Unbeautiful Winner: Leonard Cohen
By Robert Christgau
8/17/09

Circumstances rarely afford artists the chance to leave a testament. 'Live In London' comes pretty close.

As someone who admired poet Leonard Cohen's second and last novel Beautiful Losers in 1966, before Cohen was a recording artist or I was a music critic, I followed Cohen's musical career with admiration from the beginning. But the admiration was always cut with skepticism -- a skepticism that the focus and reach and three-hour duration of his February 19 comeback concert at Manhattan's Beacon Theater blew away. My conversion experience was far from the only one that night, and proved replicable -- when Cohen stopped in Seattle two months later, a friend walked in with my level of show-me and left with my level of holy-moley. Having kicked off the U.S. phase of a world tour already nine months old, the Beacon concert was soon followed by Live in London, a double-CD and/or DVD vividly documenting pretty much the same songs and stage business I'd witnessed. It prepared the way for two sold-out May concerts at NYC's much larger Radio City Music Hall, which will be followed in turn by, holy moley, an October 23 appearance at Madison Square Garden.

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