I saw Leonard Cohen twice in the 70’s, once on my own in Liverpool and four years later with my then girlfriend in Birmingham. Both times, hearing about the tour, I posted off a cheque after the tickets went on sale. A few days later, great stalls tickets arrived. That was how it worked last century. Unless an act was absolutely huge, like Led Zeppelin, you could always get tickets. The only time I missed out was when i sent off for a Joni Mitchell ticket at a theatre in London, for a gig that was, anyway, subsequently cancelled. Never did see Joni. I’m going to see Melanie for the first time, next month. She was huge in the 70’s, probably bigger than Leonard Cohen…

When I wrote about iPod farming four weeks ago, I meant to tidy up a letter a day on my iTunes, a schedule which would have got me through my entire library by the time term starts again next week. But I didn’t reckon with a three day trip to Derbyshire or the length of certain letters. So, a confession, so far I’ve only go to M. Or, to be precise, ‘Ma’. Yesterday I cleared a few of Madonna’s lesser tracks. At the moment I’m in the middle of deleting one of several Manu Chao albums that I downloaded as research before going to see him last year (he was disappointing and exhausting. Mike and I left independently but at the same time, about 70…

After reading the UK press coverage of David Mamet’s Village Voice article about why he is no longer a liberal, one might assume that he has become a rabid right winger. I just got round to reading the article that inspired the fuss and it turns out that, in writing his enjoyable farce, ‘November’, which I saw on Broadway last month (probably the first and last time I’ll be able to write that), he learnt to appreciate the importance of the marketplace and came to some mild, entirely logical conclusions about the hypocrisy of all politicians and why having a balance of power within government is a good thing. To wit: ‘The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the…

I thought seeing Lou Reed play ‘Berlin’ was excitement enough for June. Now comes news that Leonard Cohen is to tour for the first time in nearly thirty years. Regular readers will remember that I visited his home on Hydra last September. I saw him play Birmingham on the last tour, in ’79, and briefly met him in Liverpool in ’75, after his show at the Empire (I’ll save that story for another time). If his performance with U2 in the recent film is anything to go by, Leonard hasn’t got much voice left, but if he just recites his lyrics (many of which started as poems) as he does in the video below, I’ll be happy. That is, if I can get a ticket…

I somehow managed not to notice that my last entry was the 100th one on this blog, so here we are, well and truly into treble figures, with entry 101. I’m kind of excited about going to see Duffy at the Bodega Social tonight (I’ve decided that her voice is better than Lulu’s, although the latter maybe had a better knack of song choice in her Atco soul days). I’m delighted that I’ve got front row seats for Lou Reed’s Berlin tour when it hits Nottingham in June. But what’s really thrilling me at the moment is the album by Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago which is a haunting, beautiful breakup album, mostly recorded, evidently, while he spent four months in a remote cabin…