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Hallelujah, the real one
At first we hardly noticed the light drizzle but as the night grew longer and darker the weather set in, quite how hard we only realised as the spot lights lit up the sheeting rain between us and Leonard Cohen and his band. But it didn’t seem to matter we had our plastic raincoats and warm jackets.
The Mercedez Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey, just outside London, may seem an unusual concert venue and it was. Mercedez Benz World is described as the company’s UK flagship, with its own race track for test driving their latest model cars in one of their “driving experiences”, restaurants, a movie theatre and conference and outdoor concert facilities. The term facilities may be too strong a description, what should have been a forty minute drive to get there took two hours and forty minutes such was the traffic congestion, the queues to the food and drink concessions forty-five minutes from start to end and then, after Martin succeeded in getting to number four from the front, they ran out of wine, which perhaps was just as well given the queues to the toilets seemed equally long. While we managed to get out and home afterwards without delay, we have read reports on the web today of people saying it took one hour and forty-five minutes just to get of the car park.
While the venue may have lacked soul, the same could not be said of Leonard Cohen, the man with the gift of a golden voice. It is the first tour in fifteen years for the seventy-five year old, made necessary by being fleeced by a former manager or partner, probably both, but that dark cloud for him had the silver lining for us of seeing him for probably the first and last opportunity ever. And what a sublime performance, a selection of his greatest songs performed over more than two hours and a half with, as would be expected, an exceptionally good band. He was charming and self-effacing, donning a scarf to keep out the summer cold for the second half of the performance and then returning for three encores. The greats were all there: Dance me to the end of love, I’m your man, (the original) Hallelujah, Bird on a wire, Suzanne, Everybody knows, Tower of song, Famous blue raincoat, Take this waltz, First we take Manhattan, Closing time, and finishing in cute fashion given it was the third encore with I tried to leave you.
Highlights of the band included the bandurria (a “plectrum plucked chordophone”) and twelve stringed guitar of Javier Mas which added a Spanish feel to the musical arrangements, and Dino Soldo dubbed by Cohen as the master of breath on a variety of wind instrument. As an illustration of the immediacy of the digital world, background singers Charley and Hattie Webb, from just down the road in Kent, have already posted to Facebook a comment about singing their hearts out in the rain at the Weybridge concert.
Back in the land of the more ordinary, it was to Montpelier School on Friday, this time for the infant sports watching Samira Moodie display the more competitive elements of her genetic makeup. And it would be fair to report that she excelled, hitting a parent’s camera with her sponge javelin (she had told him to keep back from the infield), won her heats in the bean bag throwing and running, missed out on a placing in the soccer dribbling, fell over the line for a photo-finish win in the sack race and managed to balance the quoit on her head for the required distance. All completed in under an hour and a half.
We have updated our tour schedule and it may take some by surprise. It is to the Caribbean Island of Barbados for five weeks from 7 September and then a return to Thailand on 16 October. Why Barbados can be simply explained. Fleur has landed a teaching job and heads there at the beginning of August, so we are allowing her a month to get set up before the first of the hordes arrive.