To this day I remember Leonard Cohen skipping onto the stage like a child. This was a humorous nod to his age. He was over seventy and there was an implicit knowledge that this might be his last tour.
I also remember the silence when he recited the poem ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’, only punctuated by occasional laughter, as captured here in this live recording from that London show.
‘I’m good at love, I’m good at hate / It’s in-between I freeze.’ I love that line. For me, the beauty of his songs has long been a shield against the mediocre and mundane.
The masterful shifts from humour to pathos from the Romantic to the profane – it reminds us again what a towering writer he was – a hundred floors above us ‘in the tower of song.’
