“What a world we got, folks,” says Neil Young, before crashing into “Throw Your Hatred Down”, a 1995 anti-war song he surely hoped wouldn’t still be so horribly relevant today. Young doesn’t say much else for the duration of a gripping, intense, two-hour set, but his exasperation, anger and compassion are palpable in both his choice of songs and the way in which he plays them.
BST Hyde Park is very much the Wimbledon of music festivals, a place where it’s possible (for the right price) to watch the bands while sipping champagne on a shady terrace. With three headliners pushing 80 and temperatures into the thirties, a genteel afternoon is on the cards. But while Van Morrison doesn’t share Young’s world-changing zeal, he’s still buffeted by raging internal passions, despite having to perform from beneath a gazebo temporarily erected on the Great Oak Stage to protect him and his terrific band from the fierce afternoon sun.
Lithe and dapper in purple sunglasses and a sky blue shirt to match the ribbon of his hat, lockdown gripes finally out of his system, Morrison seems like a man reborn. At the end of a show-stopping “Summertime In England”, he’s still trading rhapsodies about DH Lawrence with his sax player as he shuffles off the stage, only to return blowing furiously into a harmonica for an exultant “Gloria”.
Yusuf/Cat Stevens carries a very different energy: wise and serene, prompting hesitant singalongs for “Father And Son” and “Wild World”. Generally, his songs tend towards the twee. But there’s an undeniable power to “The Little Ones”, dedicated to the child victims of the Srebrenica massacre, 30 years ago today – and of the massacres still happening at this moment. “We are not free,” he says, his calm demeanour momentarily shaken, “until we are free from the military industry and those who make money from wars and hatred.”
Neil Young dives straight in at the deep end with that slow-burning symphony of disillusionment, “Ambulance Blues” – a song so potent it could have been written yesterday. “I never knew a man who could tell so many lies,” he once wrote of Richard Nixon. Wonder who he’s thinking about when he sings that line today?
Swinging on ‘Old Black’, Young immediately engages Micah Nelson in a fiery guitar duel that lasts for the duration of a compelling “Cowgirl In The Sand”. It’s no coincidence that Young’s current band, the Chrome Hearts, use the same initials as Crazy Horse: they handle these songs with the same requisite balance of power and passion, adding perfectly fragile harmonies.
Nelson is the slacker prince in ripped T-shirt and Kurt Cobain shades, his guitar even more battered than Young’s. Meanwhile on the other side of the stage, venerable 82-year-old organist Spooner Oldham offers a throughline back to the ’60s soul standards, bringing his understated magic to songs such as a twinkling “Harvest Moon”.
In a typically confounding Neil move, the Chrome Hearts don’t play any songs from their recently released album Talking To The Trees, which is probably for the best. However, that album’s basic, in-your-face approach has served its purpose in sharpening Young’s focus for this tour. These are his best, most direct songs, played with fervour and fury, their targets clear.
The most recent numbers in the set are from 2003’s divisive ‘musical novel’ Greendale. But freed from that album’s clunky conceptual framework, “Sun Green” and particularly “Be The Rain” sound surprisingly urgent and vital. “Corporate greed and chemicals are killin’ the land!” shouts Young through a megaphone effect. Which is potentially a bit obvious and preachy. But nobody’s done anything about it yet, so he’s saying it again.
When – for the first time this tour – he ambles over to the piano to play a haunting “After The Gold Rush”, he naturally changes the words to “mother nature on the run in the 21st century”. There is a lovely moment when he pauses mid-song to hear the echo of the crowd singing the words back to him from the perimeter of the festival site. But mostly Young wants this heavy and raw. At one point he even sends the famous flying keyboard back into the rafters because he’d rather crunch his way through a fearsome “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)”.
It is hard to entertain the idea that this could be Young’s last-ever European jaunt. Even as curfew approaches, it looks like he could play forever. After the fourth false ending of “Rockin’ In The Free World”, the organisers are forced to pull the plug and the Chrome Hearts depart the stage in triumphant silence. While people are still sleeping in their shoes, while he’s still got fuel to burn, Neil Young will surely keep on keeping on.
