The last time I saw Neil Young at the Apollo was in 2003, when he was touring to promote his ecological country rock opera, Greendale, still unreleased at the time, which meant no one had heard any of the songs. The unfamiliarity of what he then played provoked among the audience a certain restlessness that quickly gave way to collective dismay when it dawned on them that he wasn’t going to play merely a selection of songs from the record, but the album in what turned out to be its indigestible entirety. For the rest of this review, please head over to Allan's blog. It's worth it. . .

Now that Masterchef is over – oh, well done James, but rats, I still think it should have been Emily – normal service has been resumed on the blog. I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up on some DVDs, as well as finally getting round to seeing a fantastic Spanish horror film, The Orphanage. Spain has developed a reputation for making thoughtful and engaging psychological horror films, a class away from the kind of generic slasher films Hollywood seems content to bash out. Central to this are Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others and Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone. You might well have seen The Others, simply because it was made in English with Nicole Kidman and got a pretty big distribution in the UK, through Miramax. If you’ve not seen Cronos or The Devil’s Backbone, I’d recommend them – they’re both elegant and atmospheric films, rather poetic, in fact, in the way they handle familiar horror movies tropes, in this case, vampires and ghosts, respectively. The Devil’s Backbone, incidentally, is sort of a companion piece to Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth; both are set during the Spanish Civil War and feature children as their protagonists, though Pan’s Labyrinth is more of a fantasy film, I suppose, than Backbone. Del Toro, incidentally, acts as producer on The Orphanage, directed by debuting Juan Antonio Bayona. If Pan’s Labyrinth was a take on Alice In Wonderland, then The Orphanage riffs on another Victorian children’s novel, Peter Pan. With its storyline concerning a missing child, and the distress it causes his mother Laura, you could argue it’s JM Barrie’s story as seen from the point of view of Mrs Darling. Anyway, I don’t want to go on too much about it here – I’ve reviewed it in the next issue of UNCUT. I would say, though, that if you’ve not seen any of the other films I’ve mentioned above, then do rent, buy or download. Elsewhere, I’ve been watching some new Futurama – back after its two-year hiatus. As seems to be the case with a lot of zippy, 30 minute TV series stretched out to movie length, it lags. Though the opening 25 minutes is fantastically funny, and contains plenty of sarky digs at the Fox Network, who originally cancelled the series. Also, I watched the other night Bruce Webber’s extraordinary doc on Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost, which is due for a limited theatrical release in May, and then comes out on DVD in June. I’ll save this for a blog next week, as I seem to have scribbled a hefty pile of notes on it.

Neil Young Hammersmith Apollo Thursday, March 6 2008 The last time I saw Neil Young at the Apollo was in 2003, when he was touring to promote his ecological country rock opera, Greendale, still unreleased at the time, which meant no one had heard any of the songs. The unfamiliarity of what he then played provoked among the audience a certain restlessness that quickly gave way to collective dismay when it dawned on them that he wasn’t going to play merely a selection of songs from the record, but the album in what turned out to be its indigestible entirety. It conspicuously wasn’t what people had come to hear - not that this would have worried Neil too much. He’s always done things his own way, which is one of the reasons we continue to love him, his unpredictability and sheer wilfulness matched only, really, by Dylan, and something when all is said, and also done, to be congratulated. It was hard not to feel sympathy, though, for some of the people there that night – he was, after all, only playing London on that visit, and many of them had come from hither and yon in the hope, no doubt, of seeing Neil play the stuff for which they liked him most, few of them warming to the often interminable descriptions of the songs that seemed increasingly to take up most of the show, the songs themselves often arriving as not especially distinguished after-thoughts to his windy monologues. The two couples, for instance, in the row in front of me have come down from Liverpool, somebody’s birthday involved, money spent on train fares and a couple of hotel rooms, Neil’s concert the highlight of their trip, an evening of familiar favourites what they are expecting. They sit, therefore, in baffled disappointment as one after another the songs from Greendale are played, no sign of “After The Goldrush”, “Heart Of Gold”, “Like a Hurricane” or “Powderfinger”. They leave before the end, thus missing what in truth is a rather desultory short second set of crowd-pleasing classics. Earlier, I’d been talking to the guy sitting next to me, who’d travelled down to London on a clapped out motorbike from far off Lanarkshire, a journey that with several breakdowns had taken him a ghastly 14 hours. He was exhausted, but excited at seeing Neil for the first time live after years of being a fan. Three or four numbers into the performance of Greendale, however, he’s asleep. I have to step over him on my own eventual way out, imagining him later, waking with the cleaners sweeping up around him, Neil long gone, as well as everyone else. Five years on, and Neil is again at Hammersmith, and the place is crackling with lively anticipation, something so electric in the air it’s like those moments of meteorological turmoil that preface stormy weather, lightning on the horizon, the wind beginning to whip and buck, cloudbanks rising, a low distant rumble of thunder. No one, you’d be right in thinking, is going to sleep through what follows. The stage – as already vividly described by Damien Love in his www.uncut.co.uk review of the current tour’s opening night in Edinburgh – is an apparently chaotic assemblage, like something from a pop art installation by George Segal, or somebody like him, that could be the basement where Neil keeps the accumulated junk of his many years, through which he seems when he first appears to be looking for something, a key, perhaps, to the past, which turns out to be the songs that he is soon playing. And so Neil, in a baggy white suit, which apart from the paint smears could be the one he wore on the sleeve of On The Beach, spends a little time wandering around the stage, touching things in a distracted reverie, as if he’s just walked into a room from his past that he has not in living memory visited, affecting now surprise at what’s here, what memories these things around him hold. It’s not quite as hammy as I was expecting from John’s review yesterday, but not nearly as effective as the act I remember him putting on for the similarly acoustic opening half of his 1975 shows here with Crazy Horse, when for about 45 minutes he played more convincingly the part of a spectacularly spaced out hippie troubadour, swigging tequila, wholly stoned and apparently convinced for the moment that he was in Germany. Tonight, in his suit, his hair already a-fly, he’s like some absent-minded professor in a laboratory of his own design. He reminds me oddly of eccentric TV astronomer Patrick Moore, a model of unkempt bemusement. And then the first gorgeous chords of “From Hank To Hendrix” introduce a mesmerising hour of music that mixes the familiar (“Harvest”, “After the Goldrush”, “Heart of Gold”, “Old Man”) and the truly arcane (“Kansas”, “Try”) and a couple of songs you thought you’d never hear him play – including, of course, “Ambulance Blues”, hitherto hardly-ever to my knowledge played live, but a staple of this tour, and a jaw-dropping version of “Out On The Weekend”. There’s also the by-now famously startling new take on “A Man Needs A Maid” and a robust “Old King”, written in affectionate memory of a dog he had, played on banjo. This is all great, of course, but without meaning to moan or wanting to sound like one of those people who spend all night at shows like this shouting out requests for their favourite songs in strangely strangulated voices, I would maybe have liked a few more songs that matched the intense gravity of “Ambulance Blues” and would have given a lot if he’d thrown in, say, a version of “Last Trip To Tulsa”, “Thresher”, “Marlon Brando, Pocahontas And Me” or “Comin’ Apart At Every Nail”. Anyway, after “Old Man”, there’s a short break and then Neil reappears dressed now in an even baggier black suit, paint-smeared in a manner that makes it look like he’s wearing a 21st century Nudie suit decorated by Jackson Pollock. Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, ultra-cool bassist Rick Rosas and Ben Keith are with him now, and they rock the house with a two-fisted opening onslaught of “The Loner” and “Dirty Old Man”, the noise they are making akin to the slow roar of an avalanche, an irresistible density of mass, matter and mayhem. “Spirit Road” follows, gloriously, and there’s a long, suitably malarial “Down By the River”, Young’s guitar feverish, followed by a rampant “Hey Hey, My My”, with a ferocious coda. And then there’s another huge surprise with the inclusion – again for the first time, I think, on this tour – of the great “Roll Another Number For The Road”, from Tonight’s The Night. “Oh, Lonesome Me” is as utterly marvellous as previous reviews have claimed, with wonderful support from Keith and Anthony Crawford on piano and organ. John’s least favourite moment - “The Believer” – follows. It seems even slighter in the context of tonight than it does on Chrome Dreams II, but effectively sets up a fantastically imposing “Powerdfinger”, which has the weight of legend behind it. And then there’s a show-stopping, simply colossal “No Hidden Path”, nigh on 20 minutes of it, Neil’s solos sounding like ruptures in the earth’s crust, fissures appearing everywhere, tectonic plates shifting and crashing beneath him. The stage now and the people on it are drenched in a burning golden light, that mixed with the red back-spots bathes the band in the burnished glow of an atomic sunrise or a nuclear sunset, I’m not sure which. As the song reaches towards an awesome climax, Neil stands facing the massive klieg light to the left of the stage, soloing into it, head thrown back, then lowered into it, as if he may at any moment be consumed by it, beamed up, the next stop presumably being the Phoenix Asteroid. I have a feeling of being witness to some sun-cult ritual, a worship of light as the source of eternal renewal. It’s a spooky fucking couple of minutes, this bit of the show, and I am at a loss to even begin to explain how he wrings from his guitar the sound he makes in the song’s final, dying moments, which provokes much awestruck head shaking and how-the-fuck-does-he-do-that looks at anyone who catches my eye. Great as it is, tonight’s sole encore, an initially smouldering then rowdily exclamatory “Fuckin’ Up”, seems at best noisily irrelevant, nothing he could, I think, do now that can successfully top the gargantuan wonder of “No Hidden Path” and the places it has taken him and us. If anyone’s got any spare tickets for any of the other four nights Neil is playing, you can lay them off here. This was just incredible. Let me know what you thought if you were at last night's show. ACOUSTIC SET From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Kansas A Man Needs A Maid Try Harvest After the Goldrush Old King Love Art Blues Heart Of Gold Out On The Weekend Old Man ELECTRIC SET The Loner Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Down By The River Hey Hey, My My Roll Another Number Oh, Lonesome Me The Believer Powderfinger No Hidden Path Fuckin' Up

In the midst of Neil Young fever this week, I’ve been distracted by another Canadian musical superstar. While I was waiting for my useless computer to fire up this morning, I finished the last pages of “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste”, a fascinating book by the Canadian music journalist, Carl Wilson. “Let’s Talk About Love” is part of the 33 And A Third series of books which grapple, in-depth, with various canonical albums. This one, though, is a little different, since its notional subject is a 1997 album by Celine Dion, of all people; the one with the theme song from “Titanic” on it, if you don’t have intimate knowledge of the sainted Celine’s back catalogue. Wilson’s book isn’t just about Celine Dion, though; in fact, it’s hardly about Celine Dion at all. Instead, it’s an investigation about tastes, aesthetic judgments, prejudice, high and low art, cultural and social capital, and whether Wilson can somehow educate himself into becoming a Celine Dion fan – or at least empathise in a non-patronising way with her millions and millions of fans. I’m normally a bit suspicious about music criticism that is fixated on analysing itself, the sort of stuff which goes into agonies about futurism and micro-genres and tortuous pissing battles between ‘rockists’ and ‘popists’. Without being militantly anti-academic, I quite like music writing which articulates whether the reviewer thinks a record is any good or not. But Wilson manages to be constantly interesting and thought-provoking about the issue. He can write about Pierre Bourdieu and the sort of hardcore theorising that keeps cultural studies students busy, and make it accessible rather than daunting. He can dig into the Quebecois milieu which shaped Dion, and the motives of her fans, without ever sneering. He can even write about “The Reason” (the opening track of “Let’s Talk About Love” which was co-written by Carole King, produced by George Martin and featured Robbie McIntosh of The Pretenders) and make me want to hear it. And I think he can teach us a few valuable things about music criticism, for what its worth. Wilson is very good at avoiding the temptations of kitsch and irony when he’s evaluating Dion’s work, and he’s pleasingly dismissive of the implicitly snobbish concept of “guilty pleasures”. Best of all, his book is a sophisticated polemic against the sort of music reviewing which, in lieu of having anything interesting to say about an artist, starts taking potshots at their fans instead. The most annoying thing to me that Uncut has published, in the mag or online, in the past year, was a review which said, essentially: if you don’t like Band X, you’re an idiot. I didn’t much like Band X, as it happened, and I could live without being insulted by someone who should have worked out how to write maturely by now. I hopefully got over that my-taste-is-better-than-your-taste posturing at some point in my NME days. That said, I still believe that much of the best writing about music involves subjective thought trying to pass itself off as objective (so long as the writer is self-aware enough to avoid crude hyperbolic pronouncements), and I generally disagree with Wilson when he approves of personal narrative in reviews: I’ve always hated that “crying at bus-stops” school of writing. I also think the book has one terrible flaw: Wilson goes to Las Vegas to see Dion’s show and talk to her fans, but somehow bottles out of talking to any of them. Instead, he finds interviewees through online communities – people who are no less infatuated with Dion, but aren’t necessarily typical of most of her discreet army of devotees. Nevertheless, this one’s well worth reading. Wilson has a good blog, too, which you may wish to check out - Zoilus. Not that I’m going to tell you that you should, of course. . .

So, the start of Neil Young’s six-night stand in London, and a lot of the schtick will be familiar to anyone who’s read Damien’s review of the Edinburgh show. Neil bumbles around the stage in what we might optimistically call a Proustian reverie, warms his hands on a stage light, plays “Ambulance Blues” and stops time dead in its tracks. Please head over to my Wild Mercury Sound blog to read the full review. Thanks.

So, the start of Neil Young’s six-night stand in London, and a lot of the schtick will be familiar to anyone who’s read Damien’s review of the Edinburgh show. Neil bumbles around the stage in what we might optimistically call a Proustian reverie, warms his hands on a stage light, plays “Ambulance Blues” and stops time dead in its tracks. I’m sure plenty of us know he’s been playing “Ambulance Blues” on this bunch of dates, but still, the shock of actually hearing the song live, the way it keeps unravelling, at once elegant and wracked, the way Young lets notes hang in the air, never rushes the next line, is extraordinary. I was playing “On The Beach” this morning at breakfast, and it struck me how much the song suits his older voice; the curious sweetness of its tone, that affecting mix of experience and, perhaps, increased uncertainty which he brings to the song now. This is my first time seeing Neil Young play under a roof, my previous four or five epiphanies involving giant fields, giant solos and, usually, Crazy Horse. Consequently, it’s also the first time I’ve seen one of his conceptual performance art pieces, which the first acoustic half seems to be. Two mild criticisms: Neil’s dumbshow is endearing, but pure ham; and the paintings which are ferried about the stage by the artists aren’t terribly good. We can live with this, I think, when the songs have such deathless potency. The clutter of stage gear, the junk accumulated from a lifetime of performance, seems connected with the "Archives" project; maybe when we see the CD-ROM, DVD or whatever format it eventually materialises as, some of this ephemera will be reflected on the disc. The choice of songs also emphasise that sense of arcana, nostalgia, especially “From Hank To Hendrix”, “Old Man” and “Journey Through The Past”, and the unreleased “Sad Movies” and “No One Seems To Know” (according to the internet – and who am I to argue – Young once described this as the sequel to “A Man Needs A Maid”, which is how it’s delivered tonight). I don’t agree with Damien that this presents Neil as naked, as such: the theatrical elements mean that it’s best to treat all this as a conceptual piece about memory, and reconciling yourself with your own prehistory, rather than an unmediated rooting about in a great man’s psyche. But still, it makes for a remarkable spectacle, especially on that terrific version of “A Man Needs A Maid”, as he flits between surprisingly florid piano and a truly spectral synth line. There’s a bit more chat, too, much of it expressing a sort of rueful bewilderment at the crowd’s behaviour. Young tells a story about his granny playing piano in Flin Flon, Manitoba, mention of which gets a cheer. “Oh, a lot of folks in from Flin Flon tonight,” he deadpans. Then, a rambling tale about getting busted at the Isle Of Wight festival touches in passing on Joni Mitchell. Much clapping. “That’s cheap,” he observes drolly, “I can get a round of applause just by mentioning people.” The electric set is pretty similar to Edinburgh, too, and the moment when Young faces down the giant light and solos into it, rapturously, during the gargantuan “No Hidden Path” remains a highlight. A couple of caveats here: why does he have to keep playing “The Believer”, a real weak link on “Chrome Dreams II” (bad enough to have been on “Are You Passionate”, almost); and there are times when I miss the full Crazy Horse experience. Certainly, Ben Keith and Rick Rosas play beautifully: there’s a great section of “Down By The River” (magnificent, even though they briefly lose their way somewhere in the middle of it) when Young and Keith shut down the effects and bounce clean, cleaving solos off each other. But generally, Keith and Rosas are discreet figures just beyond Young’s hyperactive maelstrom, and I find myself missing those protean huddles which he goes into with Billy Talbot and Poncho Sampredo. Really, though, picking holes in a gig as great as this seems utterly churlish, when I could be writing about the seething, heavy version of “Mr Soul”, or the gorgeous “Oh, Lonesome Me”, with Keith and Anthony Crawford complementing each other beautifully on piano and organ. Then, finally, there are the encores: “Cinnamon Girl” first, massively expanded by the sort of molten feedback coda that filled “Arc Weld”. A weird painting of a winking dove, with a kind of Hitler fringe, descends from the rafters in the middle of this, and turns out to be concealing another organ. After some confusion as to whether they’re going to keep playing, Keith takes to the organ for a relatively abbreviated, nonetheless ecstatic version of “Like A Hurricane”. Nothing here suggests to me this is in any way a valedictory tour, an emotional victory lap that some critics are painting it as. Rather, it just seems like Young is drawing new energy from his past, finding new ways to present this most exceptional and volatile of songbooks. By the end, he looked like he wanted to play all night. Tonight, maybe he will: Allan will be reporting back tomorrow. ACOUSTIC SET From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Sad Movies A Man Needs A Maid No One Seems To Know Harvest Journey Through The Past Mellow My Mind Love Art Blues Don't Let It Bring You Down Cowgirl In The Sand Old Man ELECTRIC SET Mr. Soul Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Down By The River Hey Hey, My My Too Far Gone Oh, Lonesome Me The Believer Powderfinger No Hidden Path Cinnamon Girl Like A Hurricane Pic credit: PA Photos