LONDON: The Horse Hospital

Tuesday 18th June, 2013

7:30pm

Event information

AN EVENING OF LEONARD COHEN APPRECIATION, WITH HIS BIOGRAPHER SYLVIE SIMMONS

DOORS 7:30PM
TICKETS £5 ADVANCE (LINK COMING SOON) £6.50 ON THE DOOR
Sylvie will be at the Horse Hospital on Tuesday 18th June, reading extracts from I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, to be followed by a few songs with guest musicians, and an audience Q and A.
Followed by several rare Cohen films, including previously unseen home footage of Leonard’s childhood and his family, and various vintage documentaries.
Sylvie will also be signing and selling specially discounted copies of the brand new paperback edition of the book.

I’M YOUR MAN: The Life of Leonard Cohen, by acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons, is based on a wealth of research including exclusive interviews with Cohen himself. Simmons also spoke to over a hundred key figures in Cohen’s life—among them Cohen’s main muses, the women in his life, close childhood friends, producers and artists who have worked on his albums, and contemporary artists that have worked with Cohen or have been influenced by his work (including David Crosby, Philip Glass, Judy Collins, Rufus Wainwright, Jackson Browne and many more). Starting in Montreal, Cohen’s birthplace, and where he first found fame as a poet in the fifties, I’M YOUR MAN follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra. From there it traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat, when in the mid-nineties, on the cusp of marriage to a beautiful actress and enjoying the success of his best-selling album to date, he entered a monastery on a rocky mountaintop—returning to find his bank accounts bled dry and forced back onto the road, at age seventy-three, for a wildly successful three-year world tour. Whether navigating Cohen’s journeys through the backstreets of Mumbai or his countless hotel rooms along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen’s life—from the halls of academia to the arenas of rock ‘n roll, she presents a deeply insightful portrait of both the artist and the man whose vision, spirit, depth and talent continue to move people like no one else.

Sylvie Simmons is a renowned music journalist and award-winning writer. A Londoner, she moved to LA in the late seventies where she began writing about rock music for Sounds, Creem and Kerrang!, then Rolling Stone, the Guardian and MOJO. She is the author of fiction and non-fiction books, including the acclaimed Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful Of Gitanes, Neil Young: Reflections In Broken Glass and short-story collection Too Weird For Ziggy. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she plays ukulele and continues to write music journalism.