He coaxed Leonard Cohen out of retirement, staged Prince’s 21-night London run, is bringing Britney Spears to Britain and taking Damon Albarn’s Monkey opera to China.

Concert promoter Rob Hallett of AEG has been behind some of the landmark live music events of recent years. He now has a major reunion up his sleeve – just don’t ask about the chances of a Michael Jackson comeback.

Leonard Cohen is finishing his UK arena tour – how did you talk him out of retirement?


Rob Hallett (right) persuaded his hero
Leonard Cohen to tour again.

It took some time. Leonard was trying to make some of the money back that had been stolen. [Cohen's manager stole $9.5m (£6.2m) in the 1990s.] At first he said, ‘I don’t know if anyone wants to see me. You must be joking’.

We went back and forth over a couple of years. In the end, I offered to finance the rehearsals and said, ‘we’ll do some warm-up dates in Canada, and lets see what we’ve got’.

So we were about $3m (£2m) in and 16 shows in Canada and we knew that we had a monster on our hands. When I first put an O2 show on sale everyone said, ‘what? Leonard Cohen in the O2?’ And we sold out three. It’s been a fantastic success. Everyone who’s seen the show almost without fail is saying this is the best show they’ve ever seen in their lives.

You also staged the Prince residency at the O2 – how did that come about?

More of the story,
click image