From The Times

March 5, 2008

Neil Young at Edinburgh Playhouse

 

How do you best acknowledge a standing ovation before you have even played a note? That's a conundrum that Neil Young, now 62, has yet to figure out to his own satisfaction. For the meantime, it seems enough to avoid eye contact with the source of the noise. And when the fan love gets too blinding, you can always drily pretend to shield yourself from its glare.

They called out requests from the off, but it didn't occur to anybody that he might pick up one of the eight or so guitars that encircled him and dust down Ambulance Blues from On The Beach (1974). “Waitresses are crying in the rain,” he sang. “Will their boyfriends pass this way again?” - one of the saddest lines in one of his saddest songs. An entire performance in itself, and yet something in the focused grimace of Young's delivery led you to suspect that he was only just warming up.

A dozen or so other acoustic songs - mostly culled from Young's early albums - could almost have been taken as an apology for the singer's most recent British shows, during which he performed his 2003 concept album Greendale in its entirety.

If Young once sounded like an old soul imprisoned in a young man's body, versions of Harvest and Old Man resounded from a more appropriate vessel. A small child started crying during After the Goldrush, which somehow seemed to fit the modified refrain, “Look at mother nature on the run in the 21st century.”

For the final hour Young mixed safe bets with the occasional left-field surprise. Back in 1979, Hey Hey My My was Young's riposte to punk. But what he has is far more thrillingly primitive than rock'n'roll itself. On a churning Mr Soul he deployed his guitar much like an old farmer might crank up a piece of ancient machinery. With two solos that might just as well have come with Post-it Notes saying, “Back in five minutes” - and that major-chord sunburst on the line “Yeah, she could drag me over the rainbow” - Down by the River was even better. Then he played Powderfinger the way it's meant to be played - on equipment that sounded as if it could barely contain its magnitude.

If his fans had been moved to stand up at the beginning, they were all but levitating now. “Just think of me as the one you never figured,” goes the song, but really, there was little to figure.

“It's a good thing I got going on and I'm thankful for it,” he said. At that moment he seemed as much a spectator as the rest of us, mildly uncomprehending of what had been achieved in his name. Who, on this form, could blame him?

Tour continues: Hammersmith Apollo, London W6 to Sun (not Fri); then Manchester Apollo Mar 11 and 12; Hammersmith Apollo, Mar 14 and 15