Great review

You and me both BevB4real wrote:Great photos Gwen!!
but you know I love the hands
He did so in Leeds as well Gwen.musicmania wrote:You and me both BevB4real wrote:Great photos Gwen!!
but you know I love the hands![]()
Now I am putting a call out for if any one has a video of Bird on the Wire from the second night please upload it as that performance was out of this world. The song is always amazing live and while I'd felt last year in Montreal Leonard had taken it to a whole new level he done it again in Dublin on the second night.
Leonard Cohen Living Legend
Posted on September 29, 2013 By Jean Reinhardt
His life in his music
He’s your Man
On September 11 and 12, 2013, the O2 music venue in Dublin held very mixed crowds on both nights. Young, old, middle aged, some with walking sticks, others in wheelchairs, all with one thing in common: Leonard Cohen, the living legend. He ran onto the stage, with more energy than your average 79 year old, performing some of his best numbers, from Dance Me to the End of Love to Closing Time, for close on four hours each night. Accompanied by the Webb sisters, who also played guitar and harp, the mercurial voice of Leonard Cohen was as good as ever. During the concert there were solo performances from his band, Alexandru Bublitchi on violin, guitarist Mitch Watkins and the man often introduced by Cohen as the shepherd of the strings, Javier Mas. Sharon Robinson’s solo Alexandra Leaving received a standing ovation.
The man whose lyrics are soul searching, was first recorded reading eight of his poems in 1957 by Folkways Records, when they produced the album, Six Montreal Poets. More than 50 movies list Cohen’s music on their soundtracks, with the song Bird on a Wire, being played in the film of the same name, starring Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn. With at least 2,400 cover versions of his songs having been produced worldwide, Leonard Cohen can rightly be called a living legend.
In the book, Flowers for Hitler (published 1964), Cohen’s poetry changed from his early romantic verses to the typical, caustic, bitter-sweet and often confrontational writing we see in many of his lyrics today. He was deeply affected by the Holocaust of the 1940′s and this was a big influence on the direction his poetry took. The novel, Beautiful Losers (published 1966), is full of Leonard Cohen’s obsessions and his uncanny sense of the absurd. Politics, religion, sex, and history feature in this book of radical fiction, full of loss and the dynamics of relationships.
Reading Sylvie Simmons biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (published 2012), we learn something about the integrity of this dry humoured poet. For instance, not many people are aware of the fact that during his tours in the early 1970’s in the UK and North America, Cohen and his band performed in various mental hospitals. These were private concerts for the patients, and were never used for self-promotion.
A favourite song on his tours, Dance Me to the End of Love, originally released in 1984, was partly influenced by the Nazi death camps, where musicians were forced to play in string quartets while their fellow prisoners were being annihilated.
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
With his liquid, gravelly voice, intricate guitar work and thought provoking poetry, Leonard Cohen, musician/singer/songwriter/poet, clearly deserves the title of Living Legend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvSMhgqh7JU
Leonard Cohen, Save the Last Dance for me , Dublin 12-09-2013
Video by Albert Noonan
Leonard Cohen ends his second concert in Dublin accompanied by 14,003 backing singers.!
Save the Last dance for me at the o2 Arena. September 12th 2013.
Source 1 - http://www.dublinconcerts.ie/leonard-co ... ew-photos/
Source 2 - http://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/
Source 3 - http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardc ... flove.html
By Jean Reinhardt
Leonard Cohen Live at The O2
The first half of Cohen’s performance simmered along nicely, without ever really coming to the boil.
Rowan Stokes, 09 Oct 2013, 12:22
The first half of Cohen’s performance simmered along nicely, without ever really coming to the boil. The stage, filled with colours, shadows and silhouettes, certainly looked the part; Cohen’s band were on form, most notably the great Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, whose intro to ‘Who By Fire’ was truly, and I mean truly, haunting. This one remarkable moment apart, the first half seemed light on the brilliance we have come to expect from a Leonard Cohen show.
However, after a 20-minute interval, the gig came alive in the second half. Crowd favourites ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Chelsea Hotel No. 2’ were both in their own way godly, holy portrayals of womanhood. Leonard then went on to make a claim for the title of greatest poet alive today with his beautifully articulated, spoken intros to both ‘Alexandra Leaving’ and ‘One Thousand Kisses Deep’, both aching with poetry, the beauty of which was captured superbly in his deep baritone voice.
As the set developed, it got better and better. It is a measure of Leonard’s innate courtesy and egalitarianism that each one of his nine-piece ensemble was afforded the space to illustrate their virtuoso talents. ‘I’m Your Man’ and ‘First We Take Manhattan’ were brilliant as always. But really it was during ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ – a powerful tale of love and deceit – in the second encore that, in the darkness of the theatre, Leonard found his sixth gear and made this a night, which will live long in the collective memory.
‘Closing Time’ signalled the end. ‘I Tried To Leave You’ marked it, with Cohen waltzing out of our lives the way he always does, with a smile and an exaggerated skip.
Hopefully, he’ll make another journey to an island which has fallen in love with his music. To quote the man himself: “I’m not quite ready to hang up my boxing gloves just yet... but let’s just say, I know where the hook is.”
Ten years since LC’s wonderful 2013 concerts in Dublin. And as Athnuachan foretold, this was to be his final visit to Dublin, bookending five amazing years that started with his legendary June 2008 concerts. How privileged we were to be part of his five year long lap of honour. Today we live in a much changed world, financial crash long gone but not forgotten, Obama gone, Trump been and gone and maybe…, Johnson gone, Xi very much here, ditto Putin. Climate change all around us. The needless tragedy in Ukraine dragging on. And The Clock now standing at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been. Amid this uncomfortable uncertainty and gloom, the words, memories and spirit of Mister Cohen endure to comfort, nourish and inspire us.Athnuachan wrote: ↑Sun Sep 15, 2013 5:20 pm
Later we watched the loaded tour trucks heading for the port, and felt disconsolate. I thought of Shakespeare's words:
"Our revels now are ended.These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air."
Now, that's all that there is...![]()
He seemed to be enjoying himself.