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LEONARD COHEN – WE’RE YOUR FANS
by Johnny Black
Bob Dylan’s post-millennial return to prominence as a major international artist came as a surprise even to seasoned veterans in the industry. So who would have laid odds on another heritage act of similar vintage not only pulling off the same trick, but actually outselling the spokesman of his generation?
Rob Hallett of AEG Live, that’s who.
While his peers were headbanging to Black Sabbath, the twelve year old Hallett found himself enraptured by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, the maestro of magnificent melancholy. “His music was saying more to me,” recalls Hallett. “There are lines in his songs and poems that I have lived my life by.”
So, on October 8, 2005, when it emerged that Cohen’s former manager, Kelley Lynch, had misappropriated over US$5 million from the artist's retirement fund, plus publishing rights to his songs, Hallett was saddened. “Rumour had it that even his cash card wouldn’t work. That was a sad thing to me, that my childhood hero was reduced to that state.”
Paradoxically, though, it was Cohen’s financial plunge that triggered his current reversal of fortune, making him more successful now – in his 70s - than ever before.
“I went to his meet him in his lawyer, Robert Kory’s office in Beverley Hills,” explains Hallett. “I started the conversation by coming out of the closet and admitting that I was a lifelong fan, I own all his albums and books, and I can quote lyrics from all his songs.”
Having captured Cohen’s attention, Hallett made his pitch, explaining that he believed Cohen had become a sleeping giant, one of the few artists that people wanted to see but couldn’t.
Cohen, financially bereft, pointed out that he didn’t have a band, hadn’t played in fifteen years, and was doubtful that he still had an audience. Determined to work with his lifelong hero, Hallett offered to pick up the tabs for musicians and rehearsals. “I said, ‘When you think you’ve got a band, and you feel ready to go out again, I’ll put it together. Then we’ll do a deal on the back end, recoup our costs and you’ll get the rest’.”
Hallett says he then went further and promised not just to recoup everything that had been taken from Cohen, but to try to double it.
With the deal in his pocket, Hallett admits that he then faced an uphill battle to convince not just the rest of the business, but some of his own associates at AEG Live, that Cohen could deliver the goods.
On January 13, 2008, Cohen publicly announced his long-anticipated return to performing and, that February, started two and a half months of solid rehearsals with a hand-picked band.
If Hallett was having any doubts, he must have been heartened by the extraordinary workings of fate over the following weeks.
First, Jason Castro performed Cohen’s classic song, Hallelujah, on the seventh season of American Idol, exposing the song to a whole new audience. The result? On March 7, 2008, Jeff Buckley’s version of Cohen's Hallelujah, went to number 1 on the iTunes chart.
A mere three days later, Cohen was inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in recognition of his status among the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters".
If it reads like a build-up that had been co-ordinated with military precision, Hallett insists, “All of that was serendipity. I planned none of it, but all those things made Leonard more aware of his own worth.”
Cohen set off on tour for the first time in fifteen years when he stepped back onto the stage of the 700-capacity Playhouse Theatre in the university town of Fredericton, New Brunswick on 11 May.
Cohen had insisted on eighteen small warm-up dates to restore himself to peak performing capacity. “We kept it off the internet as far as possible,” says Hallett, “and just advertised it in the local paper.”
The good burghers of Fredericton gave Cohen a standing ovation before he had sung a note and he rewarded them with a three hour show. “He’s 73,” points out Hallett. “We were all stunned.”
It wasn’t until they reached Toronto’s Sony Centre For The Performing Arts on June 6 that Hallett invited the world’s media along. “It’s a 3,500-seater and we sold out three nights in a day and a half.”
The reviews were almost uniformly glowing and Cohen was back with a bigger bang than anyone other than Hallett had anticipated.
Tour manager Mike Scoble has spent 25 years looking after everything from the opening of the Welsh Assembly to the last Mika tour, but even he sounds taken aback by Cohen’s achievement. “We have to try to keep up with him,” says Scoble. “If he’s onstage for three hours, the rest of us can’t pretend we’re tired. The age range of the audience is amazing. It really is from 18 to 80.”
This was all heartening, but how might the venerable troubadour fare in front of a non-Canadian audience? Hallett chose Dublin as the testing ground. “I knew Dublin was Leonard’s spiritual home, him being a poet,” he points out. “I’d been doing some work with John Reynolds at POD Concerts, and he came up with the idea of building an arena in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art.”
To make this ambitious plan economically viable, Hallett realised, they’d have to play three nights but Reynolds was doubtful if the potential audience was big enough. “When the first two went ,” chuckles Hallett, “they sold out in half an hour so we added the third. We did 36,000 tickets in Dublin. Just amazing. They actually rushed the stage … women running up the aisles screaming … They were singing, dancing, cheering, clapping and just sharing in it. When he sang, ‘Democracy is coming to the USA’ the whole crowd jumped up and started shouting ‘Barak!’. And to see Leonard’s smile, it was just a joy.”
“It’s a very simple production,” points out Mike Scoble. “The lighting is very understated and there are no special effects except for Leonard running on and off the stage. What makes it special is the songs, Leonard’s personality and the sheer quality of the band.”
The choice of imaginatively appropriate venues for the European jaunt didn’t stop with Dublin’s Museum. In Manchester Cohen played four nights at the Opera House, and would go on to European and Scottish castles, medieval Italian towns and French olive groves.
“There will never be anything better than Leonard Cohen’s performance that night for me,” says Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis. “I had been trying to get him here for almost 40 years and I never could. Then, the only time I didn’t try, his agent rang up and offered him.”
Cohen’s Pyramid Stage tour-de-force on June 29 elicited a rapturous reception as the strains of Hallelujah rang out into the sunset. “People say he’s grumpy and depressed but he’s nothing like that,” adds Eavis. “He’s such a lovely man. After every song he took his hat off and bowed to the audience. When he got to Hallelujah, people were just lifting off the ground.”
Glastonbury, however, delivered a more sobering lesson to Hallett. “It was a great performance, and the audience loved it,” he says, “but Leonard is a perfectionist and he wasn’t completely relaxed because he hadn’t been able to do a soundcheck. We made sure to sort that out on the other festival dates.”
The first European mainland date followed on July 1 with 18,000 devotees at Oslo’s Aliset Stadium. “I had the Bon Jovi tour at the same time so I was running around between the two, one day with Leonard, one day with Bon Jovi,” reveals Hallett. “The lovely thing is that Jon Bon Jovi is a huge Cohen fan, he does Hallelujah in their encore, and whenever I went to one of his dates, the first thing he’d ask me was ‘How was Leonard?’
July 5th brought the first of the castle dates, promoted by Concerts DK at Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle. “The audience for Leonard Cohen is unique,” reckons Kim Worsoe of Concerts DK. “His show is as close as you can get to a religious experience. Our first two dates, in July, sold 21,000 tickets, and for the upcoming October dates, we’ve sold out 12,000 tickets at Hartwall Arena in Helsinki and 8,500 for the Forum in Copenhagen.”
The Paris-based Gerard Drouot Productions handled Cohen’s first French dates. “The festival in Lyon on the 9th sold out very quickly, in 3 or 4 days (4,000),” says Drouot. “At Nice he was playing as part of the Nice Jazz Festival, and we did the largest attendance of the entire festival that night with over 7,000 tickets sold. Being Canadian, he speaks good French, and he uses it to introduce most of his songs with a short translation of the main lyrics.”
Three members of U2, Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton, turned out to see Cohen in Nice. “It’s a beautiful setting, in an olive grove,” says Hallett. “Bono had seen Leonard in Dublin and loved it, so he brought the others along to Nice.”
Looking ahead to the run of three nights at Paris Olympia (November 24 – 26), Drouot says, “Given how well we did on those first dates with almost no marketing, I think we’ve underplayed Paris. We could have done a week.”
After Lyon, Cohen moved on to Bruges, a concert promoted by Pascal Van De Velde, who founded his own company, Greenhouse Talent, after leaving Live Nation in 2004. “The Cactus Festival site is an 8,000 capacity park in the medieval city centre,” he reveals. “It sold out in under two weeks. We had rain until 7 pm and then the sun came out. The show was outstanding on every single level: the magic performance, the quality of the sound, the gentle artiste ... pure magic.”
Greenhouse Talent will be promoting further dates on the second leg of this tour, of which Van De Velde says, “In less than two weeks we sold out two nights at Forest National (6,500) in Brussells and one at Ahoy (8,000) in Amsterdam. We could easily speak of 'Leonard Cohen-fever'.”
That upcoming Amsterdam date has particularly delighted Hallett, because Holland’s biggest promoters, Mojo Concerts, felt that Cohen could not return to that city so soon after the Westerdam gig on 12 July. “It’s probably the first time in many years that a major act has played Holland without Mojo,” says Hallett, “ and we pretty much sold out the first day.”
Barry Wright, whose Edinburgh company Castle Concerts enjoys a unique relationship with Historic Scotland allowing them to stage rock events in Scottish castles, was delighted with Cohen’s showing on Edinburgh Castle Esplanade on July 16. “This year we had five shows over the summer period – including Girls Aloud, Boyzone and The Proclaimers,” says Wright. “They all sold out but Leonard Cohen was our fastest sell out ever.”
For Wright, Cohen’s resurgence underlines the long-term importance of nurturing top quality talent. “If you write your own songs, create your own music and you have talent, you can have a twenty year career,” he feels. “If you’re created by some tv talent show, you’ve probably got three and a half years.”
The biggest gamble of the tour was, undoubtedly, Hallett’s decision to put Cohen into London’s 16,000 capacity O2 on 17 July. “Everybody had questioned my sanity on that one, but we sold out in 24 hours and the show was a revelation. Leonard’s charm turned it into a club. It was incredible. You could hear a pin drop, even when he recited a poem.”
Inspired by this triumph, AEG Live put another O2 show for November. “It sold out in 24 hours, so we added a third and that will also sell out.”
At Benecassim on the 20th, says Hallett, “We’d learned our lessons from Glastonbury. We arrived well in advance so Leonard could have a soundcheck and I think Vince Power will confirm it’s one of the best performances he’s ever seen.”
The tour moved into Italy on the 27th for Lucca’s Summer Festival, a gig promoted by D'Alessandro E Galli, which Hallett rates as his personal favourite. “7,000 people in a beautiful medieval town in the heart of Tuscany,” he recalls. “The promoter, Domenico D’Alessandro, sold tickets for that show in Mozambique, London, Zimbabwe, Washington, all over the world. It was a very special gig because of that.”
D’Alessandro’s partner, Adolfo Galli, observes, “ Leonard Cohen is one of the few music legends left and we now look forward to the Milan show in October at the Teatro degli Arcimboldi. So far 50% of the tickets have been sold which indicates another definite sell out. This is a great achievement considering the recession Italy is facing in ticket sales.”
The first leg of the tour ended with another triumph, when Cohen won over the youthful, dance-oriented crowd at The Big Chill in Ledbury, UK. Founder Katrina Larkin, however, professes no surprise. “It’s because he is a genuine person who Big Chillers have admired and loved for years – it was almost beyond our dreams that he was able to perform at the festival. He added a magical moment that I don’t think any of us at The Big Chill will ever forget.”
The second leg of the tour kicks off at the 9,000 capacity Arcul De Trumpf in Bucharest on September 21, Cohen’s 74th birthday. “Over 90% of the tickets are already sold,” confirms Sorina Burlacu, owner of Romanian promoter Events, which has previously produced the Rolling Stones and mounted the country’s first international rock festival.
“It’s going to be a bigger touring party, 48 crew instead of just 34, and five artics rather than two,” explains Mike Scoble. “On the first half we were mostly using the existing sound and lights at the various festival sites, but this time we’ll be carrying our own.”
Hallett feels that the O2 proved not only that audiences enjoy seeing Cohen in arenas, but he enjoys those shows as well. “We’re doing some small arenas in Poland, where he’s treated like a god, then he’ll be one of the first acts to play the O2 in Berlin, that’s sold out, couple of nights at the Forest National sold out in minutes. Milan, I don’t like the Arena there, it’s a bit nasty, so we’re doing a beautiful old theatre on a high ticket price.”
Milena Paleckova at 10:15 Entertainment is keenly anticipating Cohen’s arrival at the 7,200 capacity HC Sparta ice sports hall in Prague (Sept 27). “We’ve been in business for sixteen years now, and we’ve promoted everybody from R.E.M. to Bob Dylan,” she says, “but when we announced the Leonard Cohen date and gave fans opportunity to register at our website, we had 4,500 people registered within a few days. That‘s never happened before.“
Johannes Wessels, founder of MPG Music Pool, Hamburg (winners of the 2007 Leo Award for best tour with Justin Timberlake) first met Leonard Cohen in 1986. “I was just learning the business back then, working on his tour at Sunrise Concerts and found him a perfect gentleman,” he says. “The Arena in Oberhausen (Nov 2) will be close to capacity, about 8,000 tickets, but Berlin (Oct 4) is a Cohen city - think of that line in First We Take Manhattan where he sings 'then we take Berlin' - so we'll do all 12,000 tickets in the new 02."
Stops at Munich’s Olympiahalle (Oct 6) and Frankfurt’s Festehalle (Oct 29) will reunite Cohen with an old friend, Marcel Avram of United Promoters AG. “I first put Leonard on in 1972 at Cirkus Krone in Munich, so it’s great to have him back again,” he says. “Selling out in Germany today is not easy, but we are already between 50 and 60% and I’m confident both shows will sell out.”
Remarkable as Leonard Cohen’s comeback has been, Rob Hallett is convinced the end is nowhere near. “After this leg ends at the MEN Arena in Manchester on November 30, we’ll start up again in Hawaii in mid-January, go down through New Zealand, into Australia, back out via Japan, then South Africa, have another break, then do the USofA. After that, who knows? He could tour in Europe until he no longer wants to.”
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Rob Hallett of AEG Live discusses his role in the 2008 Leonard Cohen tour with Johnny Black.
Can you begin by outlining what your involvement is on the Leonard Cohen tour?
I’m producing the world tour, America, Canada, Europe, Australia, the whole thing.
It was you who got Leonard Cohen to come out of retirement. How did that happen?
I’ve been a Leonard Cohen fan since I was about 12. Everybody else was listening to Black Sabbath and I was listening to Leonard Cohen. It was saying more to me. There are lines in his songs and poems that I have lived my life by.
I didn’t get the opportunity to meet him about three years ago, 2005, when I went to his lawyer, Robert Kory’s office, and basically I started the conversation by admitting that I was a lifelong fan, own all the albums and the books, that I can quote lyrics from all his songs. I basically wanted to come out the closet from the start.
He said, “Thank you very much. OK. I’m listening.”
So I put my pitch to him, which was that I believed he was a sleeping giant, one of the few artists out there that people would want to see but couldn’t, and Leonard said, “Well, you know, couple of thousand people a night, and I’ve got to put a band together, I haven’t got this, I haven’t got that…”
So I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll put up all the money for that, pick up the rehearsal tab, pay the musicians. You won’t have to put your hand in your pocket. When you think you’ve got a band, and you’re comfortable and you think you’re ready to go out again, I’ll put it together. Then we’ll do a deal on the back end, recoup our costs and you’ll get the rest.”
From that point it took another six months for him to start putting the band together, another six to find the musicians, so we didn’t start rehearsals until February 2008.
But I had this core belief, being such a fan myself, that I wasn’t the only one. I’ve been a promoter for over thirty years and in that time I’ve guessed quite well at what people and how many will come to see an act.
My next job was to persuade the rest of the world, including my people at AEG, that I hadn’t gone completely doo-lally, and that Leonard Cohen was as big as I believed he was. So I went out and started beating the bushes, and found some believers and others who weren’t, and I had to beat them around the head a bit…
You mean people outside of AEG?
Yes. We’re not in every market yet, although we have strategic alliances in every market.
So I started putting it together and the first thing Leonard insisted on was eighteen warm ups in Canada, starting in a town called Fredericton.
The build up to this tour reads like it was planned with military precision. There was huge publicity from the lawsuit, Jason Castro did Hallelujah on American Idol, Jeff Buckley goes No1 on iTunes, followed by the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction…
I didn’t plan any of that. It was all serendipity, but all those things made Leonard more aware of his own worth. I think what was stopping him from coming out was that he really didn’t think anyone was interested. He’s still shocked to this day, when he goes out there and sees all these people who want see him and love him. He really didn’t have a clue.
How badly had he been hurt by the situation with his previous manager…
My understanding is that he was hurt pretty bad. He’s never been a greedy man, he’s not someone who goes out on private jets, but rumour had it that he got to the point where his cash card wouldn’t work. That’s a sad thing to me, that my childhood hero was reduced to that state. So my promise to him was that I would try to make back and try to double everything she had stolen from him.
And have you?
Getting close.
So was that first warm up, in Fredericton, as good as you’d imagined it would be?
Yeah, it was kind of magic, because no-one knew what to expect. There was snow on the ground, it was an old student theatre, like you see if there’s a high school ball on Happy Days, you know? I’ve still got the poster and it says something like May 10 Fredericton Town Band, May 11 Leonard Cohen, May 12 Elvis Presley Tribute, May 14 Women’s Institute.
And then there he was on stage and it was magical.
I presume you’d seen him before?
Loads of times as a punter, but this was special, as it was me who’d got him there, and it was his own country, and he was my hero… and there he was, this seventy three year old man on stage and he played for three hours which shocked everybody. I felt like the audience, which was only 893 people, was all my brothers and sisters and they all stood up as one before he even opened his mouth and applauded.
As a personal, selfish thing it was great for me because it confirmed I wasn’t the only one who felt that way about him. It was fantastic. I stayed around in Canada for a couple of days longer, and the love people had for him was amazing.
So he was starting off in his comfort zone…
Yeah. We were playing 1100 – 1200 seaters, and he wanted to get eighteen of those under his belt before we hit any major cities, because he hadn’t worked for so long, and he wanted to get back to fighting fitness like a boxer, so we played Fredericton, Monkton, all these towns I’d never even heard of, we picked up rocks and found towns under them. They were selling out in five minutes.
Did people come from all over for Fredericton?
No. We were aiming at a low-key local show for local people. We kept it off the net as much as possible, we only advertised it in the local papers. We didn’t do any major advertising until we got to Toronto. It was semi-secret. Ad in the local paper, sell out in a day.
So we went through all that and it was fab. Then we hit our first major town, which was Toronto, where we sold out three nights at a 3,500 seater in a day and a half, and it started to heat up from there.
And that’s presumably where you invited the world’s media to see him?
A few media had sneaked in before, because word did get out, but Toronto was what we were aiming at.
Why did you pick the Arts Museum in Dublin to start the UK leg?
That was interesting. I knew Dublin was Leonard’s spiritual home, him being a poet, and Damien Rice, who is a superstar in Ireland, insisted on supporting. I was looking forward to Dublin and I’d been doing a bit of work with John Reynolds at POD Concerts, and it was him who came up with the idea of building an arena in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art. When I thought about it, I realised we’d have to do three nights to make that cost effective, but John thought we’d only manage one or two. I convinced him to make it three and, when the first two went they sold out in half an hour. We did 36,000 tickets in Dublin. It was fucking amazing. The second night in Dublin was probably my favourite show on the whole tour. When everyone rushed the stage for a 73 year old man … women running up the aisles screaming … it was fucking amazing. And to see Leonard’s smile, it was just a joy. They were singing, dancing, cheering and clapping and just sharing in it. When he sang, ‘Democracy is coming to the USA’ the whole crowd jumped up and cheered and started shouting ‘Barak!’
Then we did this run in Manchester, four nights sold out, but it was like being in church. They were all so respectful, it was like, ‘There’s Leonard Cohen. Don’t move, don’t even fart.’ They were still fantastic concerts, because the band is amazing and Leonard is wonderful but, compared to Dublin, the audience in Manchester killed it. They were too serious for their own good. They weren’t there to be entertained. They were there to worship in the church of Leonard Cohen. That’s all well and good but Dublin to me was the real celebration of the joy of being at a Leonard Cohen concert.
Then we went to Montreal, which is his home town…
Wasn’t that a hectic turnaround for a 73 year old man? Manchester, Montreal and then Glastonbury in rapid succession?
We were limited by when the Montreal Jazz festival was on. They wanted to do a special tribute to him, because it’s his home town, and the timing seemed right. We took a week off to do it. The last show in Manchester was Friday the 20th, our first in Montreal was the 23rd, and then Glastonbury was the 29th.
Glastonbury, it depends who you talk to. Talk to Melvin Benn or Michael Eavis and they’ll tell you it was one of Glastonbury’s finest moments. We did have 100,000 people singing So Long, Marianne, which was incredible, but it wasn’t Leonard’s favourite show by a long way, mainly because he wasn’t able to have a soundcheck. Leonard is a perfectionist and, especially so early in the tour, it was too soon to throw him into that situation, and I blame myself for that, I felt bad about that. He wasn’t able to relax into the show because he was concerned about the sound all the time. We learned from that big time, and it has never happened again.
Then we went off to Scandinavia, played an Athletics Stadium in Oslo, 18,000 people, and he was the first person to play there and again, he was like God. Copehagen was stunning. It sold out in five minutes.
I had the Bon Jovi tour at the same time so I was running around between the two, one day with Leonard, one day with Bon Jovi. The lovely thing is that Jon Bon Jovi is a huge Cohen fan, he does Hallelujah in the encore of their set, and whenever I went to one of his dates, the first thing he’d ask me was ‘How was Leonard?’
Then we did Montreux and Claud Nobs always does a wonderful job there. It’s always a special night there.
The Cactus Festival in Belgium is where Pascal .. eh … I concocted this idea. We didn’t want to do the Cactus Festival in Bruges, so we went to the organisers and asked if they could set up a day early and give us the site – we paid towards their infrastructure - so Leonard could do a stand-alone show, and that was great.
So that was a Pascal Van De Velde promotion using the site the day before. We had Martha Wainwright as support that day.
Amsterdam was great, so was Edinburgh at the Castle, but by the time we get to the O2 in London, everybody had questioned my sanity on that one, putting Leonard Cohen into a 16,000 capacity venue. We sold out in 24 hours and the show was a revelation. Leonard’s great line there was, “Welcome to the other side of intimacy.’ He turned it into a club. It was incredible. You could hear a pin drop, even when he recited a poem. In fact, it became Leonard’s favourite show of the tour, up to that point.
He’d got his soundcheck and the sound was immaculate, the band was sublime, and Leonard is so charming and humble. It was refreshing, a huge change from some guy in a cod-piece shouting out ‘Do you love me, London?’ You’re seeing a real genuine man up there who feels privileged to be there. It’s not some talentless tv talent show winner who wants people to adore him because he can do karaoke better than the bloke down your local pub. Anyone who was at the O2, that show will live with them for a long, long time.
And we put another one for November and it sold in 24 hours so we added a third and that will also sell out.
Seeing how the 02 worked brought us on to the next leg. It shaped a lot of my thinking on the next leg.
Then we went down and did Benecassim, by which point we’d learned our lessons from Glastonbury, and it went a little smoother. We got there well in advance so he could have a soundcheck and Vince Power will tell you it’s one of the best concert performances he’s ever seen.
U2 all turned up for the Nice Jazz festival, in an olive grove, a beautiful setting. Bono had seen it in Dublin, and he loved it, so he brought The Edge and Adam along to Nice. I don’t think Larry was there.
From there we went down to Lucca, a beautiful historical city in Tuscany, one of my favourite parts of Italy. A marvellous concert, 7,000 people in a medieval town in the middle of nowhere. The promoter, Domenico Alessandro, sold tickets for that show in Mozambique, London, Zimbabwe, Washington, all over the world. It was a very special gig because of that.
Then we went to Athens, played up in the mountains, which was special again because Leonard lived in Greece for several years in the 70s. Then we came back and finished the tour at the Big Chill, again having learned our lessons from Glastonbury. It went fantastic. The people that go to the Big Chill are a kind of dance crowd, young people, Dave Holmes was on after Leonard, and to see them enraptured and singing Hallelujah at the tops of their voices.
It’s interesting that the contemporary audience seems to like him so much…
Well, you expect the old farts like me to come out, but every generation produces another Leonard Cohen fan who keeps him in the public eye. Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, John Cale, kd lang, Madeleine Peyroux, then the movie I’m Your Man with Bono in it singing Hallelujah with Leonard. And it was in Shrek as well.
Financially it could be the tour of the year and it’s very satisfying that nobody else had a fucking clue, without trying to blow my own trumpet, it’s Leonard that deserves all the kudos. He came out and proved that people wanted to see him. But I don’t think many other people had it on their radar.
I’ve never stopped listening to him since I was twelve. It’s not like me rediscovering old stuff. He’s been in my daily life for the past forty years.
How does the new leg differ from the first set of dates?
We kick off with an open air show in Bucharest will be on his 74th birthday, but after that it’s all indoors.
It’s a bigger touring party because we’re carrying production, carrying sound and lights, and playing predominantly arenas. The O2 showed that not only do people enjoy seeing him in Arenas, but he enjoys it as well.
We’re doing some small arenas in Poland, where he’s treated like a god, then he’ll be one of the first acts to play the O2 in Berlin, that’s sold out, couple of nights at the Forest National sold out in minutes. Milan, I don’t like the Arena there, it’s a bit nasty, so we’re doing a beautiful old theatre on a high ticket price.
The Ahoy, now there’s an interesting one. My partner there is Pascal Van De Velde, but Mojo Concerts have had a virtual monopoly on major acts in Holland. They promoted the summer show in Amsterdam and they told me November was too soon for Leonard to come back, so they were offering half as much as we made in the summer to do the Ahoy. ‘You must be fucking joking,’ I said.
Now Pascal, of course, is a Belgian promoter but he agreed with me that Mojo had got their head up their arse, so we’ve gone ahead and done it ourselves, so it’s probably the first time in many years that a major act has played Holland without Mojo. We pretty much sold out the first day.
So where can it go from here?
Well, we’re avoiding September in America because of the election, but we’ll start up in Hawaii in mid-January, he lives in LA so that’s fine, go down through New Zealand, into Australia, back out via Japan, then South Africa, have another break, then do the USofA by which time, hopefully, democracy will have arrived.
Then, who knows? He could tour in Europe until he no longer wants to.
Presumably there’ll be an album, which should help…
A new Leonard Cohen album would be lovely, but I don’t think we need any help. There should be at least one more European tour before we hang up the hat again. You can’t keep going forever, because eventually it starts to go down and people start to get blasé about it.
I mean, people ask why we’re selling more tickets than Dylan. Well, if Dylan was away for fifteen years maybe he’d be outselling us, but he comes out every year, so you know you’ll probably see him again.
Before we finish we’ll do South America, North America, including Canada properly … but we have to be realistic, we’ll do the English-speaking markets, and there’s a lot of interest from Russia and Japan, but I don’t think the people of China are sitting around waiting for Leonard Cohen. His lyrics are very intense and your English has to be very good to understand them, although a lot of the Eastern European countries, like Poland, they have his books in translation. The same in Greece, and there’s plans to do that in Romania.
We can certainly come back to Europe. End of next summer I’ll be thinking about Zagreb, Belgrade, Istanbul – there’s a lot of places we haven’t touched.
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Mike Scoble, Tour Manager on the 2008 Leonard Cohen tour talks with Johnny Black.
Am I right in thinking you’re an independent tour manager?
I’ve never had a proper job since I left school. I’ve done production and tour management for the past 25 years. Everything from classical spectaculars to Mika to the opening of the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff for the BBC.
I hadn’t worked with Leonard before, but I’ve been on this tour from the start. I’d worked with the tour producer, Rob Hallett, before though.
We started out with little warm up gigs in the backwaters of Canada in small venues, everything from school halls to small theatres. Leonard wanted to be somewhere away from the world’s press. He’d been away for such a long time, I think he really didn’t know what to expect from an audience, or even if an audience would turn up at all.
So what are you doing out in Los Angeles?
We’re rehearsing the second leg of the Cohen tour out here. We’re putting all the technical stuff in right now at S.I.R., then the band comes in on Monday (7th September, 2008), for two weeks.
Is there much change to the show from before?
We’ll find out when Leonard turns up on Monday. There’s no moving bits or pyros or that sort of stuff, so any changes will be content. They have quite a catalogue of songs to choose from, because they rehearsed for two and a half months before we went out for the first time.
Has the crew size changed?
It will be a larger crew this time because we’re taking all our own sound and lights, whereas the last one had more festivals where we just used whatever was already on site. We just took our backline and our sound and light desks.
So it was a touring party of 29 last time, 34 including the drivers, but now it’s 48. We have five artics this time.
Does Leonard being over 70 make any difference to how you have to operate?
We have to try to keep up with him. If he’s onstage for three hours, the rest of us can’t pretend we’re tired. The age range of the audience is amazing. It really is from 18 to 80.
You start again in Bucharest. What kind of venue is that?
It’s a soccer stadium, not a huge one though.
What do you anticipate as being your biggest problems on this second leg?
We’re totally self-contained, taking all our own stuff including catering, so I don’t anticipate any serious problems. It’s basically quite a simple tour. It’s the little big show, as someone pointed out. It’s the little show that has become big by being in big venues.
There are no special effects except Leonard running on stage. He runs on and he runs off.
And there are no hurried back to back concerts. It’s all being done in a gentlemanly way. Leonard really cares about the crew. He’s always asking me how they are. He’s a gentleman with a great respect for his fellow man.
Are there venues that you’re looking forward to?
The Olympia in Paris, because it’s such a historic rock gig, all the French stars – from Edith Piaf to Johnny Hallyday, and bands like The Beatles and The Stones, they’ve all played the Olympia. I was there with Mika last year and it’s great.
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Suppliers to the 2008 Cohen tour speak to Johnny Black
Jon Cadbury, Senior Project Manager, PRG Europe
The lighting for the show was designed by Annie Militello, of the American production house Vortex Lighting. It’s very understated, but it went through a lot of changes during the early dates in Canada before it came to Europe. They ended up with three painted backdrops right upstage, and downstage of that there’s a full-width sharkstooth grey gauze, with some lighting behind it. A lot of the mood comes from lighting that gauze with a range of 700 and 3500 watt wash lights.
Martin Corr, Tour Principal, Sound Moves
When a tour needs to move from one continent to another or very quickly within a continent and conventional trucks won’t work, that’s where we come in, because we will supply an aircraft and fly the stuff.
We pick the carrier, arrange customs, and co-ordinate any security or other carrier requirements. Everything that goes on a plane now has to be positively screened because of anti-terrorist regulations, so carriers are very careful.
The worst headaches we face are last-minute changes of flight plans. When we flew them to Oslo after Glastonbury, for example, we unexpectedly had to re-route the plane around military exercises in the North Sea which put our arrival time back by 45 minutes. If the military want to do something out there, you have to give way to them.
David Steinberg, founder, Stardes Ltd
For the first half of this current tour, we basically supplied two 45 foot articulated DAF trucks to transport the sound and light desks, wardrobe and backline, but we did need a third truck when we had to pick stuff up from the airport to take to Glastonbury and back again. For the second half, it’ll be five artics.
Leonard has always been a nice artist to work with, because I always like to work with people who appreciate the quality of service we give them.
Saul Levy, Partner, SilverGray NiteFlite
The company was started about sixteen years ago and I joined as a partner about seven years ago. We’ve gone from seven buses when I started up to 26 now.
We did the first half of this tour with one star bus and two crew buses and now we’re supplying three fully-equipped Bava 45 foot double deckers and drivers, for the entire European tour.
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by Johnny Black
Bob Dylan’s post-millennial return to prominence as a major international artist came as a surprise even to seasoned veterans in the industry. So who would have laid odds on another heritage act of similar vintage not only pulling off the same trick, but actually outselling the spokesman of his generation?
Rob Hallett of AEG Live, that’s who.
While his peers were headbanging to Black Sabbath, the twelve year old Hallett found himself enraptured by Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, the maestro of magnificent melancholy. “His music was saying more to me,” recalls Hallett. “There are lines in his songs and poems that I have lived my life by.”
So, on October 8, 2005, when it emerged that Cohen’s former manager, Kelley Lynch, had misappropriated over US$5 million from the artist's retirement fund, plus publishing rights to his songs, Hallett was saddened. “Rumour had it that even his cash card wouldn’t work. That was a sad thing to me, that my childhood hero was reduced to that state.”
Paradoxically, though, it was Cohen’s financial plunge that triggered his current reversal of fortune, making him more successful now – in his 70s - than ever before.
“I went to his meet him in his lawyer, Robert Kory’s office in Beverley Hills,” explains Hallett. “I started the conversation by coming out of the closet and admitting that I was a lifelong fan, I own all his albums and books, and I can quote lyrics from all his songs.”
Having captured Cohen’s attention, Hallett made his pitch, explaining that he believed Cohen had become a sleeping giant, one of the few artists that people wanted to see but couldn’t.
Cohen, financially bereft, pointed out that he didn’t have a band, hadn’t played in fifteen years, and was doubtful that he still had an audience. Determined to work with his lifelong hero, Hallett offered to pick up the tabs for musicians and rehearsals. “I said, ‘When you think you’ve got a band, and you feel ready to go out again, I’ll put it together. Then we’ll do a deal on the back end, recoup our costs and you’ll get the rest’.”
Hallett says he then went further and promised not just to recoup everything that had been taken from Cohen, but to try to double it.
With the deal in his pocket, Hallett admits that he then faced an uphill battle to convince not just the rest of the business, but some of his own associates at AEG Live, that Cohen could deliver the goods.
On January 13, 2008, Cohen publicly announced his long-anticipated return to performing and, that February, started two and a half months of solid rehearsals with a hand-picked band.
If Hallett was having any doubts, he must have been heartened by the extraordinary workings of fate over the following weeks.
First, Jason Castro performed Cohen’s classic song, Hallelujah, on the seventh season of American Idol, exposing the song to a whole new audience. The result? On March 7, 2008, Jeff Buckley’s version of Cohen's Hallelujah, went to number 1 on the iTunes chart.
A mere three days later, Cohen was inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in recognition of his status among the "highest and most influential echelon of songwriters".
If it reads like a build-up that had been co-ordinated with military precision, Hallett insists, “All of that was serendipity. I planned none of it, but all those things made Leonard more aware of his own worth.”
Cohen set off on tour for the first time in fifteen years when he stepped back onto the stage of the 700-capacity Playhouse Theatre in the university town of Fredericton, New Brunswick on 11 May.
Cohen had insisted on eighteen small warm-up dates to restore himself to peak performing capacity. “We kept it off the internet as far as possible,” says Hallett, “and just advertised it in the local paper.”
The good burghers of Fredericton gave Cohen a standing ovation before he had sung a note and he rewarded them with a three hour show. “He’s 73,” points out Hallett. “We were all stunned.”
It wasn’t until they reached Toronto’s Sony Centre For The Performing Arts on June 6 that Hallett invited the world’s media along. “It’s a 3,500-seater and we sold out three nights in a day and a half.”
The reviews were almost uniformly glowing and Cohen was back with a bigger bang than anyone other than Hallett had anticipated.
Tour manager Mike Scoble has spent 25 years looking after everything from the opening of the Welsh Assembly to the last Mika tour, but even he sounds taken aback by Cohen’s achievement. “We have to try to keep up with him,” says Scoble. “If he’s onstage for three hours, the rest of us can’t pretend we’re tired. The age range of the audience is amazing. It really is from 18 to 80.”
This was all heartening, but how might the venerable troubadour fare in front of a non-Canadian audience? Hallett chose Dublin as the testing ground. “I knew Dublin was Leonard’s spiritual home, him being a poet,” he points out. “I’d been doing some work with John Reynolds at POD Concerts, and he came up with the idea of building an arena in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art.”
To make this ambitious plan economically viable, Hallett realised, they’d have to play three nights but Reynolds was doubtful if the potential audience was big enough. “When the first two went ,” chuckles Hallett, “they sold out in half an hour so we added the third. We did 36,000 tickets in Dublin. Just amazing. They actually rushed the stage … women running up the aisles screaming … They were singing, dancing, cheering, clapping and just sharing in it. When he sang, ‘Democracy is coming to the USA’ the whole crowd jumped up and started shouting ‘Barak!’. And to see Leonard’s smile, it was just a joy.”
“It’s a very simple production,” points out Mike Scoble. “The lighting is very understated and there are no special effects except for Leonard running on and off the stage. What makes it special is the songs, Leonard’s personality and the sheer quality of the band.”
The choice of imaginatively appropriate venues for the European jaunt didn’t stop with Dublin’s Museum. In Manchester Cohen played four nights at the Opera House, and would go on to European and Scottish castles, medieval Italian towns and French olive groves.
“There will never be anything better than Leonard Cohen’s performance that night for me,” says Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis. “I had been trying to get him here for almost 40 years and I never could. Then, the only time I didn’t try, his agent rang up and offered him.”
Cohen’s Pyramid Stage tour-de-force on June 29 elicited a rapturous reception as the strains of Hallelujah rang out into the sunset. “People say he’s grumpy and depressed but he’s nothing like that,” adds Eavis. “He’s such a lovely man. After every song he took his hat off and bowed to the audience. When he got to Hallelujah, people were just lifting off the ground.”
Glastonbury, however, delivered a more sobering lesson to Hallett. “It was a great performance, and the audience loved it,” he says, “but Leonard is a perfectionist and he wasn’t completely relaxed because he hadn’t been able to do a soundcheck. We made sure to sort that out on the other festival dates.”
The first European mainland date followed on July 1 with 18,000 devotees at Oslo’s Aliset Stadium. “I had the Bon Jovi tour at the same time so I was running around between the two, one day with Leonard, one day with Bon Jovi,” reveals Hallett. “The lovely thing is that Jon Bon Jovi is a huge Cohen fan, he does Hallelujah in their encore, and whenever I went to one of his dates, the first thing he’d ask me was ‘How was Leonard?’
July 5th brought the first of the castle dates, promoted by Concerts DK at Copenhagen’s Rosenborg Castle. “The audience for Leonard Cohen is unique,” reckons Kim Worsoe of Concerts DK. “His show is as close as you can get to a religious experience. Our first two dates, in July, sold 21,000 tickets, and for the upcoming October dates, we’ve sold out 12,000 tickets at Hartwall Arena in Helsinki and 8,500 for the Forum in Copenhagen.”
The Paris-based Gerard Drouot Productions handled Cohen’s first French dates. “The festival in Lyon on the 9th sold out very quickly, in 3 or 4 days (4,000),” says Drouot. “At Nice he was playing as part of the Nice Jazz Festival, and we did the largest attendance of the entire festival that night with over 7,000 tickets sold. Being Canadian, he speaks good French, and he uses it to introduce most of his songs with a short translation of the main lyrics.”
Three members of U2, Bono, The Edge and Adam Clayton, turned out to see Cohen in Nice. “It’s a beautiful setting, in an olive grove,” says Hallett. “Bono had seen Leonard in Dublin and loved it, so he brought the others along to Nice.”
Looking ahead to the run of three nights at Paris Olympia (November 24 – 26), Drouot says, “Given how well we did on those first dates with almost no marketing, I think we’ve underplayed Paris. We could have done a week.”
After Lyon, Cohen moved on to Bruges, a concert promoted by Pascal Van De Velde, who founded his own company, Greenhouse Talent, after leaving Live Nation in 2004. “The Cactus Festival site is an 8,000 capacity park in the medieval city centre,” he reveals. “It sold out in under two weeks. We had rain until 7 pm and then the sun came out. The show was outstanding on every single level: the magic performance, the quality of the sound, the gentle artiste ... pure magic.”
Greenhouse Talent will be promoting further dates on the second leg of this tour, of which Van De Velde says, “In less than two weeks we sold out two nights at Forest National (6,500) in Brussells and one at Ahoy (8,000) in Amsterdam. We could easily speak of 'Leonard Cohen-fever'.”
That upcoming Amsterdam date has particularly delighted Hallett, because Holland’s biggest promoters, Mojo Concerts, felt that Cohen could not return to that city so soon after the Westerdam gig on 12 July. “It’s probably the first time in many years that a major act has played Holland without Mojo,” says Hallett, “ and we pretty much sold out the first day.”
Barry Wright, whose Edinburgh company Castle Concerts enjoys a unique relationship with Historic Scotland allowing them to stage rock events in Scottish castles, was delighted with Cohen’s showing on Edinburgh Castle Esplanade on July 16. “This year we had five shows over the summer period – including Girls Aloud, Boyzone and The Proclaimers,” says Wright. “They all sold out but Leonard Cohen was our fastest sell out ever.”
For Wright, Cohen’s resurgence underlines the long-term importance of nurturing top quality talent. “If you write your own songs, create your own music and you have talent, you can have a twenty year career,” he feels. “If you’re created by some tv talent show, you’ve probably got three and a half years.”
The biggest gamble of the tour was, undoubtedly, Hallett’s decision to put Cohen into London’s 16,000 capacity O2 on 17 July. “Everybody had questioned my sanity on that one, but we sold out in 24 hours and the show was a revelation. Leonard’s charm turned it into a club. It was incredible. You could hear a pin drop, even when he recited a poem.”
Inspired by this triumph, AEG Live put another O2 show for November. “It sold out in 24 hours, so we added a third and that will also sell out.”
At Benecassim on the 20th, says Hallett, “We’d learned our lessons from Glastonbury. We arrived well in advance so Leonard could have a soundcheck and I think Vince Power will confirm it’s one of the best performances he’s ever seen.”
The tour moved into Italy on the 27th for Lucca’s Summer Festival, a gig promoted by D'Alessandro E Galli, which Hallett rates as his personal favourite. “7,000 people in a beautiful medieval town in the heart of Tuscany,” he recalls. “The promoter, Domenico D’Alessandro, sold tickets for that show in Mozambique, London, Zimbabwe, Washington, all over the world. It was a very special gig because of that.”
D’Alessandro’s partner, Adolfo Galli, observes, “ Leonard Cohen is one of the few music legends left and we now look forward to the Milan show in October at the Teatro degli Arcimboldi. So far 50% of the tickets have been sold which indicates another definite sell out. This is a great achievement considering the recession Italy is facing in ticket sales.”
The first leg of the tour ended with another triumph, when Cohen won over the youthful, dance-oriented crowd at The Big Chill in Ledbury, UK. Founder Katrina Larkin, however, professes no surprise. “It’s because he is a genuine person who Big Chillers have admired and loved for years – it was almost beyond our dreams that he was able to perform at the festival. He added a magical moment that I don’t think any of us at The Big Chill will ever forget.”
The second leg of the tour kicks off at the 9,000 capacity Arcul De Trumpf in Bucharest on September 21, Cohen’s 74th birthday. “Over 90% of the tickets are already sold,” confirms Sorina Burlacu, owner of Romanian promoter Events, which has previously produced the Rolling Stones and mounted the country’s first international rock festival.
“It’s going to be a bigger touring party, 48 crew instead of just 34, and five artics rather than two,” explains Mike Scoble. “On the first half we were mostly using the existing sound and lights at the various festival sites, but this time we’ll be carrying our own.”
Hallett feels that the O2 proved not only that audiences enjoy seeing Cohen in arenas, but he enjoys those shows as well. “We’re doing some small arenas in Poland, where he’s treated like a god, then he’ll be one of the first acts to play the O2 in Berlin, that’s sold out, couple of nights at the Forest National sold out in minutes. Milan, I don’t like the Arena there, it’s a bit nasty, so we’re doing a beautiful old theatre on a high ticket price.”
Milena Paleckova at 10:15 Entertainment is keenly anticipating Cohen’s arrival at the 7,200 capacity HC Sparta ice sports hall in Prague (Sept 27). “We’ve been in business for sixteen years now, and we’ve promoted everybody from R.E.M. to Bob Dylan,” she says, “but when we announced the Leonard Cohen date and gave fans opportunity to register at our website, we had 4,500 people registered within a few days. That‘s never happened before.“
Johannes Wessels, founder of MPG Music Pool, Hamburg (winners of the 2007 Leo Award for best tour with Justin Timberlake) first met Leonard Cohen in 1986. “I was just learning the business back then, working on his tour at Sunrise Concerts and found him a perfect gentleman,” he says. “The Arena in Oberhausen (Nov 2) will be close to capacity, about 8,000 tickets, but Berlin (Oct 4) is a Cohen city - think of that line in First We Take Manhattan where he sings 'then we take Berlin' - so we'll do all 12,000 tickets in the new 02."
Stops at Munich’s Olympiahalle (Oct 6) and Frankfurt’s Festehalle (Oct 29) will reunite Cohen with an old friend, Marcel Avram of United Promoters AG. “I first put Leonard on in 1972 at Cirkus Krone in Munich, so it’s great to have him back again,” he says. “Selling out in Germany today is not easy, but we are already between 50 and 60% and I’m confident both shows will sell out.”
Remarkable as Leonard Cohen’s comeback has been, Rob Hallett is convinced the end is nowhere near. “After this leg ends at the MEN Arena in Manchester on November 30, we’ll start up again in Hawaii in mid-January, go down through New Zealand, into Australia, back out via Japan, then South Africa, have another break, then do the USofA. After that, who knows? He could tour in Europe until he no longer wants to.”
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Rob Hallett of AEG Live discusses his role in the 2008 Leonard Cohen tour with Johnny Black.
Can you begin by outlining what your involvement is on the Leonard Cohen tour?
I’m producing the world tour, America, Canada, Europe, Australia, the whole thing.
It was you who got Leonard Cohen to come out of retirement. How did that happen?
I’ve been a Leonard Cohen fan since I was about 12. Everybody else was listening to Black Sabbath and I was listening to Leonard Cohen. It was saying more to me. There are lines in his songs and poems that I have lived my life by.
I didn’t get the opportunity to meet him about three years ago, 2005, when I went to his lawyer, Robert Kory’s office, and basically I started the conversation by admitting that I was a lifelong fan, own all the albums and the books, that I can quote lyrics from all his songs. I basically wanted to come out the closet from the start.
He said, “Thank you very much. OK. I’m listening.”
So I put my pitch to him, which was that I believed he was a sleeping giant, one of the few artists out there that people would want to see but couldn’t, and Leonard said, “Well, you know, couple of thousand people a night, and I’ve got to put a band together, I haven’t got this, I haven’t got that…”
So I said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll put up all the money for that, pick up the rehearsal tab, pay the musicians. You won’t have to put your hand in your pocket. When you think you’ve got a band, and you’re comfortable and you think you’re ready to go out again, I’ll put it together. Then we’ll do a deal on the back end, recoup our costs and you’ll get the rest.”
From that point it took another six months for him to start putting the band together, another six to find the musicians, so we didn’t start rehearsals until February 2008.
But I had this core belief, being such a fan myself, that I wasn’t the only one. I’ve been a promoter for over thirty years and in that time I’ve guessed quite well at what people and how many will come to see an act.
My next job was to persuade the rest of the world, including my people at AEG, that I hadn’t gone completely doo-lally, and that Leonard Cohen was as big as I believed he was. So I went out and started beating the bushes, and found some believers and others who weren’t, and I had to beat them around the head a bit…
You mean people outside of AEG?
Yes. We’re not in every market yet, although we have strategic alliances in every market.
So I started putting it together and the first thing Leonard insisted on was eighteen warm ups in Canada, starting in a town called Fredericton.
The build up to this tour reads like it was planned with military precision. There was huge publicity from the lawsuit, Jason Castro did Hallelujah on American Idol, Jeff Buckley goes No1 on iTunes, followed by the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction…
I didn’t plan any of that. It was all serendipity, but all those things made Leonard more aware of his own worth. I think what was stopping him from coming out was that he really didn’t think anyone was interested. He’s still shocked to this day, when he goes out there and sees all these people who want see him and love him. He really didn’t have a clue.
How badly had he been hurt by the situation with his previous manager…
My understanding is that he was hurt pretty bad. He’s never been a greedy man, he’s not someone who goes out on private jets, but rumour had it that he got to the point where his cash card wouldn’t work. That’s a sad thing to me, that my childhood hero was reduced to that state. So my promise to him was that I would try to make back and try to double everything she had stolen from him.
And have you?
Getting close.
So was that first warm up, in Fredericton, as good as you’d imagined it would be?
Yeah, it was kind of magic, because no-one knew what to expect. There was snow on the ground, it was an old student theatre, like you see if there’s a high school ball on Happy Days, you know? I’ve still got the poster and it says something like May 10 Fredericton Town Band, May 11 Leonard Cohen, May 12 Elvis Presley Tribute, May 14 Women’s Institute.
And then there he was on stage and it was magical.
I presume you’d seen him before?
Loads of times as a punter, but this was special, as it was me who’d got him there, and it was his own country, and he was my hero… and there he was, this seventy three year old man on stage and he played for three hours which shocked everybody. I felt like the audience, which was only 893 people, was all my brothers and sisters and they all stood up as one before he even opened his mouth and applauded.
As a personal, selfish thing it was great for me because it confirmed I wasn’t the only one who felt that way about him. It was fantastic. I stayed around in Canada for a couple of days longer, and the love people had for him was amazing.
So he was starting off in his comfort zone…
Yeah. We were playing 1100 – 1200 seaters, and he wanted to get eighteen of those under his belt before we hit any major cities, because he hadn’t worked for so long, and he wanted to get back to fighting fitness like a boxer, so we played Fredericton, Monkton, all these towns I’d never even heard of, we picked up rocks and found towns under them. They were selling out in five minutes.
Did people come from all over for Fredericton?
No. We were aiming at a low-key local show for local people. We kept it off the net as much as possible, we only advertised it in the local papers. We didn’t do any major advertising until we got to Toronto. It was semi-secret. Ad in the local paper, sell out in a day.
So we went through all that and it was fab. Then we hit our first major town, which was Toronto, where we sold out three nights at a 3,500 seater in a day and a half, and it started to heat up from there.
And that’s presumably where you invited the world’s media to see him?
A few media had sneaked in before, because word did get out, but Toronto was what we were aiming at.
Why did you pick the Arts Museum in Dublin to start the UK leg?
That was interesting. I knew Dublin was Leonard’s spiritual home, him being a poet, and Damien Rice, who is a superstar in Ireland, insisted on supporting. I was looking forward to Dublin and I’d been doing a bit of work with John Reynolds at POD Concerts, and it was him who came up with the idea of building an arena in the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art. When I thought about it, I realised we’d have to do three nights to make that cost effective, but John thought we’d only manage one or two. I convinced him to make it three and, when the first two went they sold out in half an hour. We did 36,000 tickets in Dublin. It was fucking amazing. The second night in Dublin was probably my favourite show on the whole tour. When everyone rushed the stage for a 73 year old man … women running up the aisles screaming … it was fucking amazing. And to see Leonard’s smile, it was just a joy. They were singing, dancing, cheering and clapping and just sharing in it. When he sang, ‘Democracy is coming to the USA’ the whole crowd jumped up and cheered and started shouting ‘Barak!’
Then we did this run in Manchester, four nights sold out, but it was like being in church. They were all so respectful, it was like, ‘There’s Leonard Cohen. Don’t move, don’t even fart.’ They were still fantastic concerts, because the band is amazing and Leonard is wonderful but, compared to Dublin, the audience in Manchester killed it. They were too serious for their own good. They weren’t there to be entertained. They were there to worship in the church of Leonard Cohen. That’s all well and good but Dublin to me was the real celebration of the joy of being at a Leonard Cohen concert.
Then we went to Montreal, which is his home town…
Wasn’t that a hectic turnaround for a 73 year old man? Manchester, Montreal and then Glastonbury in rapid succession?
We were limited by when the Montreal Jazz festival was on. They wanted to do a special tribute to him, because it’s his home town, and the timing seemed right. We took a week off to do it. The last show in Manchester was Friday the 20th, our first in Montreal was the 23rd, and then Glastonbury was the 29th.
Glastonbury, it depends who you talk to. Talk to Melvin Benn or Michael Eavis and they’ll tell you it was one of Glastonbury’s finest moments. We did have 100,000 people singing So Long, Marianne, which was incredible, but it wasn’t Leonard’s favourite show by a long way, mainly because he wasn’t able to have a soundcheck. Leonard is a perfectionist and, especially so early in the tour, it was too soon to throw him into that situation, and I blame myself for that, I felt bad about that. He wasn’t able to relax into the show because he was concerned about the sound all the time. We learned from that big time, and it has never happened again.
Then we went off to Scandinavia, played an Athletics Stadium in Oslo, 18,000 people, and he was the first person to play there and again, he was like God. Copehagen was stunning. It sold out in five minutes.
I had the Bon Jovi tour at the same time so I was running around between the two, one day with Leonard, one day with Bon Jovi. The lovely thing is that Jon Bon Jovi is a huge Cohen fan, he does Hallelujah in the encore of their set, and whenever I went to one of his dates, the first thing he’d ask me was ‘How was Leonard?’
Then we did Montreux and Claud Nobs always does a wonderful job there. It’s always a special night there.
The Cactus Festival in Belgium is where Pascal .. eh … I concocted this idea. We didn’t want to do the Cactus Festival in Bruges, so we went to the organisers and asked if they could set up a day early and give us the site – we paid towards their infrastructure - so Leonard could do a stand-alone show, and that was great.
So that was a Pascal Van De Velde promotion using the site the day before. We had Martha Wainwright as support that day.
Amsterdam was great, so was Edinburgh at the Castle, but by the time we get to the O2 in London, everybody had questioned my sanity on that one, putting Leonard Cohen into a 16,000 capacity venue. We sold out in 24 hours and the show was a revelation. Leonard’s great line there was, “Welcome to the other side of intimacy.’ He turned it into a club. It was incredible. You could hear a pin drop, even when he recited a poem. In fact, it became Leonard’s favourite show of the tour, up to that point.
He’d got his soundcheck and the sound was immaculate, the band was sublime, and Leonard is so charming and humble. It was refreshing, a huge change from some guy in a cod-piece shouting out ‘Do you love me, London?’ You’re seeing a real genuine man up there who feels privileged to be there. It’s not some talentless tv talent show winner who wants people to adore him because he can do karaoke better than the bloke down your local pub. Anyone who was at the O2, that show will live with them for a long, long time.
And we put another one for November and it sold in 24 hours so we added a third and that will also sell out.
Seeing how the 02 worked brought us on to the next leg. It shaped a lot of my thinking on the next leg.
Then we went down and did Benecassim, by which point we’d learned our lessons from Glastonbury, and it went a little smoother. We got there well in advance so he could have a soundcheck and Vince Power will tell you it’s one of the best concert performances he’s ever seen.
U2 all turned up for the Nice Jazz festival, in an olive grove, a beautiful setting. Bono had seen it in Dublin, and he loved it, so he brought The Edge and Adam along to Nice. I don’t think Larry was there.
From there we went down to Lucca, a beautiful historical city in Tuscany, one of my favourite parts of Italy. A marvellous concert, 7,000 people in a medieval town in the middle of nowhere. The promoter, Domenico Alessandro, sold tickets for that show in Mozambique, London, Zimbabwe, Washington, all over the world. It was a very special gig because of that.
Then we went to Athens, played up in the mountains, which was special again because Leonard lived in Greece for several years in the 70s. Then we came back and finished the tour at the Big Chill, again having learned our lessons from Glastonbury. It went fantastic. The people that go to the Big Chill are a kind of dance crowd, young people, Dave Holmes was on after Leonard, and to see them enraptured and singing Hallelujah at the tops of their voices.
It’s interesting that the contemporary audience seems to like him so much…
Well, you expect the old farts like me to come out, but every generation produces another Leonard Cohen fan who keeps him in the public eye. Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright, John Cale, kd lang, Madeleine Peyroux, then the movie I’m Your Man with Bono in it singing Hallelujah with Leonard. And it was in Shrek as well.
Financially it could be the tour of the year and it’s very satisfying that nobody else had a fucking clue, without trying to blow my own trumpet, it’s Leonard that deserves all the kudos. He came out and proved that people wanted to see him. But I don’t think many other people had it on their radar.
I’ve never stopped listening to him since I was twelve. It’s not like me rediscovering old stuff. He’s been in my daily life for the past forty years.
How does the new leg differ from the first set of dates?
We kick off with an open air show in Bucharest will be on his 74th birthday, but after that it’s all indoors.
It’s a bigger touring party because we’re carrying production, carrying sound and lights, and playing predominantly arenas. The O2 showed that not only do people enjoy seeing him in Arenas, but he enjoys it as well.
We’re doing some small arenas in Poland, where he’s treated like a god, then he’ll be one of the first acts to play the O2 in Berlin, that’s sold out, couple of nights at the Forest National sold out in minutes. Milan, I don’t like the Arena there, it’s a bit nasty, so we’re doing a beautiful old theatre on a high ticket price.
The Ahoy, now there’s an interesting one. My partner there is Pascal Van De Velde, but Mojo Concerts have had a virtual monopoly on major acts in Holland. They promoted the summer show in Amsterdam and they told me November was too soon for Leonard to come back, so they were offering half as much as we made in the summer to do the Ahoy. ‘You must be fucking joking,’ I said.
Now Pascal, of course, is a Belgian promoter but he agreed with me that Mojo had got their head up their arse, so we’ve gone ahead and done it ourselves, so it’s probably the first time in many years that a major act has played Holland without Mojo. We pretty much sold out the first day.
So where can it go from here?
Well, we’re avoiding September in America because of the election, but we’ll start up in Hawaii in mid-January, he lives in LA so that’s fine, go down through New Zealand, into Australia, back out via Japan, then South Africa, have another break, then do the USofA by which time, hopefully, democracy will have arrived.
Then, who knows? He could tour in Europe until he no longer wants to.
Presumably there’ll be an album, which should help…
A new Leonard Cohen album would be lovely, but I don’t think we need any help. There should be at least one more European tour before we hang up the hat again. You can’t keep going forever, because eventually it starts to go down and people start to get blasé about it.
I mean, people ask why we’re selling more tickets than Dylan. Well, if Dylan was away for fifteen years maybe he’d be outselling us, but he comes out every year, so you know you’ll probably see him again.
Before we finish we’ll do South America, North America, including Canada properly … but we have to be realistic, we’ll do the English-speaking markets, and there’s a lot of interest from Russia and Japan, but I don’t think the people of China are sitting around waiting for Leonard Cohen. His lyrics are very intense and your English has to be very good to understand them, although a lot of the Eastern European countries, like Poland, they have his books in translation. The same in Greece, and there’s plans to do that in Romania.
We can certainly come back to Europe. End of next summer I’ll be thinking about Zagreb, Belgrade, Istanbul – there’s a lot of places we haven’t touched.
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Mike Scoble, Tour Manager on the 2008 Leonard Cohen tour talks with Johnny Black.
Am I right in thinking you’re an independent tour manager?
I’ve never had a proper job since I left school. I’ve done production and tour management for the past 25 years. Everything from classical spectaculars to Mika to the opening of the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff for the BBC.
I hadn’t worked with Leonard before, but I’ve been on this tour from the start. I’d worked with the tour producer, Rob Hallett, before though.
We started out with little warm up gigs in the backwaters of Canada in small venues, everything from school halls to small theatres. Leonard wanted to be somewhere away from the world’s press. He’d been away for such a long time, I think he really didn’t know what to expect from an audience, or even if an audience would turn up at all.
So what are you doing out in Los Angeles?
We’re rehearsing the second leg of the Cohen tour out here. We’re putting all the technical stuff in right now at S.I.R., then the band comes in on Monday (7th September, 2008), for two weeks.
Is there much change to the show from before?
We’ll find out when Leonard turns up on Monday. There’s no moving bits or pyros or that sort of stuff, so any changes will be content. They have quite a catalogue of songs to choose from, because they rehearsed for two and a half months before we went out for the first time.
Has the crew size changed?
It will be a larger crew this time because we’re taking all our own sound and lights, whereas the last one had more festivals where we just used whatever was already on site. We just took our backline and our sound and light desks.
So it was a touring party of 29 last time, 34 including the drivers, but now it’s 48. We have five artics this time.
Does Leonard being over 70 make any difference to how you have to operate?
We have to try to keep up with him. If he’s onstage for three hours, the rest of us can’t pretend we’re tired. The age range of the audience is amazing. It really is from 18 to 80.
You start again in Bucharest. What kind of venue is that?
It’s a soccer stadium, not a huge one though.
What do you anticipate as being your biggest problems on this second leg?
We’re totally self-contained, taking all our own stuff including catering, so I don’t anticipate any serious problems. It’s basically quite a simple tour. It’s the little big show, as someone pointed out. It’s the little show that has become big by being in big venues.
There are no special effects except Leonard running on stage. He runs on and he runs off.
And there are no hurried back to back concerts. It’s all being done in a gentlemanly way. Leonard really cares about the crew. He’s always asking me how they are. He’s a gentleman with a great respect for his fellow man.
Are there venues that you’re looking forward to?
The Olympia in Paris, because it’s such a historic rock gig, all the French stars – from Edith Piaf to Johnny Hallyday, and bands like The Beatles and The Stones, they’ve all played the Olympia. I was there with Mika last year and it’s great.
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Suppliers to the 2008 Cohen tour speak to Johnny Black
Jon Cadbury, Senior Project Manager, PRG Europe
The lighting for the show was designed by Annie Militello, of the American production house Vortex Lighting. It’s very understated, but it went through a lot of changes during the early dates in Canada before it came to Europe. They ended up with three painted backdrops right upstage, and downstage of that there’s a full-width sharkstooth grey gauze, with some lighting behind it. A lot of the mood comes from lighting that gauze with a range of 700 and 3500 watt wash lights.
Martin Corr, Tour Principal, Sound Moves
When a tour needs to move from one continent to another or very quickly within a continent and conventional trucks won’t work, that’s where we come in, because we will supply an aircraft and fly the stuff.
We pick the carrier, arrange customs, and co-ordinate any security or other carrier requirements. Everything that goes on a plane now has to be positively screened because of anti-terrorist regulations, so carriers are very careful.
The worst headaches we face are last-minute changes of flight plans. When we flew them to Oslo after Glastonbury, for example, we unexpectedly had to re-route the plane around military exercises in the North Sea which put our arrival time back by 45 minutes. If the military want to do something out there, you have to give way to them.
David Steinberg, founder, Stardes Ltd
For the first half of this current tour, we basically supplied two 45 foot articulated DAF trucks to transport the sound and light desks, wardrobe and backline, but we did need a third truck when we had to pick stuff up from the airport to take to Glastonbury and back again. For the second half, it’ll be five artics.
Leonard has always been a nice artist to work with, because I always like to work with people who appreciate the quality of service we give them.
Saul Levy, Partner, SilverGray NiteFlite
The company was started about sixteen years ago and I joined as a partner about seven years ago. We’ve gone from seven buses when I started up to 26 now.
We did the first half of this tour with one star bus and two crew buses and now we’re supplying three fully-equipped Bava 45 foot double deckers and drivers, for the entire European tour.