And then there are the songs. Cohen’s lyrics are marvels of the form. While on his earlier records their settings may have been overwrought, in their current incarnation they are vibrant little gems, stripped right back to their essence or given a new lease of life in another’s sympathetic voice. Of course in Cohen’s own voice, now a basso profondo, lyrics of love and longing, memory and regret, fairly leap out of the musical texture and strike right at the listener’s heart. And there were moments last night when Leonard Cohen actually reminded me of James Brown. Cohen spent so much of the concert falling to his knees, remaining on his knees, singing while kneeling on the stage, not just at moments of great emotion, as James Brown was wont to do, but to maintain in the audience a level of tension and concentration that would have been all too easily broken, what with the giant screens flanking the stage and the inevitable flickering of iPhones as the few younger audience members tweeted the setlist.
It was at those moments – Leonard Cohen on his knees on the stage, unraked rows A-P in front of me (including the crucial one tall man whose head always blocked the very part of the stage that I was trying to see) – that I was actually grateful for the giant screens. I hate feeling like I’ve paid to see a live performance, only to end up watching television, but one needs to see Cohen’s face when he sings. More importantly, one needs to see Cohen’s face as he reacts to the other musicians as they’re playing to understand what ‘musicianship’ really means. There were extended moments in the concert last night when the unspoken communication and mutual respect between Cohen and Javier Mas, playing the 12-string guitar or the bandurria, was captured on those giant screens, and they are moments that will remain with me forever.
This need for giant screens aside, I still wish Cardiff could have offered Leonard Cohen a more beautiful room to sing in. He and the band were able to maintain a sense of intimacy despite the harsh and unlovely surroundings of the Motorpoint Arena, but they needed drapes, and a proscenium arch, and a little bit of gilded filigree splattered here and there to complement the lovely velvet upholstered chairs that the guitarists and fiddler sat on stage left, and indeed the very classic and understated businesswear that Cohen and his band (male and female alike) wore to work last night. I can’t wish myself back to a Leonard Cohen performance in the 1970s, however, and I’m fairly certain this was the one and only time that I will have had the privilege of seeing the man perform, so I will abandon my petty grievances of aesthetic imperfection and note the most wonderful and joyous image of the night: Leonard Cohen, thanking his ‘friends’ (the audience), thanking his collaborators, each in turn, each by his or her full name, thanking the stage crew, again by name, thanking the soundman, the lighting designer and the rigger, all by name, bowing deeply, then turning to his right and skipping off stage as the music played on.
