Straight from the Horse's mouth
Neil Young and Crazy Horse Sheffield Arena

Sunday June 17, 2001
The Observer

Same boots and jeans, same old guitar. But with new songs in a set of classics, Neil Young will never be old hat

It is a nice coincidence that the king of rock 'n' roll is criss-crossing Europe at the same time as the queen of pop. You couldn't get two artists further apart in their approach to their art. In fact Neil Young could justifiably claim to be the anti-Madonna.

There is nothing polished, practised, thought-out, contrived, packaged or fake about Neil Young; from the scratched enamel on his guitar Old Black to the whirlwind crashing solos that punctuate every live performance, Neil Young is utterly into everything he does.

And, in case you were hoping for objectivity, I'm into it too.

Sometimes though, as here in Sheffield, you wonder if he really minds whether there is an audience there at all, whether as he sang in 'From Hank to Hendrix': 'Here I am with my old guitar, doin' what I do'.

The stage area was left bare to mimic a garage feel, a tough brief in a 12,500 capacity arena. His only props were a kid's pirate flag, a 4ft statue of Crazy Horse and a synthesizer that came down on a chain in a teacrate for one of the encores.

He stopped the perfor mance briefly at the start of his third song 'I've Been Waiting for You', an uplifting powerful love song from his first 1969 solo album, after six chords because he thought the band had started too fast. 'I haven't played this for a long time so I wanna get it right. It's very important to get it right,' he said to no one in particular.

Maybe it's because he's always been trying to get the music right that his appeal is so enduring. While Madonna focuses on the glitz of image, Young wears the same clothes, hats and boots that he always did.

Who cares what he wears? While Madonna spent the Eighties discovering and reinventing her style to suit her commercial ambitions, Young was being sued by his record company for doing albums that didn't sound like Neil Young records. In doing his own thing he has occasionally produced some monumental turkeys but the great thing with Young is that he's got a back catalogue that you can spend a few years wallowing in while he finds himself again.

Young has had enough high points and has enough other musicians paying homage to have an appeal beyond what you'd expect (he's being supported at various points on this tour by Beck and Oasis).

There were, predictably, plenty of late-30s to 50s blokes eager to hear a live soundtrack to their good old days, but nestling among the denims and thinning hair at the front I also met a Yorkshire grandmother, an Asian teenager whose older brother was keeping an eye on him and two 17-year-olds who played air guitar throughout and knew all the words to everything. As Madonna might say to him, in the unlikely event that they meet in a European service station over the next couple of months, his demographics are very impressive.

Young couldn't give a toss of course. It's about the music. As he sways and stomps and lurches towards the mike like a drunk, slow-witted farmhand playing air guitar with a pitchfork, his face contorts with emotion even on songs he's been knocking out for 30 years.

He plays for two hours solid and encores with 12-minute guitar fests like 'Cortez the Killer', or maniacal solos on 'Like A Hurricane'. He seems to even have the same voice he had 30 years ago on the apocalyptic After the Goldrush where you could only tell this wasn't an old recording because he had to replace the doom-laden predictions for the 'Nineteen Seventeees' with ones for the 'Twenty-First Centureee'.

Although it was a very Seventies-heavy set (one from from 1969's Neil Young album, three from 1979's Rust Never Sleeps , two from 1970's After the Goldrush , one from 1975's Zuma , one from 1977's American Stars and Bars and three Nineties' high points), he also knocked out four new songs which sounded like future classics ('Standing in the Light of Love', 'Going Home', 'When I Hold You in my Arms' and 'Gateway of Love').

And then there is Crazy Horse, the three-piece band that he's recorded 10 albums with in 28 years. They aren't the greatest musicians of all time but the alchemy that occurs when they play with Young is mesmerising and lifts him to a different level. Billy Talbot's bass was at its insistent minimalist best (Young teases him that he only knows three notes) and together with Ralph Molina's unflashy drumming they anchored Young to his songs while Frank Sampedro's guitar cheers on Young own virtuosity. Their confidence in the music, even after a few years on other projects, made the performance really special.