Trying to cover the entirety of Neil Young’s tempestuous 40 year career in a documentary film lasting not much more than 60 minutes is a bit like trying to pour the Atlantic into a bucket, an impossible task, however noble the intentions. Don’t Be Denied – “a documentary film about the life and times of Neil Young” – makes a sometimes brilliant stab at telling Neil’s story in the aforementioned hour and is full of fascinating moments and boasts some great archive footage of Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse and solo performances. There’s also terrific interview content with the legendary contrarian, filmed over nine months in New York and California, Neil living up entirely to his reputation as someone you would be ill-advised to mess with, on any level you might care to consider. “I only care about the music,” he says early on with uncompromising conviction. “It’s sad. I’m brutal,” he adds later with a worryingly steely resolve. “I only do it for the music. People are secondary.” “Neil’s like a force of nature. It’s like having the wind in your band. He was the nitro-glycerine in the mix,” observes David Crosby, who with Graham Nash and Stephen Stills is here to bear witness to the havoc Young’s monumental bloody-mindedness has frequently wrought. “My first job is to follow my musical course and it’s always detrimental to people around me,” Young subsequently says, reinforcing the point. “There’s always a lot of collateral damage.” Directed by Ben Whalley for BBC 4, the film, which was previewed last night in a swanky West End Hotel, moves at break-neck speed through Young’s life and music, which it tackles chronologically. Longstanding Neil fans will therefore find a lot of inevitably familiar ground covered here. We have, for instance, the Winnipeg adolescence, fondly recalled by former members of his first notable band, The Squires, the hearse trip from Toronto to LA, where he runs again into Stephen Stills, his fractious history with The Buffalo Springfield (“that wasn’t my band, but I was in it”), his takeover and transformation of The Rockets into Crazy Horse, the superstardom that followed After the Goldrush, Harvest, and his enlistment by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Young is characteristically terse about why he contested his own popularity after Harvest made him briefly the most popular solo star in the world, his audience at the time clamouring for more of the same. “I’m determined to avoid repetition,” he says. “I didn’t want to do another album like Harvest. How many sensitive songs can you write before it’s not a sensitive song? After Harvest, I could have made an album just like it. I could have made an album that everybody wanted. Instead, I made an album that nobody wanted.” He’s talking now about Time Fades Away, the first instalment of what later became known as ‘The Doom Trilogy’ – which subsequently included On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night, whose raw derangements cost him a goodly portion of the audience that had only recently swooned over the winsome Harvest. He’s gruffly funny about the infamous “Revolution Blues” (“they say that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/I hate them worst than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars”), a song from On The Beach inspired by Charlie Manson. “I played it to Crosby,” he recalls, “and he said, ‘Don’t sing about that. It’s not funny.’ It spooked people. But then, they were spooky times. I knew Charles Manson and he spooked the hell out of me.” It says a lot about how much history the film has to pack in that by now we’re 45 minutes into Don’t Be Denied, which in its hectic final 15 minutes hurtles through the next 25 years, from Rust Never Sleeps to Living With War and the last CSNY tour, which took that album’s songs to an often hostile audience, pausing briefly to consider Young’s brief flirtation with synthesisers on Trans, at which time, we might be astonished to learn, his favourite groups were the Human league and, er, A Flock Of Seagulls. “You’re going to go up and down,” he says, looking back finally at who and what he has been “Sometimes you get lost in a trough and no one can see you and no one cares. They’re just looking at the whitecaps,” he observes vividly, seeing his career as a series of cresting and receding waves. “Then you come up again. You just have to hang in there and keep going.” This is all compelling stuff, but the problem is there simply isn’t enough of it. Another half hour would have helped, but what Neil’s life and times clearly beg for is the kind of treatment Scorsese afforded Dylan in No Direction Home. Still, you won’t want to miss it and I’ll be watching again when the film is broadcast on BBC 4 on October 31 at 10.00pm.

OK so I might get sick of this one after a while, but we’re not blogging for posterity here. Chairlift are yet another band from Brooklyn (though originally from Boulder), and their debut album, “Does You Inspire You”, is another record that’s making me rethink my long-nurtured antipathy towards ‘80s revivalism. Ostensibly, a lot of this enormously – perhaps transiently – beguiling album is fixated on a certain kind of glacial synthpop. There are some pretty obvious influences at the root of a good few Chairlift songs; “Planet Health”, for instance, has the nebulously oriental synth chimes and fretless bass that must surely have been inspired by Japan circa “Tin Drum”. As one of the relatively few ‘80s New Pop types I can stomach, the Japan comparison is fine by me, though some of the other names I’ve seen thrown about in relation to Chairlift are a bit alarming – Yazoo, even Berlin, amazingly. The thing is, though, they’re good enough – and discreetly arty enough, too – to suggest an entirely different set of reference points. So while, “Territory” is a borderline preposterous piece of synth bombast, it’s still engaging thanks to Caroline Polachek’s sternly ethereal vocals and a series of melodic shifts that may call to mind “TNT”-era Tortoise (like another superficially ‘80s band, The Week That Was). And plenty of the droll, precise musical settings remind me of a bunch of mid-‘90s German bands, like Tarwater and Kreidler, who were a satellite of the post-rock scene and who made cerebral pop music out of avant-electronica. The opening “Garbage” is especially terrific in this way, also recalling a synth rescoring of Sonic Youth’s “Experimental Jet Set”, with Polachek’s still, opulent croon a distinct relative of Kim Gordon. And the record ends with an odd and striking sequence that runs through arch country (“Don’t Give A Damn”) to dislocated ambience (“Chameleon Closet” and “Ceiling Wax”), the latter finding Polachek noting, “I will never return from that scary place”. I guess I should stress, though, that a good part of what Chairlift do is vigorously hip and catchy – so catchy, in fact, that I’m wary a few of these songs will become irritants once they become ubiquitous. “Evident Utensil” is actually irritating from the off, being a wryly bouncy cousin of “Barbie Girl” after a fashion. But “Bruises” is the one that’s going to make Chairlift, a mighty successful negotiation between poise and cuteness that’s an infallibly perfect successor to Feist as the iPod soundtrack. Let’s count how many weeks before it drives us mad. . .

There’s a story about Steve McQueen being offered the role of architect Doug Roberts in The Towering Inferno. McQueen turned it down, asking instead to play fire chief Michael O’Hallorhan, claiming that there’s no way an audience would find him believable in any role other than a straight-ahead man of action. The part of Roberts, instead, went to Paul Newman. At that point, in 1974, Newman’s most successful roles had been as outlaws, con-men and rebels – characters arguably not that far removed from the kind of people who peppered McQueen’s own CV. But it says a lot, perhaps, about how cinema audiences were prepared to accept him, that despite the succession of outsiders and wild ones he’d played, there was something inherently likeable and appealing about Newman. It’s certainly true in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969). For a film made in the late Sixties – a time where it was all about sticking it to The Man – it’s maybe not surprising that audiences would be rooting for characters who, in an earlier, less complicated era would have been the bad guys. The easy charm of Newman and Robert Redford put Butch & Sundance in the Top 10 grossing movies for the decade. Newman had been a more dangerous kind of outlaw for Arthur Penn in The Left-Handed Gun (1958), based on a TV play written by Gore Vidal where he played a feral Billy the Kid with an unnerving hair-trigger temper. You wonder what he’d have been like for Peckinpah. Newman was a huge star in the Sixties – an era not exactly light on major Hollywood muscle. He shared the decade with Brando (with whom he'd studied at the Actors' Studio under Lee Strasberg), McQueen, Redford and later, Beatty and Hoffman. If you see the Sixties as the transitional period between the Golden Age of Hollywood and the modern era, then you can argue that Newman is the link between Clark Cable and George Clooney. His classic movie star looks would certainly have not been out of place in a previous time, while his willingness to build a CV around rebels and outsiders chimed with the decade's counter-culture leanings and was picked up by a later wave of actors. You can see the arc of his career, and how he successfully manoeuvred between the demands of different eras of filmmaking by the directors he worked with. There’s Preminger, Robert Wise, Michael Curtiz, Hitchcock and Huston; Altman and George Roy Hill; Scorsese, the Coens and Sam Mendes. Newman did his last on screen work for Mendes, playing a gangster in The Road To Perdition (2002). The film itself is often too sentimental, but Newman is towering as Irish Catholic Mob patriarch, John Mooney. It reminds me, to some degree, of the way Leone used Henry Fonda, similarly in the autumn of his career, as the sadistic killer in Once Upon A Time In The West. That was a brilliant piece of counter casting that subverted Fonda’s legacy of noble, finely chiselled heroes. So, too, here was Newman, wintry and sinister, telling Tom Hanks’ enforcer Michael Sullivan, “None of us will see Heaven.” Whatever we might have thought of Newman’s catalogue of jailbirds, cardsharps or pool hustlers, none of them were ever as vicious as this. Here are some YouTube links to five of Newman’s greatest screen moments. BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID: "For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble..." THE STING: "Your one thousand..? I'll raise you two thousand..." THE HUSTLER: "I came to play pool, Fats..." COOL HAND LUKE: "Nobody can eat 50 eggs..." ROAD TO PERDITION: "This is the life we chose, this is the life we lead..." Now we’d like you to tell us what your thoughts and feelings are about Paul Newman. What were his defining roles for you? How do you think he'll be best remembered..?