LEONARD COHEN’S LEGENDARY 1970 ISLE OF WIGHT SHOW TO BE RELEASED ON CD AND DVD

2009: LEONARD COHEN’S STELLAR COMEBACK YEAR CAPPED BY DVD DEBUT OF 1970 CONCERT PERFORMANCE

LEONARD COHEN LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970

TWO-DISC DVD+CD PACKAGE COUPLES
FESTIVAL DOCUMENTARY FILM BY MURRAY LERNER
WITH AUDIO RECORDING BY TEO MACERO

Live versions of classic songs from first two Leonard Cohen LPs: “So Long, Marianne,” “The Stranger Song,” “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Good¬bye,” “Suzanne,” “Bird On The Wire,” “You Know Who I Am,” “The Partisan,”
and more, plus poetry and stories to calm the 600,000 at Isle Of Wight

DVD documentary adds 2009 interviews with fellow festival performers Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Bob Johnston, and Kris Kristofferson

Available at both physical and digital retail outlets starting Oct. 20, 2009, through Columbia/Legacy – also available in double-LP and Blu-ray configurations – releases coincide with latest dates on Cohen’s first full-scale U.S. tour in 15 years, Oct. 17th through Nov.13th

“‘All those people had been sitting out there in the rain, after they’d set fire to Hendrix’s stage,’ Bob Johnston recalls, ‘and nobody had slept for days. And then Leonard came out and he started out singing ‘Like… a … bird’ – singing it so slowly that everybody in that audience was exactly with him. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard. And that’s what saved that show and saved the festival.’”
– Bob Johnston, as told to Sylvie Simmons, from the liner notes to LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970

Nearly 40 summers ago on August 31, 1970, 35-year-old Leonard Cohen was awakened at 2 a.m. from a nap in his trailer and brought onstage to perform with his band at the third annual Isle Of Wight music festival. The audience of 600,000 was in a fiery and frenzied mood, after turning the festival into a political arena, trampling the fences, setting fire to structures and equipment – and stoked by the most incendiary performance of Jimi Hendrix’s career, less than three weeks before his death.

As Cohen followed Hendrix’s set, onlookers (and fellow festival headliners) Joan Baez, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins and others stood sidestage in awe as the Canadian folksinger-songwriter-poet-novelist quietly tamed the crowd. Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Murray Lerner, whose footage of the 1970 festival did not begin to see release until 1995, was able to capture Cohen’s performance. Likewise, Columbia Records staff A&R producer Teo Macero, who was ostensibly there to record Miles Davis’ set, did a brilliant job of supervising Cohen’s live recording as well.

LEONARD COHEN LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 is a fascinating and timely portrait of the artist as a young man, just three years into his recording career (though he was already a published poet and novel¬ist for 15 years). As he mesmerizes the Isle Of Wight audience, Cohen intersperses a baker’s dozen songs with tales both real and apocryphal, as well as a handful of his poems. In pristine condition after nearly four decades in the archive, the video and audio programs will be available together as a deluxe two-disc DVD+CD package at all physical and digital retail outlets starting October 20th through Columbia/Legacy, a division of SONY MUSIC ENTER¬TAIN-MENT. A double-LP vinyl set will be released on the same date.

LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 will also be available on Blu-ray, exclusively through Amazon.com [in US]

The CD (and double-LP) of LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 represent the 77-minute concert set as performed by Cohen and his backup band: Bob Johnston (Cohen’s Nashville-based Columbia A&R staff producer), and Nashville musicians Charlie Daniels (electric bass, fiddle), Ron Cornelius (lead guitar), and Elkin ‘Bubba’ Fowler (bass, banjo). They were joined by backup singers Corlynn Hanney, Susan Musmanno, and Donna Washburn. During the course of their European tour – which Cohen only agreed to undertake if Johnston (producer of Cohen’s most recent LP, Songs From A Room) would manage him and organize the band – the group began to call themselves The Army, owing to the battles they were subjected to by audiences on the road.

The DVD (and Blu-ray) of LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 is a masterwork by Murray Lerner, known for his work on Festival!, his Oscar-nominated 1969 documentary of the Newport Folk Festivals. His work on that film spurred the Isle Of Wight promoters to bring him aboard and document their festival – whose violence turned it into the last of the three original Isle Of Wight festivals of 1968, 1969, and 1970. (Bob Dylan put the festival on the map when he performed there in 1968, his first public performance since recovering from his fabled motorcycle crash of 1966.)

Lerner’s Isle of Wight footage went unfunded for decades until 1995, when the multi-artist Message To Love (with its brief snippet of Cohen singing “Suzanne”) was finally issued on video. Since then, Lerner’s documentary-style Isle of Wight videos on the 1970 performances by Miles Davis, The Who, and Jimi Hendrix have inspired a new generation of music fans. In 1980, Lerner’s From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern In China won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Adding further historic provenance to LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 is a newly commissioned 2,000-word liner notes essay written by veteran British rock journalist and BBC commentator Sylvie Simmons. Author of well-received biographies on Neil Young (Reflections In Broken Glass, 2003), Serge Gainsbourg and others, Simmons previously wrote liner notes for the 2003 Sony International compilation MOJO Presents An Introduction To Leonard Cohen.

“Before he sang,” Simmons writes, “Cohen talked to the hundreds of thousands of people he couldn’t see. He told them – sedately – a story that sounded like a parable and a bedtime story, that worked like hypnotism and at the same time tested the temper¬a-ture of the crowd. He described how his father would take him to the circus as a child. Leonard didn’t much like circuses, but he enjoyed the part where a man would stand up and ask everyone to light a match so they could locate each other in the darkness. ‘Can I ask each of you to light a match,’ Leonard asked the audience, ‘so I can see where you all are?’”

All but three of the songs on LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 originated on Cohen’s first two LPs, his debut Songs Of Leonard Cohen from 1967 (“So Long, Marianne,” “One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong,” “The Stranger Song,” “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Good¬bye,” “Suzanne”); and Songs From A Room from 1969 (“Bird On The Wire,” “You Know Who I Am,” “Tonight Will Be Fine,” “The Partisan,” “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy”). The three other songs – “Diamonds In The Mine,” “Sing Another Song Boys,” and “Famous Blue Raincoat” – were destined for Cohen’s third album, 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate (which actually reprised the Isle of Wight live version of “Sing Another Song Boys”).

The October 20th release of LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 coincides with the next leg of Cohen’s first full-scale U.S. tour in 15 years, opening October 17th at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida (Fort Lauderdale), ending November 13th at the HP Pavilion in San Jose, California. (Please see complete itinerary below.)

Cohen made history earlier this year when – in between critically acclaimed concerts in Canada, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand – he played New York’s Beacon Theatre in February, followed by California’s Coachella Festival in April. These were his first U.S. performances since 1994, the year that he commenced a five-year retreat at the Mt. Baldy Zen Center atop a mountain in the San Gabriel Forest.

Cohen returned to recording and touring in 1999, when he released the studio album Ten New Songs in 2001. The live album Field Commander Cohen came in 2001 (culled from British tour dates back in 1979); and the studio album Dear Heather in 2004. 2006 marked the release of Blue Alert, the debut album by Anjani Thomas, a protégé of Cohen since the ’80s, produced by Cohen, with all songs co-written by Cohen and Anjani. On March 10, 2008, Leonard Cohen was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame at the 23rd annual dinner ceremony. In March 2009, Cohen released Live In London as a DVD and as a separate double-CD package, a 5-star album recorded at the O2 Arena in 2008.

Along the way, Leonard Cohen became the first Canadian-born artist ‘inducted’ into Legacy Recordings’ prestigious Essential series – when The Essential Leonard Cohen was issued in 2002. The 31-song compilation was personally chosen by the artist, with selections that ranged from Songs Of Leonard Cohen through 2001’s Ten New Songs. In May 2007, Columbia/Legacy issued expanded editions of Songs Of Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room, and Songs Of Love and Hate, each with multiple tracks of previously unreleased bonus material.

All of the tracks on LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970 were written by Leonard Cohen except the highly-charged “The Partisan,” originally a French song of World War II heroism and resistance. The English translation was penned by Tin Pan Alley song¬smith Hy Zaret, of “Unchained Melody” and “One Meatball” renown. Joan Baez had been singing “The Partisan” for years, and at Isle of Wight Cohen dedicated the song to her “and the work she is doing.” (Baez finally got around to recording “The Partisan” on her 1972 album, Come From the Shadows, whose title came from a line in the song.)

Joan Baez – whose performance preceded Hendrix at Isle of Wight – is among the quartet of fellow festival performers who bear witness to Lerner in 2009, along with Judy Collins, Bob Johnston, and Kris Kristofferson. Their interviews add to the historic impact of LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970.

“It was a brilliant performance,” Simmons writes, “and Lerner’s cameras captured Cohen’s commanding presence, hypnotist’s charm, and an intimacy that would seem unfeasible in such a vast, inhospitable space.” As Johnston sums up, “It was magical, from the first moment to the last. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was just remarkable.”

DVD + CD:

LEONARD COHEN LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970
(Columbia/Legacy 88697 57067 2)

Disc One: DVD – Chapters: 1. Intro: Diamonds In The Mine • 2. Famous Blue Raincoat • 3. “It’s A Large Nation” • 4. Bird On The Wire • 5. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong • 6. The Stranger Song • 7. Tonight Will Be Fine • 8. “They’ve Surrounded The Island” • 9. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye • 10. Sing Another Song Boys • 11. Judy Collins Introduces Suzanne • 12. Suzanne • 13. Joan Baez On The Isle Of Wight • 14. The Partisan • 15. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy • 16. Credits: So Long, Marianne • Bonus Interviews: Bob Johnston • Judy Collins • Joan Baez • Kris Kristofferson.

Disc Two: CD – Selections: 1. Introduction • 2. Bird On The Wire • 3. Intro to So Long, Marianne • 4. So Long, Marianne • 5. Intro: “Let’s renew ourselves now…” • 6. You Know Who I Am • 7. Intro to Poems • 8. Lady Midnight • 9. They Locked Up A Man (poem)/A Person Who Eats Meat/Intro • 10. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong • 11. The Stranger Song • 12. Tonight Will Be Fine • 13. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Good¬bye • 14. Diamonds In The Mine • 15. Suzanne • 16. Sing Another Song, Boys • 17. The Partisan • 18. Famous Blue Raincoat • 19. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.

Blu-ray

LEONARD COHEN LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970
(Columbia/Legacy 88697 588299 1)

Chapters: 1. Intro: Diamonds In The Mine • 2. Famous Blue Raincoat • 3. “It’s A Large Nation” • 4. Bird On The Wire • 5. One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong • 6. The Stranger Song • 7. Tonight Will Be Fine • 8. “They’ve Surrounded The Island” • 9. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye • 10. Sing Another Song Boys • 11. Judy Collins Introduces Suzanne • 12. Suzanne • 13. Joan Baez On The Isle Of Wight • 14. The Partisan • 15. Seems So Long Ago, Nancy • 16. Credits: So Long, Marianne • Bonus Interviews: Bob Johnston • Judy Collins • Joan Baez • Kris Kristofferson.

Vinyl double-LP:

LEONARD COHEN LIVE AT THE ISLE OF WIGHT 1970
(Columbia/Legacy 88697 57067 2)

LP One: Selections – Side one: 1. Introduction • 2. Bird On The Wire • 3. Intro to So Long, Marianne • 4. So Long, Marianne • 5. Intro: “Let’s renew ourselves now…” • 6. You Know Who I Am • Side two: 1 Intro to Poems • 2 Lady Midnight • 3 They Locked Up A Man (poem)/A Person Who Eats Meat/Intro • 4 One Of Us Cannot Be Wrong • 5 The Stranger Song.

LP Two: Selections – Side one: 1. Tonight Will Be Fine • 2. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye • 3. Diamonds In The Mine • 4. Suzanne • Side two: 1 Sing Another Song, Boys • 2 The Partisan • 3 Famous Blue Raincoat • 4 Seems So Long Ago, Nancy.

legacy

LEONARD COHEN LIVE IN LONDON DVD SET DUE FROM SONY

 

For over four decades, Leonard Cohen has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a figure whose body of work achieves greater depths of mystery and meaning as time goes on. His songs have set a virtually unmatched standard in their seriousness and range. Sex, spirituality, religion, power – he has relentlessly examined the largest issues in human lives, always with a full appreciation of how elusive answers can be to the vexing questions he raises. But those questions, and the journey he has traveled in seeking to address them, are the ever-shifting substance of his work, as well as the reasons why his songs never lose their overwhelming emotional force. Documentaries, awards, tribute albums and the ongoing march of artists eager to record his songs all acknowledge the peerless contribution Cohen has made to what one of his titles aptly calls “The Tower of Song.”

In 2008 Leonard Cohen embarked on his first tour in 15 years. Quickly recognized as musical folklore in the making, 29 of the original dates sold out almost immediately, leaving fans and critics alike hailing the show as a once in a lifetime experience. By popular demand, the Canadian/UK tour was extended and by the end of that year it had reached 84 markets worldwide, selling more than 700,000 tickets. The Live In London release fully captures and recreates the extraordinary show from that tour that earned Cohen more than 80 five-star reviews for his performances.

Track Listing:
1. Dance Me To The End Of Love
2. The Future 
3. Ain’t No Cure For Love 
4. Bird On The Wire 
5. Everybody Knows 
6. In My Secret Life 
7. Who By Fire 
8. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye 
9. Anthem 
10. Introduction 
11. Tower Of Song
12. Suzanne
13. The Gypsy’s Wife 
14. Boogie Street 
15. Hallelujah 
16. Democracy 
17. I’m Your Man 
18. Recitation w/ N.L.
19. Take This Waltz 
20. So Long, Marianne 
21. First We Take Manhattan 
22. Sisters Of Mercy 
23. If It Be Your Will 
24. Closing Time 
25. I Tried To Leave You 
26. Wither Thou Goest

Buy your copy hereif you live in the USA.
Buy your copy hereif you live in Europe.
Buy your copy hereif you live in Canada.

LEONARD COHEN LIVE IN LONDON 2CD SET DUE FROM SONY

 

Sony Music Entertainment/Columbia Records is proud to announce the release of Leonard Cohen’s Live In London, a musical chronicle of the legendary singer-songwriter-musician-painter-poet’s historic 2008 concert — available as either a DVD or 2 CD set — on Monday 30 March in the UK and Tuesday, March 31, 2009. Cohen’s performance of “Suzanne,” culled from ‘Live In London’, is now streaming exclusively on the site. Click here for both!

Recorded live on July 17, 2008 at London’s 02 Arena, one of Europe’s largest indoor venues, during Cohen’s phenomenal 2008 World Tour, Live In London offers definitive performances of classic songs drawn from the artist’s 40-year repertory.

Leonard Cohen’s first newly recorded release since 2004′s gold-certified Dear Heather, the Live In London collection fully captures and recreates the extraordinary show that earned Cohen, who celebrated his 40th year as a Columbia Records artist in 2007, more than 80 five-star reviews for performances during his fall 2008 UK and European tour.

Leonard Cohen’s return to live performance in Canada and Europe was met with extraordinary and unanimous accolades throughout 2008:

“Cohen poured everything he had into a stunning performance.” – Rolling Stone, June 9, 2008 

“Cohen’s master class will become Irish concert lore…. Quite simply, it doesn’t get much better than this.” – The Independent (Ireland), June 16, 2008 

“The mood in the hall was adulatory…. This show is one for the ages.” – The National Post (Canada), June 7, 2008 

“An epic concert for an ecstatic audience.” – Macleans (Canada), June 2008 

“Cohen didn’t just present the songs that made him famous – he brought them to life, animating his well-tuned verses with wit and passion and presence.” – Toronto Globe and Mail, June 9, 2008 

“Charming, funny, poignant, smart, sharp and sexy…. Leonard Cohen was our man” – Toronto Sun, June 7, 2008 
“When legend Cohen takes to the stage, it’s no less than a cultural event of Biblical dimensions” – The Independent (Ireland), June 15, 2008 

“Leonard Cohen’s first show in Britain in 15 years is immaculate, beautiful, exquisite.” – Daily Telegraph, London, June 18, 2008 

“Leonard Cohen is the coolest dude on the planet, bar none.” – Sunday Tribune (Ireland), June 22, 2008 

“Here is a performer who reigns supreme in his ability to illuminate the spiritual, the political and the personal with passion, insight and wit.” – Birmingham Mail (England), August 4, 2008 

The first Leonard Cohen concert collection to be released since 2001′s Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979, Live In London includes the songs:

Disc 1 -

1. Dance Me To The End Of Love 
2. The Future
3. Ain’t No Cure For Love 
4. Bird On The Wire 
5. Everybody Knows 
6. In My Secret Life
7. Who By Fire
8. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye
9. Anthem
10. Introduction
11. Tower Of Song
12. Suzanne
13. The Gypsy’s Wife

Disc 2 - 

1. Boogie Street
2. Hallelujah
3. Democracy
4. I’m Your Man
5. Recitation w/ N.L.
6. Take This Waltz
7. So Long, Marianne
8. First We Take Manhattan
9. Sisters Of Mercy
10. If It Be Your Will
11. Closing Time
12. I Tried To Leave You
13. Wither Thou Goest

Buy your copy here if you live in Europe.
Buy your copy here if you live in the USA.