Live at the Isle of Wight 1970

Leonard Cohen appeared at the third Isle of Wight festival in the early hours of August 31, 1970, roused from sleep in his trailer to face a restive crowd of some 600,000 after a night of unrest and fires had unsettled the grounds. Backed by the loose acoustic ensemble he had assembled for his first sustained touring, he opened with a quiet, almost conversational authority that drew the audience back from the brink of chaos - a performance that has since become one of the defining Cohen legends, set against Jimi Hendrix's incendiary set earlier that night. The set drew on his first two albums, pairing signature songs such as 'Suzanne', 'So Long, Marianne' and 'Bird on the Wire' with spoken introductions, poetry and the unreleased 'Famous Blue Raincoat', then still new. Coming only two years into his recording career, the show captured Cohen moving from literary outsider to a commanding, if soft-spoken, live performer, deepening the persona of the wry troubadour-poet that would define his work for decades. Long circulated in bootleg form and glimpsed in festival documentaries, the performance affirmed Cohen's standing as a singular voice in the early-1970s singer-songwriter landscape and has since been regarded as among the most storied sets in the history of the festival.