Leonard Cohen at Glastonbury
Wrote this review of Leonard Cohen at last year's Glastonbury Festival for the official website. I've just been listening to the live album and felt the need to repost it...
Welcome to Glastonbury, Leonard Cohen; welcome to this gloriously gaudy feast of holy fools and neon-clad fakirs, of prophets and loss, of ecstasy and revelation. Welcome to a tower of song erected in a farm, where closing time is Monday and the world, for the most part, is a little bit more real, purely because of its unreality. Welcome to a world where flame haired girls shiver out tears from their lovers’ shoulders, a saline cascade of joy that chimes as it falls to the tune of ‘Bird on a Wire’.
“It’s a great honour to play for these angels born of the mud,” says Cohen, his sonorous growl encompassing a lop-sided smile as he surveys the oasis of bliss rising from the heads and hearts of the crowd. He has moved them to stillness with ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’, which stalks up the spine like a lover’s finger, chilled them with his vision of ‘The Future’, and he is about to launch into ‘Tower of Song’.I had forgotten this song until now, forgotten the line “I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice.” The crowd laughed appreciatively at the perceived irony, but it occurs to me that golden is exactly what Cohen’s voice is. It is heavy and coruscating, and, through the cracks, it shines down on the transfixed crowd, who worship it and join in with it in impassioned choruses, first with ‘So Long Marianne’ and then more and more throughout his set.
Cohen’s is a voice that Moses could have carved the Ten Commandments on with his fingernails; heavy yet tender, soft almost, mordant, but laced with a lyrical, playful wit and wisdom that beggars most of his contemporaries’; it is a savage and glorious tool that serves the words, which anatomise the vagaries of love and politics, lust and despair. He is “leaning out for love” and “will lean that way forever”.
‘Suzanne’ melts over the crowd like dew; ‘Hallelujah’ erupts like a volcano in thousands of lungs; the sensual, subtle bravado of ‘I’m Your Man’ sings like a pheromone in the encroaching dusk. Cohen, all the while, is simply smiling like Gabriel, occasionally doffing his trilby to bursts of applause. He is the epitome of refined cool, a dapper, studied man who carries peace in his wake and parts the sea of gaudy thrills that is Glastonbury to open ways to a myriad of promised lands.
