GROWING
UP WITH
LEONARD
COHEN

On his latest album Leonard Cohen calls himself a lazy bastard living in a suit. After my father and I saw the 78-year-old play at Lucca Summer Festival on a hot Tuscan evening recently, the word lazy is not one we took home with us. His set lasted past midnight with three encores and no costume changes from the suit and hat he walked on stage in. This was the fourth time my father was seeing Leonard Cohen perform live, the second for me, and a pilgrimage for both of us towards what has become almost a rite of passage in both our lives

If you are a Leonard Cohen fan, watching him play live is like witnessing a sacrifice. Kneeling to the ground like a mourning widow clutching the microphone between his hands like a crucifix he suspended the crowd in ritual silence broken only by the cavernous depths of his voice with the opening lines: Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin/ Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in/ Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove/ Dance me to the end of love. The collective breath we had all been holding since Leonard first made a sound was synchronously released across those gathered outdoors in the Piazza as the sun was setting that afternoon. The lamb had been sent to slaughter and the people could finally dance.

This might sound overboard, comparing a gig to the rituals of ancient priesthood, Leonard Cohen to the Messiah, but I am not the first music fan to commit this kind of blasphemy. The last time my father and I saw Leonard play was at Wembley Arena in London last autumn, but while his performance was characteristically unfaultable, it did not leave the same impression on us that the concert in Italy would. This impression was no doubt intensified by the dramatic setting; the medieval architecture of the historic Piazza Napoleone; the gathering of people of all ages from across the world; the impending sunset; the beer. As for my father, who would celebrate his 65th birthday the following weekend and who first saw Leonard perform live when he was 31 years old (Leonard age 44), there was an extra half a lifetime’s worth of memories he had to filter through that night.

Dad first saw Leonard play at the Brighton Dome in 1979 on the Field Commander Cohen tour with a girlfriend whose name and facial features he fails to recall. The girl he may have forgotten, but the songs have stayed with him since. The details of the second Leonard concert Dad attended are luckily much less hazy than the first. It was May 11, 1993 when, two marriages and a couple of kids later, he met up with his recently separated second wife (my mother) outside The Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. He remembers wearing “a dark suit to keep in with the Leonard ethos and mum in one of her bright dresses.” That night was the first London date of Leonard Cohen’s The Future tour and the last tour he would go on for another fifteen years. Such a hiatus was brought on by both the complications of a lawsuit against his then manager, as well as his personal devotion to Zen Buddhism. By the time Leonard would go on his next world tour, mainly to recompense for the losses his manager had accrued, it was the summer of 2008 and my mother was in hospital with terminal cancer.

Dad remembers walking into the auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall that evening in ’93 to an audience full of women who, like mum, “ just adored him”. The women still do adore him, the men too, and being somewhat forced into going on tour again has, it would seem, serendipitously made him realise how much he still loves to perform. At Lucca he could barely tear himself away from the stage until, after a third encore with the apt song ‘I Tried to Leave You’, he had to honour local noise curfew laws and finally stop. Even then he skipped off stage backwards into the wings waving and smiling at his applauding audience to the closing line of the final song: And here's a man still working for your smile.

Each Leonard Cohen concert I have been to I’ve expected to be one of the youngest members of the audience, but at Lucca there were a surprising number of kids. To my left a baby was even watching Leonard sing from the advantageous heights of his father’s shoulders. I had to wonder whether my love for Leonard is something I chose for myself or if it stems from some dumbfounded familial duty– like those babies born hooked on heroine, or Ned Flanders’ sons’ unquestionable belief in God. A couple of years before that concert in ‘93 Dad remembers driving the family to France (mum in the passenger seat; my sister and I in the back) and putting a cassette into the player for the ride. “We listened to his early albums Songs from a Room and Songs of Leonard Cohen all the way to Cannes in the car then back via Disneyland Paris for a ride in the teacups,” he tells me. I’ve seen that photo - a much smaller more gap-toothed version of myself smiling goofily from a giant teacup – but the songs must have planted themselves in my memory in less evident ways.

Leonard’s songs often open up a dialogue with the self; they often say goodbye or long to be free; they are songs about love and hate and everything in between; and they speak to the human soul in a way that most songwriters attempt to and many can only mimic. There is a reason why ‘Hallelujah’ has been covered over 300 times. Even if the cover versions did start to wear thin after Jeff Buckley, Bob Dylan and K.D. Lang’s renditions it remains to this day a song that can speak to the collective heart of its audience and that is probably why you can’t help but sing along when you hear it.

When Leonard played ‘Hallelujah’ at Lucca the backing vocals from the Webb Sisters sang out like a siren call, transfixing the audience to the song’s timelessness. The sisters have been touring with Leonard since 2008 and their sublime harmonies (as Leonard describes them) provide the perfect contrast to his bottomless voice which, Dad says, “has just grown deeper and more gravelly” with time. Then there’s Sharon Robinson who was invited on stage with Leonard back in 1979 has accompanied him on tour ever since. When she sang her solo cover of Cohen’s ‘Alexandra Leaving’ at Lucca he did not break the audience’s applause for a long time, a silence that gestured his sincere appreciation for her talent as his long time collaborator and co-writer. He makes sure to give time to each of his band members and introduces them with poetic accolades such as "the timekeeper, the prince of precision, Rafael Bernardo Gayol” on drums and to bassist Roscoe Beck, "a veteran and a victim of these long campaigns". Bandurria player Javier Mas was given centre stage at one point, with his own dramatic shadow as a backdrop to the instrumental sounds that hark back to those of the sitar or mandolin that Leonard favoured on songs like ‘Teachers’. Aside from ‘Hallelujah’, there was one other song whose opening lines - Come over to the window, my little darling – always makes me smile, and which made the whole audience sing along. When the camera panned over the audience almost everyone was singing the sad and strangely uplifting words of ‘So Long Marianne’ up on screen.

Watching Leonard Cohen live is a cathartic experience like no other for me. It’s also a time and space where my father and I are allowed to hold hands and sway like a couple of unlikely hippies and cry when Suzanne is played. Leonard wears a suit because he has always felt more comfortable in a suit. “My father trained as an engineer but somehow he fell into the clothing business manufacturing clothing. I grew up wearing suits,” he tells an anonymous interviewer. “I tried jeans but I never felt comfortable in blue jeans, never got it right. So I just finally surrendered to the fact that I felt most comfortable in a suit.” Over the years the suit and the hat have become two halves of Leonard’s staple look and a statement that only his fans, who probably don’t consider themselves the suit-wearing types either (unless they’re at a Leonard Cohen gig), truly understand. At Lucca we met one man in the audience who had been selling one-of-a-kind t-shirts he had handmade with Leonard Cohen lyrics like ‘one of these days when the hat doesn’t help…’ penned onto them. He was probably about 60 himself but had been following Leonard on his ‘Old Ideas’ world tour selling these tee-shirts out of the bag he was carrying around on his back. Leonard Cohen’s suit is an oxymoron for the man it dresses but, if the concerts Dad and I have been to are anything to go by, it’s safe to say that as long as he’s still getting on stage in the suit there’ll be an audience of lazy bastards waiting to see him.