Leonard Cohen - Royal Albert Hall, London, Britain, 5-10-1970 (NEW TO PUBLIC CIRCULATION!)

WHOA! I don't think I've ever been more excited to post an album than this one. If you're a Leonard Cohen fan at all, this is a must have. I think it's his best concert recording, and for all intents and purposes it's been unavailable to the public until now.

In the past few days, I was doing some searching for Cohen material in order to post more BBC albums from him. I happened to come across some mentions that there had been some copyright extension releases of his music. If you don't know what that is, in the European Union there's a law that if a music recording isn't made public within fifty years of the year it had been recorded, then it goes into the public domain. So the record companies of many musical artists, such as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, and so on, have released music to the public just to maintain the rights. They typically do it just a few days before the end of the year where their rights will end, and they only make the music available for a few hours in the middle of the night for iTunes in some European country, hoping no one will notice. Then the music goes back into the vaults, so they can continue to own it without selling it. (Why?!) 

So what I read was this happened to some of Leonard Cohen's music. There were copyright releases for his music from 1967 (in 2017), 1970 (in 2020), and 1972 (in 2022). It's possible there were more that went completely undetected. I found a few obscure mentions of these releases, but I highly doubted it, because where's this music? All the copyright releases for the acts mentioned above, and more, have been heavily bootlegged. However, after doing some further digging, I got lucky and found the entire copyright extension release for 1970. For all intents and purposes, this stuff has never been in the public domain before now.

I plan on posting more of this, including some studio versions of previously unreleased songs, but I want to start with this concert, because it's amazing. Keep in mind that Cohen never really did any concerts prior to 1970, so this is about as far back as his live music goes. (He played a few songs here and there, but he had stage fright in those early years. He did do a significant BBC concert in 1968, which I've posted here, but that's about it.) So his 1970 tour (in Europe only) was a big deal for Cohen fans. This was the most important concert of the tour because it was held in London, at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall, which meant it was attended by media figures and other famous musicians. (It sold out, not surprisingly.) 

The great news is that the sound quality is freaking fantastic, all the way through! At times, it's easy to think these are studio versions, because there's a "you could hear a pin drop" type sound. And the performance is great too. (He played in acoustic mode, with backing vocalists and a lead guitarist, and not much else.) The only music that's ever been released from this exact concert is the last song, "Please Don't Pass Me By (A Disgrace)," which was a highlight of Cohen's "Live Songs" album, released in 1973. (If you're a big Cohen fan, it may be strange that you're unfamiliar with nearly all of this, but very familiar with the last song!) Why the entire concert hasn't been released yet is a true mystery to me.

Anyway, that's the good news. The bad news is that the copyright extension release only contained the music. What I mean is, as soon as the applause started at the end of each song, there was a quick fade out that sounded jarring to the listener. Furthermore, that release included no banter between songs whatsoever. That's because the record companies only had to briefly release the music in order to keep the copyright, not the banter or anything else, so they released the bare minimum. That's a big disappointment, because Cohen's comments are a big reason to hear his concerts.

However, I resolved to fix this problem. I went looking for a bootleg of this exact show, and I found one. Unfortunately, it's an obscure bootleg because the sound quality is terrible. For instance, during the banter, I couldn't make out the words and often could barely even figure out if Cohen was talking at all. So that tape was of no use to me whatsoever. Then I looked for other audience bootleg recordings from his 1970 tour. There were a few, but they all sounded pretty rough. The best of a bad lot was a concert in Frankfurt, Germany, which took place on May 6, 1970, just four days prior to this concert. I resolved to grab the applause and banter from that one and use it to fill in the missing bits of this concert.

To cut to the chase, it worked like a charm. In fact, I'm kind of shocked at just how well it worked. The key is that I used an audio editing program called "Enhanced Speech" by Adobe. It's only been around the last year or so (as I write this in November 2023). It really brings clarity to muddy recordings. Unfortunately, it only works for speech, not singing or music, so it has had limited use for me and my blog in general. But it was ideal for this situation, because the only thing I needed to fix was the banter. I had to do a lot of careful work, often going line by line and even sometimes word by word, but the end result is the banter now sounds almost like soundboard quality, fitting in well with the crystal clear music. There are only a few bits here and there where the Enhanced Speech program failed to work, usually because the source material was too muddy.

Also, fleshing out the applause worked out really nicely. It seems that clapping is the one thing that basically sounded the same on the two recordings. For all the songs on this album, the applause starts from one source, and fades into the second source. But it all sounds like the same generic cheering  to my ears. I was careful to make sure that the exact amount of cheering after each song is precisely how long that cheering actually took place in the Frankfurt concert. Most of the other bits between songs, like guitar tuning, sounded a lot rougher, and Enhanced Speech couldn't help with that, so I generally cut those bits out.

Now, you might complain that the music is from one concert and the banter is from another one, and it's true that is a bit weird. However, it turns out that since this was Cohen's first tour, he kept things simple, playing virtually the exact same songs every night, in the same order, and even usually making the same comments between songs. That really helped me out, because it meant I was able to find comments for virtually every song, since the set lists of the two concerts were only different by a song or two. (All the songs that don't have banter before them didn't have banter before them in the Frankfurt concert.) No doubt, it was a big help that the concerts were only four days apart. (For instance, Cohen only played "Please Don't Pass Me By" in concert four times in his entire career, and that included these two concerts.) There was only one bit of banter I cut out because it was specific for a German audience.

Two of the songs, "Diamonds in the Mine" and "Story of Isaac," have "[Edit]" in their titles because I had to do extra work on those. It seems Cohen got careless and pulled his mouth away from the microphone during parts of those songs, because the volume of the lead vocals dropped way down at times. But I was able to fix that using the audio editing program UVR5, going line by line in parts to boost the vocals back to normal levels. Oh, and the poem "Celebration" was only from the Frankfurt show. But it sounded so good after using the Enhanced Speech on it that I decided to leave it in.

The bottom line is, there was a lot of work that went into making this concert sound great, mostly by filling in the missing bits from the copyright extension release. But from your point of view as a listener, it should sound seamless, a pristine sounding concert from Cohen's first tour that effectively has never been publicly available until now. 

The only concert from this tour that's been made public is his set from the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, which was released in full as "Live at the Isle of Wight 1970" in 2009. That was a more historically important concert, since he played in front of half a million people. But in terms of both the music and the recording quality, I think this clearly is the better concert. If nothing else, it's half an hour longer, so there are more songs and more banter (plus four short poem recitations, and none at the Isle of Wight). But also, there are obvious sonic advantages to the fact that he was playing in front of only 10,000 people instead of half a million. And it was a friendly crowd, allowing him to be relaxed and at the top of his game, whereas the Isle of Wight was a rather hostile crowd, and it was kind of a struggle all the way through. (For instance, singer Kris Kristofferson later commented about Cohen's set at the Isle of Wight: "I never have known why [the crowd] didn't just hoot him off the stage like they did with a lot of people, especially me!")

Anyway, please enjoy this, and spread the word to other Cohen fans. Also, if anyone out there knows about the 1967 and 1972 copyright extension releases, please let me know, and share, so I can help get it out there to people who are dying to hear it! It's ridiculous that record companies hoard music like this in their vaults for more than fifty years. What are they waiting for?! Most of the people who care will be long dead by the time they properly release any of that stuff, if they ever do.

This album is an hour and 44 minutes long.

01 talk (Leonard Cohen)
02 Bird on a Wire (Leonard Cohen)
03 talk (Leonard Cohen)
04 So Long, Marianne (Leonard Cohen)
05 talk (Leonard Cohen)
06 You Know Who I Am (Leonard Cohen)
07 Dead Song [Poem] (Leonard Cohen)
08 Lady Midnight (Leonard Cohen)
09 talk (Leonard Cohen)
10 One of Us Cannot Be Wrong (Leonard Cohen)
11 The Stranger Song (Leonard Cohen)
12 For E.J.P. [Poem] (Leonard Cohen)
13 Avalanche (Leonard Cohen)
14 talk (Leonard Cohen)
15 Joan of Arc (Leonard Cohen)
16 talk (Leonard Cohen)
17 Tonight Will Be Fine (Leonard Cohen)
18 talk (Leonard Cohen)
19 The Partisan (Leonard Cohen)
20 talk (Leonard Cohen)
21 Sisters of Mercy (Leonard Cohen)
22 Celebration [Poem] (Leonard Cohen)
23 Diamonds in the Mine [Edit] (Leonard Cohen)
24 Story of Isaac [Edit] (Leonard Cohen)
25 talk (Leonard Cohen)
26 Famous Blue Raincoat (Leonard Cohen)
27 talk (Leonard Cohen)
28 Sing Another Song, Boys (Leonard Cohen)
29 Travel [Poem] (Leonard Cohen)
30 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye (Leonard Cohen)
31 Suzanne (Leonard Cohen)
32 Please Don't Pass Me By [A Disgrace] (Leonard Cohen)

https://www.imagenetz.de/btkzf

The cover photo is from this exact concert. However, the original was in black and white. I used the Palette program to help colorize it.