Old Man in a Hat

A quiet night in Lisbon. The gentle sounds of laughter and clinking glasses mingle with the lapping of the water along the riverfront. I’m on my way to meet an old man in a hat and a grey suit. To hear him sing. He’s been singing and writing poetry since I was in school. The man in question is Leonard Cohen, and the occasion is a concert in the Atlantic Pavilion - a birthday present from my three kids. I’m going on my own. I know that’s a bit sad, but in some ways it’s fitting too, to drown in the melancholy of that gravelly old voice. Well, it’s not really gravelly, much smoother than that. Tom Waits is gravel. Cohen is more like a smooth grey shale, sliding down the mountainside. But it is an old voice.

Cohen, along with Dylan and Van Morrison, were the principal voices in my head, growing up in the sixties in Northern Ireland. I’m always a bit wary, however, about the prospect of seeing them perform in their old age. Don’t want to be disappointed. But this was great. Really great. Superb, in fact. Probably because, not only was he on top form, but his band - each own was a superb musician in his own right - and the backing singers - well, that’s a slight to call them backing singers. The Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie, ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1gu4YdA6tE ) and Sharon Robinson  were amazing and sang wonderfully.

Lisbon packed out the arena, and as I looked around the hall at so many fiftysomethings just like myself, I realised how, while I was lying there in my bedroom in Coleraine as a 14 year old, drifting off to “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy”, in the midst of all the political reality that was unravelling in the sixties in Northern Ireland, these men and women were going through their own personal nightmares as children during the Salazar years of dictatorship and through the 1975 revolution. Poignant then, when he sang those lines at the end of “The Partisan”
 “Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing, 
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come; Then we'll come from the shadows.”
Portugal is different now. Northern Ireland is different. But in some ways, we’re all still waiting for our freedom...