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Leonard Cohen: Hammersmith Odeon, London

Mick Brown, The Guardian, 27 February 1985

FOR WHAT are undoubtedly all the wrong reasons, one has come to approach Leonard Cohen with suspicion. The air of long-suffering torture one associates with his records — his in making them, mine on hearing them — seems to have become exaggerated in the memory by the passage of time. Scepticism has set in, and he has become fixed in the mind as a prophet of doom — an intellectual reading Donne on an Aegean beach, warmed by the longing glances of sylph-like literary undergrads, somewhat too aware of his erudition, his noble, ravaged profile, the fatal sadness of his gaze. Some racket.

Total word count of piece: 330

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