This one’s a big one – in more ways than one

An adventure to London to see a living legend. What do you do when confronted by the possibility of seeing someone perform who has impressed you and the critics and the masses for around 30 years, you’ve bought a stackful of their albums but somehow always missed live? In this case you do whatever it takes to obtain a ticket and then don’t believe that it is actually going to happen until you get inside the theatre and all the signs are that, yes, it is going to happen. At last. (This actually reads like a sub-Mills & Boon teen romance but there you go, it’s all true.) So it was for the trip to Hammersmith to see the mighty Neil Young. And it didn’t disappoint. In fact to make matters better, for those of us who can’t decide whether we like simple acoustic, folksy Neil or blasted out of the aural electric soundscape Neil, he was doing two sets – one of each.
So we started with acoustic Neil (actually not until after we’d had acoustic Pegi – his wife – using most of his band) with our man surrounded by around eight acoustic guitars, a psychedelically-splashed grand piano and a honky tonk upright. Not to mention all sorts of other bizarre stage equipment. Some serious film set size flood lighting, a native American statue (actually looking like an old cowboy film style red Indian in all honesty) stage right, an easel stage left, the stage open to the back so all the guts of the theatrical experience on display.
Anyway, back to the show. Now there are some for whom acoustic Neil is their dreamboat, the keening wail and the gentle strum of an acoustic guitar puts them into heaven. I have a sympathy with this view and have been known to croon along with Only Love Can Break Your Heart; Oh Lonesome Me (oh yes, I know all about heartbroken teenage angst). But I do not sympathise with that competitive school that has to be the first to recognise and applaud the first few notes of whatever he has started to play. And you notice this more in an acoustic setting. That said, the audience were impressively quiet once they’d got this testosterone bout out of the way. But the old man was great, responding to calls from the audience as and when it suited him and changing his mind about what he wanted to play but sometimes going ahead anyway despite his own concerns – generally not shared by the audience, particularly on his foray into a simplistic banjo number.
And then after the interval we had electric Neil with his grand guitar “Old Black” and a change of outfit from his off-white suit to a black paint-spattered suit. (The significance passed me by but if you can spot it then let’s hear it.)
Having chatted at the rear of the stage with the not-entirely-obvious-what-he-was-for artist with the easels and large canvases, Crazy Horse appeared, he moved to the front of the stage, the artist popped up a painting on the easel stage left which served to tell us what he was playing. (So it did make sense after all.) And he proceeded to play it at blistering volume with all sorts of electronic mayhem. Now, if anyone has stuck with the last year’s ramblings they will know that this strikes me as a damn fine thing. What I want from a live performer is something that I cannot get from sitting on the sofa listening to the albums (no matter how loud I turn them up). And this we got in major style. Starting with The Loner from his first solo album and proceeding to ricochet around his back-catalogue up to the latest Chrome Dreams 11 and then back round again we got a real blitz of just unbelievable force wringing and wrenching and throttling his guitar to play how he wanted it to sound. If you want a comparison then, better than any of his own live albums, the only one I can think of is Jimi Hendrix wrestling with Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. Really. Wonderful, wonderful stuff. Not easy listening by any stretch and all the better for it. And then amongst the encores we had a beautiful version of Tonight’s the Night before finally ending with something called The Sultan (complete with live on-stage sultan!) which is, apparently, the very first item in his discography, you can’t plunder a back-catalogue much farther than that. So, living legend lives up to expectations. Excellent.