You never really know what to expect with Neil Young. The notoriously cantankerous, and occasionally precious performer who exited a ridiculously successful Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young tour with a suggestion to Steven Stills to ‘eat a peach’, the politically aware author of the anti-Nixon protest song Ohio who voiced support for Ronald Reagan in the ’80s, the commercially successful songwriter who refused to indulge his radio hits for many years. If you’re Neil Young, you do what the fuck you want: because you’re Neil Young.
But that was then, and this is now. In the ’70s, Neil Young was a young-ish bloke who displayed the annoying attributes of an old bloke bemoaning social and economic progress; in the 21st century, Neil is rocking out like a young bloke, taking the piss out of his infamous self-indulgence and wiping the songwriting floor with his pale imitators.
Tonight’s show at Rod Laver Arena commences in strange and comic circumstances: a posse of stage technicians clad in white laboratory coats wander around the stage with clipboards. Eventually, the signal is given, and the over-sized cabinets are lifted from over equally over-sized amplifiers; shortly after, another large prop appears in the form of a large microphone.
Eventually Neil and his band mates appear. Neil is older, wiser and no less talented. He’s wearing the same faded Aboriginal flag t-shirt he wore on his last Australian tour; while there’s a slight sag in his jowls, he’s looking remarkably health and happy. There’s a dose of theatricality in the show’s opening: The Beatles’ A Day In The Life plays over the PA, and then Neil and the Crazy Horse guys stand to attention for Advance Australia Fair. You assume Neil’s observed the local irony: in the United States, everyone would know every single word to the national anthem; in Australia, we can’t even hum along properly.
From there, it’s a set that walks the line between the old and the new. The old comes in the form of material from Rust Never Sleeps, Zuma and Harvest; the new material from Psychedelic Pill stacks up above so much competing dross that’s been wantonly released on the market over the last 10 years. When Neil – in acoustic mode – offers the evening’s token commercial radio friendly moment with Heart Of Gold, he follows quickly with Ramada Inn from Psychedelic Pill. The subtle irony of the sequence – a slight jibe at the tedious nostalgia of the baby boomer generation to follow a baby boomer classic – is probably lost on the lot of the audience, but it doesn’t disturb the moment.
And then there’s Neil in stand-up raconteur mode, embarking on a self-referential journey through his extensive discography, before settling on Cinnamon Girl. Cortez The Killer follows next, and if you’re not happy now, why did you bother coming? There’s a nod to Buffalo Springfield days – please, can someone get those guys out to Australia before it’s too late – with Mr Soul, before Hey Hey, My My concludes the set. The guys in the lab coats are back on stage in the brief intermission before the encore: the prop cabinets stop short of covering the prop amplifiers, and Neil, Talbot, Molina and Sampedro are back. Tonight we get Roll Another A Number and while it lacks the punch of Like A Hurricane, no-one’s complaining – at least, not audibly. There is no other Neil Young but Neil Young.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Photo credit: Richard Sharman
LOVED: Cortez The Killer.
HATED: The fact that the show had to end.
DRANK: Only my water, because the bar lines were too long, and the beer expensive and nasty.
