His band calibrates its rawness, equally capable of a lurching blues and a delicate pizzicato waltz, and his voice is thick and slurred but can always summon tenderness.
After Offenbach's death, a friend said that Hérminie "gave him courage, shared his ordeals and comforted him always with tenderness and devotion".
Ehrmann Feldman et al [ 23] defined UEDs as 'having substantial neck and upper limb pain' and Fry [ 24] described the 'overuse (injury) syndrome' as 'those changes brought about in the muscle and joint ligaments from excessive use, causing pain, loss of function, and almost always demonstrable tenderness in the affected structure'.
He wouldn't go around telling us kids how much he loved us but I could always see the tenderness in his eyes.
It is hard not to relish his morose wit: "I have always had a tenderness and compassion for children (especially when through supreme mental effort I have tried to forget that they will be adults like anyone else)." Yet as Colm Tóibín points out in a preface to this reissue of Margaret Sayers Peden's 1988 translation, while it is possible to root for Castel, it's never for very long.
And here, to my mind, is what Cocker is lacking in 2009: the tenderness that always propped up his cleverness.
Despite the often provocative nature of her subject matter, Goldin has always insisted on the tenderness of her way of seeing, the hope as well as the despair.
There's a great rationality - it's almost as dismissive as J G Ballard's or John Gray's - and great rage, but is there any of the tenderness Hoban always achieves?
Of Freaks and Men is close to early David Lynch in its grotesqueness and Balabanov's images are faintly reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus, with a suggestion of Joel-Peter Witkin, though they have always the solvent of tenderness.
But the cast is so strong overall, and the two Housmans are so moving: Mr. Easton is all lucid pain and cautious, rueful dignity; Mr. Leonard is always caught between anxiety, tenderness and proud intelligence.
