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Friday 9 January 2009

Crumblies’ gig

It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2.

It all started earlier this year, when my friend Chris managed to get four tickets for the first Leonard Cohen concerts at the O2. ‘There’s one for you if you want it,’ he said. Well, obviously I wanted it, but cash was a little short at the time — in fact, not so much short as entirely absent, avoiding me as though I’d said the wrong thing. And I do have an ongoing tinnitus problem, the result of reviewing too many awful Tin Machine gigs for a certain crazed mass-market newspaper in the early 1990s. Earlier this year I went to a friend’s book launch held in a seedy West End dive where they played chart tunes at ear-splitting volume, and for a week afterwards I thought my head was going to explode. So I said no to Chris, with the greatest reluctance, and slight relief in the knowledge that the £67 I didn’t have, I still didn’t have, rather than having £67 less than that.

But the Leonard Cohen concerts, as everyone will tell you, were life-changing events, not least for Leonard himself, whose money problems outclass my own in every way. A few weeks later Chris rang up again. ‘I’ve got four more tickets for 13 November. There’s one for you if you want it. And it really wasn’t that loud. The sound quality is so good it doesn’t have to be loud. Go on, you’ll regret it if you don’t.’

So, obviously, several months later I find myself on the Thames Clipper, surrounded by slightly worn-looking middle-aged people all buzzing with anticipation, or coffee. As we shall see at the O2, Laughing Len attracts a pangenerational audience — young people accompanying aged parents, with the occasional grandparent hobbling along behind, who bought Len’s first album in 1967, or might have slept with him. There’s also a glorious preponderance of attractive young Jewish women milling about but, overall, this is the crumbliest and most bourgeois audience for a gig I have ever seen.

More articles from: Marcus Berkmann | this section

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