Neil Young: Glastonbury Festival - Pyramid Stage

Saturday 27th June 2009

This is a Crackerjack review of Neil Young. Do you agree? Rate and review this event.

Crackerjack rating: 9 / 10.

He was almost the one that got away. Neil Young’s been on the wishlist as a headliner for years, and this time he finally made it.

You could instantly tell he meant business too. He doesn’t have anything to prove to his fans, but Young clearly saw this as an opportunity to woo some of the non-believers.

Stamping a size 10 boot on his guitar pedals, Young was off and running in spectacularly feisty fashion with growling versions of Hey Hey, My My and Mansion On The Hill, almost physically assaulting his guitar as he fizzed off a stream of solos.

After the heavy rock riffage, he showed us the other side of his songwriting character with the reflective Are You Ready For The County complete with wheezing harmonica.

Ever the schizophrenic performer, he pinballed back and forth between the distorted proto-grunge and countryish songs in his back catalogue.

Revisiting one of his earliest peaks with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, just a handful of songs into the set and you could tell the old boy was having fun.

Spirit Road was dedicated to “all the alcoholics in the crowd” and Words (Between the Lines of Age) stretched out into the distance with Young sparring with his bandmates.

If that might have been one for the Young faithful, he got the undecideds on board again with a stunning – and short – Cinnamon Girl.

Fittingly, he then dusted off his own mini eco anthem Mother Earth which he performed on a antique organ. It was bold, sparse and totally mesmerising.

Good to see, too, that he played Needle and the Damage Done alone on his acoustic. Young has a somewhat complicated relationship with his most famous tunes – he’ll never do the “human jukebox” routine on the heritage circuit for those who just want to hear the hits.

The huge rockers were lapped up, but encouragingly the charming country folk of Comes a Time won an equally warm welcome with swathes of the crowd singing along lustily.

The ageless Heart of Gold similarly hit the spot as did a thrillingly epic Down By The River. It’s such a flexible, open-ended beast of a song you get the feeling Young never plays it the same way twice.

There’s just one odd choice in the set when the throwaway Get Behind The Wheel is played at a critical moment near the end.

We’ll forgive him though thanks to a hilarious version of Rockin’ In The Free World. The old ham finished the song four times before giving his rhythm section a nod and sparking them up one last time. It got a huge laugh, not least from the man himself who was obviously having a ball.

At encore time, he blasted through The Beatles’ Day In The Life, and after ripping his guitar strings off, he carries on frantically soloing – the flying strings nearly take his eye out in the process.

The diehards went away totally satisfied but the buzz from many of those unfamiliar with his work was that they’d found a brand new hero. You couldn’t really ask for anything more than that.

STEVE HARNELL

This is a Crackerjack review of Neil Young. Do you agree? Rate and review this event.