REVIEW: Leonard Cohen, Live in London (Columbia)

From The Independent (UK)

Album: Leonard Cohen, Live in London (Columbia) --
March 27, 2009 by Andy Gill --
(Rated 5 stars out of 5) --

"It's wonderful to be gathered here, on just the other side of intimacy," murmurs Leonard Cohen as he takes the stage for one of last year's hugely successful UK shows.

It's a line which encapsulates the essence of Cohen's late-blooming appeal – as if the audience were gathered here with him, rather than for him – and the wry reference to the intimacy which has been his stock-in-trade for the past four decades, here humorously attenuated to fit the amusingly outsize venues he found himself playing at this late stage of his career.

But what becomes immediately apparent listening to this wonderful double-album is that Cohen is possessed of a rare and remarkable ability to make colossal venues like the Royal Albert Hall and even the O2 Dome shrink to about the size of a police-box – or, more appropriately, a suburban boudoir. Blessed with the most sensual basso profundo since Barry White, he makes the act of singing for thousands seem like pillow-talk for one's ears alone. For confirmation, just listen to the mighty roar of acclaim which greets the now-famous line from "Tower Of Song" about being "born with the gift of a golden voice": it's because every member of his audience is, in a sense, there alone with Leonard as he croons through romantic favourites like "Sisters Of Mercy", "Suzanne", "I'm Your Man", "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" and "Ain't No Cure For Love", or shares the world-weary wit of "Everybody Knows" and "Democracy".

For so long derided as an inconsolable melancholic fit only to soundtrack the wrist-slitting despair of terminal depressives, Cohen has been reassessed over the last couple of decades as one of pop's subtlest comic talents, the mordancy of his humour sometimes too dark to recognise as droll. Here, his comedic gift is best demonstrated by the timing he brings to his onstage patter.

He opens the set with a one-two sucker-punch combination that effectively maps out the parameters of his art, the unalloyed romantic devotion of "Dance Me To The End Of Love" followed immediately by the bitter, dystopian sardonicism of "The Future". From there on, there's barely a slack moment in the 26 songs, rendered with unassuming grace by the 10-piece band.

His collaborator Sharon Robinson steps up to share "In My Secret Life" and "Boogie Street", and the faint echo of several thousand other collaborators is dimly discernible on many of the tracks, notably a "Hallelujah" which bests even John Cale's statuesque version, and reclaims the song from reality-show imposters and usurpers.

REVIEW: Live in London (2009)

From Entertainment Weekly

Music Review --
Live in London (2009) --
Leonard Cohen --

At 74, Leonard Cohen may no longer be — as he sings on ''So Long, Marianne'' — cold as a new razor blade. But listening to this double CD, recorded last summer, it's clear he's still cool as a cucumber. Both an older, wiser counterpart to The Essential Leonard Cohen and, based on one recent concert, a quip-forquip preview of his spring tour, Live in London is a reminder that Cohen is as gifted a performer as he is a songwriter. A

QUOTE: "Conversations from a Room" by Tom Chaffin, Canadian Forum, August/September 1983

A few weeks ago Cohen received in the mail a newspaper clipping from a South African newspaper, a story about a surgeon named Leonard Cohen who specializes in restoring severed limbs. Scrawled across the sheet was an inscription: "We knew you could do it, Lenny."

Cohen told me about it in a bar several nights before, and we are laughing about it again. "You know," I say, "you bring it on yourself, Leonard."

"“Yeah,"” he says with a smile. "“Yeah, I guess I do."

Cohen relishes and takes with good humour the bleak proportions of his artistic persona – "I've had people tell me that my records have made their lives not worth living."

"Conversations from a Room" by Tom Chaffin, Canadian Forum, August/September 1983

QUOTE: Le Cercle de Minuit (The Midnight Circle), transcript of television program broadcast by France 2, December 1992. Interviewer is Michel Field

Field: Leonard Cohen, do you laugh sometimes?

Leonard Cohen: Always.

Michel Field: Why do you hide it so well?

Leonard: Not at all, I don't hide it. My songs, my friend Graeme (Allwright) is wrong, are very happy, really! (laughs) Basically, my songs are jokes.

Field: At their beginning they may be, but since it took you three or four years to write them, the result is that we don't find this last song, for example, a joke.

Leonard: Oh yes, and I am very happy when they are completed.

Field: Is it hard?

Leonard: It's hard like work, it's working. It's not especially distressing nor does it cause suffering, it's just work. Everybody knows working is usually hard.

"Le Cercle de Minuit" ("The Midnight Circle"), a transcript of a television program broadcast by France 2, December 1992. Interviewer is Michel Field

QUOTE: "Heavy Cohen" by Cliff Jones, Rock CD, December 1992

"I'm not Nostradamus but anyone can see that things are getting difficult here. There's similar threads running through all my work from the very start right through to this album. As early as '79 I was talking about the real feeling a lot of people have deep inside that this is the end. These are the final dark days, the flood's on its way.

"All our psychic landmarks are gone and the whole psychic landscape is being washed away. The essential centrality has been eroded to the point where it's all breaking apart. We no longer have any sense of who we are, where we belong or what we should be doing. Most of us feel it and we're all more than a little freaked out!"

"Heavy Cohen" by Cliff Jones, Rock CD, December 1992

QUOTE: "Maverick Spirit: Leonard Cohen" by Jim O'Brien, B-Side Magazine, August/September 1993

"You know, to be part of that chain that binds the generations one to another is an agreeable feeling. But of course, I myself experienced the same phenomenon with artists of the previous generation.

"The kind of training I had as a young writer, a young composer, made me very much aware of where I stood in a long line of singers or poets: musicians from the Troubadours; even before that, from Homer; and even before that, from Isaiah and King David; coming all the way down through the various strains into English literature; into poetry; into folk poetry like Robbie Burns; into folk singers like Pete Seger, Allan Lomax, and Woodie Guthrie; and down to my own generation. I've always been aware of that tradition, and to be one of the figures that allows the tradition to continue is very gratifying. That's a long-winded answer, but I think you know what I mean."

"Maverick Spirit: Leonard Cohen" by Jim O'Brien, B-Side Magazine, August/September 1993