. He’s certainly a frustrated stand-up comedian … I hope Arthur Smith gets to see him. I think my favourite line was ‘I haven’t toured for thirteen years. I was sixty then. Just a kid with a crazy dream.’ He listed his antidepressants. He said he’d tried to throw himself into various religions and philosophies, but cheerfulness kept creeping through. We applauded his one-handed keyboard solo in ‘Tower of Song’. He said we were too kind. He said it was an honour to sing to us. Primarily, we swooned.
His band was almost as wonderful as he is. I love the three backing singers, one of whom was ‘collaborator’ Sharon Robinson, for all that they stole ‘If It Be Your Will’, because they do all have excellent voices and Leonard Cohen adores them and they do that little twisty sidestepping dance on every single song. I love the drummer quite powerfully. He got the biggest round of applause during the finale bit purely because he had drums, you know, and therefore did a drum solo, and there’s nothing quite so attention-grabbing as a drum solo. I particularly loved him during ‘Democracy’, ‘cause it’s a march. I love the man holding the hat, who might have been called Dean O’Sullivan but was probably called Dino something else. I love the Hammond organ man. I love Bob Metzger. I love the twelve-string guitarist and oud player like crazy, largely because Leonard Cohen loved him even more and took his hat off too him and got down on one knee and sang his love to him quite a lot. That was a really unexpected bonus. The slash. I think he sang the last verse of ‘Take This Waltz’ to him – the one he sings to the backing singers on the BBC documentary. And I love Roscoe Beck. He’s one of the names Leonard Cohen calls out on several live recordings I’ve heard, so he was very familiar to my brother and myself (Incidentally, it was great being with my brother because we could elbow one another during all the Leonard Cohen lyric in-jokes. I didn’t realise we had so many. He can’t possibly go off and get married. It’s absurd. Apologies for the interference.). The day after my family and I saw Willie Nelson in concert in Liverpool, we saw his harmonica player Mickey Rafael walking through the Cavern district, and weirdly that was more exclamation-inducing than anything that had happened the night before. It was the same sort of thing with Roscoe Beck – we said ‘That’s Roscoe Beck!’ to one another, though we never said the same thing about Leonard Cohen out loud. I suppose the latter’s just a touch less believable, but the former makes the whole thing a touch more so.
Bearing that last point in mind, I tried hard not to let it be too much an exercise in making myself aware and fully appreciative of precisely what was afoot, ‘cause that’s the sort of thing that can fairly ruin your Christmas – you don’t want to miss words because you’re too busy saying ‘That’s Leonard Cohen’ to yourself – but it was fairly difficult not to because, you know, Leonard Cohen was singing on the stage. And mostly that’s why I experienced unprecedented fury when the three men alongside me started singing. They were fine through the first half, but after the intermission they returned with beer and took to singing along very tunelessly indeed. I’ve seen recorded concerts with a lot of noisy and exuberantly vocal audience participation and I’m sure they’re grand in their own way, but this wasn’t one of them – this was 1,900 lifelong fans’ one and only entirely unexpected change to hear the man singing to them live, and mostly I think they wanted to devote their full attention to that. The bloke next to me was audibly chewing as well. I silenced him for three whole songs with a terrible glare that I think communicated something along the lines of ‘OH GOD YOU ARE UPSETTING ME SO PROFOUNDLY’, then an excellent man in front of me silenced all three of them for half a dozen more songs by turning around and saying ‘Can you not sing along, please?’. I wanted to kiss his lovely face. But they started again up shortly afterwards and from that point on nothing would stop them. I tried awful looks and stamping right next to the nearest one’s foot and clamping my hand very deliberately over the entire left side of my head. It made no odds and I was massively pleased when they left halfway through the encores. I don’t know if it’s a killjoyish thing to be thinking, but generally I look at it this way: if Leonard Cohen’s singing ‘I’m Your Man’ into your right ear, you don’t much want a half-cut tone-deaf pillock-face who isn’t Leonard Cohen simultaneously mangling it into your left.
There was also a heckling woman at the front of the gallery who got on my wick by the end. Her first heckle, ‘Oh yes you are’ in response to ‘But I’m not coming on’, was passable because it was panto-esque and there was very much a laughing response from the audience anyway in anticipation of the golden voice line, but after that it got a bit wearing. I don’t particularly get why she wanted to impinge on his consciousness as the irritating woman who won’t stop interrupting, but there we go. Aside from that it was perfect.
In my hotel room afterwards and again on the train home I listened to my MP3 player on shuffle. About a dozen songs in Leonard Cohen started singing to me, rather like he has done since I was born, very much giving the impression that he lives only untouchably on albums and not so much for three hours in a room with me and 1,899 other people. That’s why it was all a little bit special.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 04:06 am (UTC)I hate that people near you sang. That's really awful. BUT OH GOD YES EVERYTHING YOU SAY YES, the COMPLETELY UNLIKELYNESS OF IT and the constant reminding yourself it was happenign while also trying not to INTERRUPT IT HAPPENING, and the constant HIM COMING BACK WHICH WAS JUST AWESOME BECAUSE IT WAS AWFUL EVERY TIME HE LEFT and every song me and Bec listed at the interval as SONGS HE HAD NOT SUNG YET he just came back on and sang except for some of them, but then when you have written ALL THE GOOD SONGS IN THE WORLD it is hard maybe to sing them ALL IN ONE GO. I spent yesterday evening mostly SEETHING because other people were hearing him singing and I was not. I LOVED HIS HAT. I LOVED ALL HIS BAND PEOPLE AND SINGERS> I loved the drummer so much, I loved how he waved all the time when they were going off and on again and how he refused to wear a hat and how he looked a lot like John Travolta from Pulp Fiction.
I loved clapping his keyboard playing, and how he kept telling us we were an honour to sing for. YES. THAT IS RIGHT THE HONOUR IS ALL YOURS. LOON. I love how much everyone loved him and just wanted to clap him forever and it makes me die inside when I think about it and I had goosebumps for an entire four hours and I JUST LOVE THAT IT WAS REAL AND THAT IT HAPPENED AND I CANNOT BELIEVE IT EVEN AT ALL.
I love that you were there. Bec and I had one of those conversations with two women in the queue for the loos as well. It was such a beautiful interval, I loved the expressions on everyone's faces, and just . . . OH GOD IT WAS THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD THE WHOLE THING EVERYTHING OH GOD. I loved the version of Hallelujah he sang, I love how entirely perfectly brilliant the entire room was and how lakjs;flkjslfaskjdflsdf, I love that it had most of my favourite bits in. Mostly I love the unexpected slash which was INCREDIBLE AND BEAUTIFUL AND.
Roscoe Beck was greatness, I love that he was allowed an ARTY HAT because he was the director. Dean O'Sullivan is called Dino Soldo, I only know because I had to look him up, nobody stopped applauding Leonard Cohen quite long enough to actually hear anybody's names.
I can't imagine that his voice is remotely actually real or existent. I imagine it is mostly a lie. Because I CANNOT GET OVER IT.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 07:59 am (UTC)Oh. I've never done so many standing ovations. Or even any, I think. Eventually I tucked all my possessions under my arms in anticipation of the next seventeen ovations because they kept rolling onto the floor.
The next day my brother said maybe we spent the evening hallucinating the concert in a gutter instead of actually attending it. Personally I think my clothes were too dry for that to be the case, and my imagination not quite that good.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-20 11:01 am (UTC)