jack_ryder (jack_ryder) wrote,
jack_ryder
jack_ryder

Leonard Cohen & Clare Bowditch

Last night we joined the rest of Sydney's audience for adult contemporary music at Acer Arena for the Leonard Cohen concert, with incomparable support from Clare Bowditch.

I can't say I'm a Leonard Cohen fan as such, unlike murasaki_1966. I like his songs and appreciate his talent with words, but I didn't immerse myself in him like some of my friends did so long ago. He was more use to me as a comic tool that as an outliner and fellow conspirator in the pain of the human heart. I always figured Leonard Cohen for the advanced heartbreak course, whereas at the time I was having a hard enough time getting someone else to hold on to my heart long enough to smash it.

So I had no great expectations last night - a professional gig from a legendary musician at the twilight of his career but no idea that I was going to be enchanted and transformed as I was.

The band, the musicians, the troupe I guess that he had assembled were world class - there were moments of the concert where I had momentarily stopped breathing, enthralled by the virtuosity on display.

Leonard Cohen, himself, was a masterful showman - minimising the patter and maximising its impact, gliding in and out of his back catalog of songs with an effortless grace. Not bad for a man of 76. His age has stooped him, but his magnificently apocalyptic voice was untremored as it guided us through the endless landscape of splintered relationships and through the deep wells of emotional pain.

Clare Bowditch was an exceptional support act. Seemingly dwarfed on stage with her best friend Pikelet as accompanist, Bowditch managed to turn the Acer Arena, the apotheosis of a fucking barn, into the most delicate of initimate spaces. No mean achievement.

Truly one of the greatest concerts I've ever had the privilege to attend.
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