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The Irish Times - Wednesday, July 28, 2010
PADDY CLANCY
First we take Lissadell . . . country house gets ready for Cohen concerts
WB YEATS fan Leonard Cohen has this weekend been guaranteed a view of the window of the room the poet used when he visited a young Countess Constance Markievicz and her sister Eva Gore-Booth.
Cohen’s backstage quarters will look beyond the audience, directly towards the room where Yeats eventually stayed when he visited Lissadell House in Sligo on regular occasions.
On his first visit to the house in 1894, a 29-year-old Yeats had to settle for a small room over the stables. There was a custom at the time of keeping bachelors well away from any temptation that might be found in the big house.
Eventually, Yeats was to have his own temporary quarters in the house proper. Years later he was to write of the sisters: “Two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle.”
Cohen, who will play before 20,000 fans in the grounds of Lissadell on Saturday and Sunday, is expected to pay a private visit to Yeats’s grave at the nearby Drumcliffe Church graveyard.
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head, as Yeats wrote, the northwest is expecting concerts of a lifetime, with Cohen’s shows being preceded on Friday by a Westlife show before 10,000 fans.
Production crews were yesterday completing final stages of a new amphitheatre in the Lissadell grounds. The organisers were confident about the comfort and security arrangement for 30,000 fans over the weekend – 10,000 a night.
Having picked the brains of local farmers this week, they are more than hopeful the rain will hold off.
Westlife will have two support acts. Kian Egan’s wife Jodi Albert and her band and Shane Filan’s brother-in-law Glenn Cal, a regular in Sligo pubs, will perform on Friday night.
Westlife, playing their first concert in seven years in Sligo, near the homes of three of the four group members, will host a special party with families and close friends behind the stage.
Cohen will perform for three hours without support acts.
